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

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

#51

Post by benmorris »

smacktoward wrote: post #42

As long as we're sharing hosting anecdotes/recommendations, I'll throw in my two cents: I've dealt with umpty gazillion hosting companies over the last 15+ years, and the only one that has consistently impressed me to the point where I recommend them to clients without any reservations is Rackspace. Both in their dedicated server offerings and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff. (Rackspace Cloud doesn't have as much ble…

I share a similar opinion. I compare every host I deal with to Rackspace. I have dealt with them from early on 6+ years ago with their dedicated servers and mail. Their support is the real deal and if you need a managed service level I would not think twice about using them. That being said though if you are going unmanaged you're going to pay a lot more to use Rackspace than other companies.

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

#52

Post by secabeen »

CharlesW wrote: post #9
wonderyak wrote: post #3

My least horrible experiences have all been with DreamHost as well. Our company did reseller hosting for about 5 years and went through all of the acquisition stuff Marco mentions. We had to exit SoftLayer because they were horrible, only to be brought right back. Hosting is a horrible business. To be good at it and have marketplace success you need to deliver over the top support; which is just unsustainable at scal…

I'm not a fan of "me too"s, but I've been a DreamHost customer since 2001 and use them for smaller sites and may try VPS and/or dedicated with them in the future. I recall one rough patch with them in 2006 ( http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an... ), but I felt like they did a pretty good job of keeping customers informed and so I stuck with them.

Dremahost VPS is a pretty interesting product, as you still get the unlimited disk and bandwidth of the shared product, but now on a VPS.

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

#53

Post by bobfunk »

larrys wrote: post #45
bobfunk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Took a look that looks really good. I assume people can also drag a .html etc or a .jpg and it will replace an existing file after verifying (and/or rename)? Good luck!

Thanks!

So far updates are done by just dragging the whole folder unto the site dashboard again. We'll figure out what files have changes and just upload those.

There's also a version history so people can always roll back changes or see how the site looked like before.

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

#54

Post by benihana »

coderdude wrote: post #13

I've been a Media Temple customer since 2007 and a GoDaddy customer since 2004 [edit: I say 2004 but I don't think that's possible. I must have switched to them sometime after 2006 but I can't recall who my previous registrar was.]. I like both companies just fine though apparently not everyone has been as lucky. I don't know if GD is going to be a good home for mt since GD specializes in cheaper hosting. But... GoDa…

I hated their customer support. I had to call it more than I usually do for a company, and every time, after they fixed the issue, they tried to sell me something. Not a simple little 'no thanks' they tried hard to sell me something. I had to tell them 'no' multiple times on multiple occasions. Take that anecdote for what it's worth.

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

#55

Post by arkitaip »

cleversoap wrote: post #24
arkitaip wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. I'm currently happy using Webfaction but I just know it's a matter of time before I have to look for a new hosting company.

I've been with them for quite a while and one thing I've noticed they do differently is that they will upgrade your service periodically while not changing the price. For example, I've gone from 128MB to 512MB of usable memory for my vhost without paying anything but my $9.99 a month. There are other anecdotes (awesome control panel, good support, etc...) that make me think it's unfair to group them with other hostin…

Oh, I agree that Webfaction is very very good at shared hosting. It's just that I've learned my lesson and don't plan to be too attached to them.

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

#56

Post by ericabiz »

mattbee wrote: post #37
sterlingross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting is a pretty stressful and thankless industry. Your services can run flawless for years and your clients wont think twice about you, but as soon as the mail server crashes you are somehow evil and ruining their business. You were smart to get out. I haven't yet.

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…

As someone who also ran a hosting company (2001-2007, when I sold it--the acquiring company is still in business and doing fine today), there are some people who are building hosting companies for the long term, and many others who will sell given the right $ amount and timing.

Some of the best hosting companies I've been with were run by "lifers" (which is what you sound like to me, too.) You've got a good team, a system, and you're profitable and growing your customer base. You're enjoying yourself, so there's no point in selling.

There are many others for whom the support gets to be too much, or they haven't charged enough to make a profit--in my case, it was both. If you can't make a profit, you can't put the systems in place you need to run a great business, so you kill yourself getting up at 3AM when a customer texts your "emergency support" line. Eventually, you burn out, sell it and move on.

Unfortunately, with hosting being as price-sensitive as it is (I like the comparison to airlines someone else made in this thread), there will always be companies that start up, have an owner that runs him/herself into the ground, and sell.

You "lifers" are in many ways smarter than the rest of us. I applaud you for not giving up and not giving in to the price war. Here's hoping other hosting company owners will read these comments and realize there is an alternative to full burnout mode.

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

#57

Post by thwarted »

bobfunk wrote: post #39
larrys wrote: post #29

"But it’s also highly commoditized: hosts can’t differentiate their products very much, there’s effectively no barrier to entry, switching at any time is fairly cheap and easy, and most customers buy primarily on price." I don't agree at all that for many website hosting customers the process is "easy". A typical web hosting customer is not tech saavy they either have it being handled by their "tech guy" or they can'…

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…

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.

I think this is partly because of providers like godaddy who have massive up-sell attempts and navigation misdirection to confuse people into purchasing all their value-add services when all you wanted was to purchase a domain or use their DNS services. It's the rare provider who just wants to do one thing well rather than be horizontally integrated and do a bunch of things half-assed. Unfortunately, people prefer one-stop shopping, but the integration doesn't make it easy to differentiate the offerings as services that don't need to be provided by a single provider. Like you can use godaddy as a registrar, but the ability to not use godaddy as the DNS provider too is buried and hidden. They purposely conflate what can be two separate services.

EDIT: I do remember canceling some godaddy service at one time and the process was super easy. Called and said I want to cancel service, wait time on the phone was low, and there was no questions asked.

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

#58

Post by infinitone »

DigitalSea wrote: post #11

This news could not make me happier after moving from Mediatemple completely about 6 months ago. I would say I got out just in time. My experience with Media Temple (I was with them since the beginning and all of the teething problems they had with their hosting in the early days) was fairly good. Support was great, but if you soon find you hit the limit of their hosting pretty quickly. They used to market their Grid…

Yup, same- we got outta MT just in time about 4 months ago. Switched to DO.

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

#59

Post by Trufa »

I would like to know what other people experiences are with regard to Hostgator. Honestly, I chose because I didn't know many other options at the time but I've never had any sort of trouble and their chat assistance is pretty awesome.

I would like to know if I'm actually just lucky or if other people have had this experience too.

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

#60

Post by chris_mahan »

elwell wrote: post #43
smacktoward wrote: post #42

As long as we're sharing hosting anecdotes/recommendations, I'll throw in my two cents: I've dealt with umpty gazillion hosting companies over the last 15+ years, and the only one that has consistently impressed me to the point where I recommend them to clients without any reservations is Rackspace. Both in their dedicated server offerings and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff. (Rackspace Cloud doesn't have as much ble…

will upvote with reservations (don't want too many people there, but I think they have handled popularity rather well)

I have three instances at rackspace cloud, and all three have 100% uptime for 4+ years. Could not be happier. Of course, running debian stable might have some to do with that.
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