GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting

its a nice post, and the note that MT was planning for exist since day one is insightful ... i didnt know that

but i cant help but feel, the MT story was forced into this post to make the much general point that most hosting companies are horrible

also, he does seem to miss a smallish fact MT or he doesnt raise it clear enough .. MT was not a great host .. it was an expensive mediocre host ... but i think he probably did downplay this a little to make his louder statement that things will get worst for MT ... mainly because the founders left

i have to disagree, MT wasnt, he sort of admit it, the founder was never a believer he admit it ... MT didnt loose much

plus if hosting is such a comodity and MT wasnt good .. the customers should feel they really lost anything

again i believe marco used MT story as just an excuse to make this post ...

"there’s effectively no barrier to entry"

Made this point in another comment but want to stress the biggest barrier to entry is being able to provide customer support and handling the "rtfm" type calls. So it's a people problem. In the sense that you could start doing hosting as one individual but at a certain point you'd have to hire someone to take care of the support calls that a larger customer base (than one person can handle) would require.

While we're on the topic, this page is heavily astroturfed like those of many large companies. A number of sockpuppets are implicated in the page's history. I enjoyed contributions by "ParsonsRep" [1] which aren't sneaky at all, most edits signed "(I AM AFFILIATED WITH GODADDY.COM)".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsR...

I disagree - Bytemark have been in business nearly 12 years, thousands of interesting clients, no difficult ones that I've not turned around to my way of thinking :-)

We've just built our own data centre (http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-w...), have launched our own IaaS product (http://bigv.io) and we get a lot of recommendations though as we're based in the UK we're not as big on most HN readers' radars. Not _just_ a plug, but as someone who wanted to go into video games and ended up running a hosting company, I've found it more interesting than I expected.

We still pick up business (and staff) from great hosting companies whose founders run out of steam. So seeing that happen over and over, our big challenge is to put a company structure in place where (one way or another) we don't have to make that awful "nothing will change - honest!" contractual obligation blog post. I've seen it happen over and over in the UK too - anyone remember DSVR? But also Melbourne last year, RapidSwitch, Redstation ... all beloved names with keen founders that got folded into a bigger company and gradually forgotten.

So I'm 1) trying to put in place products that will last at least another 10 years, and as we develop new ones, also have a transition plan to keep service going without ridiculous legacy maintenance 2) thinking about very long-term private ownership plans, turning it to an employee partnership, or anything else that will give new customers the assurance that we're here to stay even after Pete & me step away from it, as we will do one day. It'll be a few more years before anyone should believes us, but I think 12 years is already above average.

Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.

We're working on solving this for static sites with BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com).

Both by giving people an instant way to get their site online, but also by making it dead easy to do typical tasks like adding Analytics or getting forms to work.