Don't pay for hosting. Run your own box on a static IP. I've done it for a decade for the 12+ sites my business operates for its various brands. The traffic is fairly light, sites are mostly static, but the cost savings add up.
GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
151–160 of 166 posts
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#152Don't pay for hosting. Run your own box on a static IP. I've done it for a decade for the 12+ sites my business operates for its various brands. The traffic is fairly light, sites are mostly static, but the cost savings add up.
My geek side really wants to run my own box but as I am currently paying $50 a year to host 4 websites, it's difficult to justify the electricity bill plus the cost of a static IP.
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#153I 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...)
We had a non-neglible number or clients still running on PHP 4. =( It's a dilemma indeed, because upgrading all of the servers and software is bound to break a huge portion of the websites, many of which have been loyal clients for years. (But don't have the dev experience to fix things.) Not upgrading things leads to degrading service, and upgrading things leaves a lot of clients with broken websites.
Also: hacked WordPress sites. The bane of my existence. I must've dealt with several hundred of them in my time.
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#154I think it's interesting how shared hosting has such a terrible reputation.
Really, it's sad, because it's pushing a lot of folks who really shouldn't be running their own servers into the VPS market.
Thats the thing, though; VPSs, generally speaking, have much harder limits. It's harder for that one user to make the server suck for everyone. I mean, it's not as good as a dedicated server, but it's a big step up from the isolation available in shared hosting.
Now that the market price for VPSs has fallen almost to the shared hosting level, I wonder if services that implement a shared-hosting like environment within managed VPSs will take off? Something where the user doesn't have root, where it's managed by the hosting company (presumably automatically) but where there is only one user per virtual.
There are PAAS providers that operate that way, sure, that will let you run languages better than PHP... but there doesn't seem to be an ecosystem of PAAS providers that are all compatible, like there is with php shared hosting.
What interests me about this sort of "PHP as a service" is that unsophisticated users are used to dealing with shared hosting. They understand the limitations. And they want the resource isolation of a VPS solution, even if they are unable or unwilling to put in the sysadmin work required.
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Look into it a bit deeper. That was an elephant that terrorized a village in Africa. It was sanctioned to be put down, no different than a rabid dog.
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think this is the beginning of that phase you haven't been paying any attention at all. Just look up Endurance International Group. They own many (most?) of the major consumer brands and snag up new ones regularly. I can think of two big purchases this year already: DirectI ($110m) and A Small Orange (not sure on sale price)
Wait, A Small Orange was bought? This would explain a slight shift I've noticed with them in the last year...
March 2013. From what I've been tracking, their reputation has only improved since. It seems running independently is going well for the time being.
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
That should be called murder and he should be in jail. Fsck him and his company.
Look into it a bit deeper. That was an elephant that terrorized a village in Africa. It was sanctioned to be put down, no different than a rabid dog.
He is very very rich, if he had particularly cared about protecting the fields rather than shooting elephants perhaps he would have paid for the installation and upkeep of a fence.
His own comment on the affair was "These people have literally nothing and when an elephant is killed it's a big event for them, they are going to be able to eat some protein." Now personally I supect that there are better ways for Bob to go and increase the protein in these people's diets, other than shooting elephants.
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 10…
Speaking as someone who is involved in a couple of charities, each of which has a single VM, Bytemark's not all about big clients. Their support has always been excellent.
I was thinking 'big' in terms of "Able to justify a VM plus sysadmin/management contract". Which is big in terms of most of the hosting industry's clients :)
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else. It's notably worse than a number of other commodity experiences I've had. Dreamhost aggressively oversells. They're hardly unique in this, but they admit and embrace it like nobody else I've seen. Because of this, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, a…
With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc. We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, b…
> We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites.
If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can rely on.
DreamHost is not one of those businesses.
> There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans.
Something something the road to hell something...
Re: GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
#160I'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.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with assisting a village of poor Africans by killing an elephant.