A Short Rant About Hosting
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A Short Rant About Hosting
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Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#2I particularly like this nugget:
> Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#3"Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time."
My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased).
We'd get pricing estimates that changed by the time of day and who emailed it to us. The shopping process made the migration seem easy.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#4I particularly like this nugget: > Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
What if the person doesn't know exactly what it is that they need? I know a lot of people who know software but aren't as solid on knowing how to scale the hardware side. For those people a table isn't really helpful.
That said however, it should be an option to have that access. I personally prefer Joyent as a web host. They've shown really solid I/O numbers via their benchmarking. I've been a happy customer since it was TextDrive.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#5Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#6Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
Yes. Go with SoftLayer. We have tons of servers, and get a great discount, especially on RAM. They have been great.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#7Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
Agreed. Call Softlayer and name your price. All my servers are 50% cost of retail.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#8Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
So anyone who wants servers needs to talk with sales and negotiate a discount? I think the point of this post was:
Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
When comparing between hosting providers, most lack the time and resources to negotiate with each provider to find out what the "real" rate is. Hosting should be a commodity, providers should treat it as such. I think there are probably good opportunities for hosting providers that provide an honest rate.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#9Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.
Agreed. Call Softlayer and name your price. All my servers are 50% cost of retail.
Oh any their support is second to none IMHO. I've called at any hour of the day and had a tech diagnosing my issues on the phone with no wait.
Re: A Short Rant About Hosting
#10As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?