101–110 of 166 posts
I think people will always pay for service, quality, and experience. Whoever can deliver that consistently will make money in hosting.
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 as far as I know, a big chunk of them are still there.) Needless to say, this resulted in a really crappy service for the clients on those servers, and there never seemed to be a big push to get everybody migrated off of them and onto our newer servers running cPanel. We were working towards it, but it was a big endeavor that would leave a lot of clients extremely upset when things invariably went awry. So rather then putting some good development time towards automating the process as much as possible and hiring more support for those accounts that didn't migrate properly, the problem just sat there for years.
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True! Started with one place I can't remember - started with S. It was cheap and allowed multiple small sites to run off one account. Eventually turned to crap and so we bailed. WebCentral - gave up on their silly control panel. Used a place in NSW or Vic that started off OK, then was acquired (BlueCentral, I think?) and turned into a bit of a rude disaster. Abandoned that. Had a site break on Friday of a long weeken…
Melbourne IT are also a waste of time. I don't know how they're still in business.
I guess you have to pick your poison, a company that might not be so great but has been around, or someone that is great but fleeting. Although that is starting to change now with Linode, Rackspace, and others.
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…
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.
The support person refused to do so, but instead, asked me to subscribe to a dedicated server. I explained that I didn't need a dedicated server, as it was clear from my statistic that all faults were on their IO throughput side. He just won't listen and still insisted on up-selling me a dedicated server.
What a horrible experience! Anyone encountered the same thing as I do? Is IO throughput a PITA for your hosting experience?
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True! Started with one place I can't remember - started with S. It was cheap and allowed multiple small sites to run off one account. Eventually turned to crap and so we bailed. WebCentral - gave up on their silly control panel. Used a place in NSW or Vic that started off OK, then was acquired (BlueCentral, I think?) and turned into a bit of a rude disaster. Abandoned that. Had a site break on Friday of a long weeken…
Hosting in Australia seems crazily expensive to me. One of the many reasons we need the NBN.
Plus I know of a smaller company that's intending to move in here. Hope that goes well...
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.
"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…