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A Short Rant About Hosting

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Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#61

Post by sunchild »

jvdh wrote: post #45
chopsueyar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I don't think a salesman is the first person you want to talk to to help you in this regard.

This is actually a sad state of affairs. It used to be that the salesperson was exactly the kind of guy who could solve this. Now they're just too busy padding deals with stuff almost everyone knows you don't need.

It's a top-down problem. If the company's executives are pushing salespeople to work in the 1990's-era enterprise sales model, you get websites with zero useful information and a phone number for upselling.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#62

Post by 422long »

gks wrote: post #4
jakewalker wrote: post #2

I 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 i…

There's a distinct audience for the sales reps - likely more on the business or procurement side. Any good provider will have sales engineers who can speak to the technology side and the impact technology has on the business or financials of the overall hosting engagement.

A multi-person model is structured around larger enterprises that already have separate staff representing these different roles.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#63

Post by gks »

verisimilitude wrote: post #38
gks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I second your Joyent recommendation. An article of mine made it to the top of Hacker News' frontpage - said article is hosted on one of their SmartMachines w/only 256megs of RAM… running blogging software I had written myself. And it held up fine! To fit within the confines of that amount of RAM, though, I've since switched to nginx… :)

Yea. I have two SmartMachines through them. One of the now unavailable 512mb machines and a 1gig. I've been pretty happy with both of them. There are certainly ways they could improve but it's clear that Solaris Zones as a way to do virtualization isn't going to show the same level of performance degradation as a typical virtualization setup.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#64

Post by gks »

jvdh wrote: post #45
chopsueyar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I don't think a salesman is the first person you want to talk to to help you in this regard.

This is actually a sad state of affairs. It used to be that the salesperson was exactly the kind of guy who could solve this. Now they're just too busy padding deals with stuff almost everyone knows you don't need.

That's kind of what I was trying to say. The fact that "sales" is so bent on selling you stuff instead of getting you the right stuff for what you're trying to do instead is a problem.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#65

Post by kookster »

comparing contegix managed hosting to others like AWS is apples and oranges. There is no level of AWS where you get a team of sysadmins answering your emails within seconds, 24/7.

contegix is worth every penny.

Re: A Short Rant About Hosting

#66

Post by dcposch »

ethank wrote: post #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 c…

Couldn't agree more. For inspiration, see SpaceX's pricing page (tldr; $54M for a rocket to low earth orbit) http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php#pricing_and_performance

Lesser companies are shy about pricing for two reasons: * They simply can't compete on a cost/benefit basis * They want to capture "consumer surplus" (see Joel's awesome writeup, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...)

"Capturing consumer surplus" is an MBA euphimism for "charging different people different amounts for the same product, based on whatever we can get away with".

Sales dweebs love it because it makes for smart-looking powerpoints at the end of the month (look, we charged these forty customers double! free money!)

What they can't measure is how many saw the "call us" button on the website and weren't gullible enough for that shit. Those people simply left to find a competitor with more transparent pricing.

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