GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by lelandbatey » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 5:37 AM UTC

pjbrunet wrote: post #17

lelandbatey wrote: post #4

Web hosting customers are nomads. If your host hasn’t been ruined yet, just wait. This line right here is absolutely sage wisdom. Here are some of the companies I've bought services from, as well as what I remember happening to them: ClubUptime Closed in a disastrous closure due to basically being conned. DirectSpace Still around, haven't changed much VolumeDrive Very sketchy, I don't really know how they're still in…

I have a long list too. You need off-site backups because that day will come. Funny, my first real host (he.net) is still in business. Maybe it's true you get what you pay for ;-)

Haha, I would hope he.net is still going strong, since they're Hurricane Electric and provide a lot moelre than just hosting.

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

#112

Post by mprovost » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 5:46 AM UTC

workhere-io wrote: post #105

arikrak wrote: post #100

What's interesting about standard shared web hosting (mainly used by small PHP-based sites) is how most of them are secretly owned by one company: EIG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group Many people spend time comparing the different services, but in truth they're all the same! Also, you get much better specs with the free tier of OpenShift, but I guess that will change once enough people swit…

Many people spend time comparing the different services, but in truth they're all the same! The fact that many of them have the same parent company doesn't mean that their servers, features, support, uptime, etc. are the same. So they're no more the same than Facebook and Instagram are the same social network just because they have the same owner.

EIG's business model is to buy up smaller hosting companies pretty much just for the customer base and then migrate them all onto the same shared infrastructure. They keep the front end sites operating the same but it's all the same on the back end. They've done it so many times that they've gotten quite good at the migrations, and then whatever random hardware the original company was using is discarded. Usually noone from the company being taken over ends up working for them, support is sent to their offshore call centres (who actually do a decent job). Most web hosting companies are fairly small operations and usually have a single owner or maybe a few partners who are just bought out and the employees are all let go.

They're able to maintain the appearance of having a bunch of competing companies and you can shop around for the best deal, which they will change around periodically, but it's always the same thing underneath.

Source: Worked for two webhosts acquired by EIG.

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

#113

Post by shreyasubale » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 6:21 AM UTC

Trufa wrote: post #59

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.

Hostgator is awesome, Their support is pretty good. I have 4 VPS servers running there and never faced any problem. Their customer support is also awesome.

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

#114

Post by NKCSS » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 7:14 AM UTC

Hmm, the recommendations at the end of the article still seem pretty pricey to me. I'm personally a fan of LeaseWeb; been renting servers with them for 5 years now and still very happy, at a good price (~€100 for 100MBit unmetered, quadcore xenon x3440, 16GB ram, 2x2TB HDD and ESXi 5.1)

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

#115

Post by gingerlime » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 7:35 AM UTC

Trufa wrote: post #59

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.

Will not recommend Hostgator at the moment, even though I used to recommend them for years.

I was using HG for probably 7 years or so. But I believe they recently got acquired by EIG[1]. I'm not saying there's a connection, but I've experienced several incidents that made me change my mind.

At some point I was moved to new servers. The migration process was very sketchy. HG did not send notification emails about the migration on time, which meant once the migration took place, I had to try to figure out which DNS changes to make (were not provided), whilst the service was effectively down.

Afterwards they've had a rather major issue with their email servers, which got blacklisted as a result of a large amount of spam being sent from compromised Joomla apps[2]. This resulted in many forwarded emails to bounce and (my) customers being both aware of the forwarding (which wasn't always desirable for me), and that their emails bounced. The Hostgator response to this incident was painfully slow and they did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the effect on their customers.

I already had shared hosting services running with webfaction, so I moved most of it away to them. For more heavy-weight hosting, where I need more control, I use Linode and AWS.

[1]http://www.shoutmeloud.com/hostgator-sold-endurance-enduranc... [2]http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting-res...

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

#116

Post by porker » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 7:39 AM UTC

naiyt wrote: post #102

I worked in webhosting for about two years, and can attest to the fact that it's a horrible world. We were pretty good at our jobs, but the company was experiencing some really nasty growing pains, and the product was pretty bad as a result. One of the big pains in the webhosting world is maintaining legacy systems...we had about 15,000 clients on ancient servers running RHEL4, under a proprietary VPS platform. (And…

I feel your pain for legacy systems. Mine is just one shared hosting server for clients I've had for years - clients whose sites still require PHP 5.2 and break if it's upgraded.

Short of ditching them I haven't figured out what to do. I'd hate to be a shared hosting company where thousands of sites break when the server software is upgraded (not to mention Wordpress installs getting hacked every day...)

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

#117

Post by Nux » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 7:47 AM UTC

moocowduckquack wrote: post #38

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…

The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. - http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/6057... - look at him with his big happy face, he could choose to spend his time and money in so many ways and he chooses to go and shoot elephants. Godaddy could shit rainbows all day long and I still wouldn't want to give them any money.

That should be called murder and he should be in jail.

Fsck him and his company.

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

#118

Post by porker » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 7:47 AM UTC

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…

It's good to hear from you Matt, I've had Bytemark/BigV recommended to me half a dozen times, as well as seeing you sponsoring conferences since ~2007.

I guess your life is made easier than many of the hosting companies by not offering shared hosting, and (from the impression I've got) generally working with larger clients. So none of those issues of upgrading PHP and finding clients' sites stop working, or having 1000 hacked and exploited Wordpress-hosting accounts to deal with each morning. If you encounter them, how do you mitigate those two scenarios?

DSVR brings back memories - I used them in 2002-2003? They had such a reputation... and then just disappeared off the radar!

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

#119

Post by Nux » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 8:01 AM UTC

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…

Have been really impressed with the consistent positive things I hear about Bytemark.

Seems like you have a lot of good karma and should get more HN exposure if you ask me.

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

#120

Post by Terretta » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 8:14 AM UTC

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…

Rackspace instances, no issues.

Rackspace cloud sites, terribly unpredictable performance with frequently obscene (20s+) latency, then categoric denial of actual measured issues for months... followed by begrudging admission, a swap of networking hardware, and a respite for a few months... until it all starts again. This pattern is much too frequent in their forums. I suspect they assume the customer's code is always at fault, so won't really look into their network layers unless coerced. A real shame.