131–140 of 166 posts
Is it me or is there a place in the market for higher quality, less commodity type hosting services. Right now things are segmented by type of hosting in very technical ways, but we're now seeing more value added hosting for things like rails (heroku), wordpress (wp engine), etc. I think people will always pay for service, quality, and experience. Whoever can deliver that consistently will make money in hosting.
I'm not sure I got it 100% right, but I think there are some valid points.
I remember in 2001 when it was almost a badge of honor to be hosted on (MT), especially if you were one of those website that got the free hosting in exchange of their logo on the page.
Pretty much like Apple.
"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'…
My father-in-law works for a small business that launched a static site earlier this year. They pay $80/month for "maintenance" on that static site.
I just launched a static site last night. Total cost? $10 / year.
If this was an easy thing for most consumers then they wouldn't be paying $950 / year more than I am.
About softlayer: Its possible to bargain with them. We have E-2620 servers there, official starting price at $879, and we pay $299/month including more RAM and a small network. So they had been willing to undercut co-location calculation if you ask them. I dont know if this is still possible after IBM. I guess their sales team now knows better how to barter with big customers.
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DH's shared hosting is bad, possibly horrible. Their shared servers go down frequently. Often they didn't even seem to know the server I'm on was down until I sent a support request. I keep my account for testing and sites I don't really care much about.
Shared hosting is really bad in general. If you happen to be grouped up with people that are constantly hitting their resource limits and/or the box is oversold it can be even worse.
They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries ("those are inefficient" they kept arguing). After a week we were reinstated - turns out there was someone else running spambot on another hosting account on the same server. But... we were "ecommerce" so obviously must have been the root cause of a spiked CPU. I vowed at that point to not use shared hosting again, and haven't since 1998.
It's been nicer with cheap VPSs over the last few years - easier to get clients set up with their 'own' servers. I know that VPSs are shared as well, and I've seen issues where one VPS abused resources to the point where it affected mine, but that's been pretty rare (2x in the past 5 years I can think of), and it's always easier for people to track down, isolate and resolve.
Also, it was one anecdote point, and was 15 years ago, and was just 'bad service' but life is too short to try to be putting projects as risk to save a few bucks. Projects/sites generally have enough troubles - dealing with shared hosting is just one more thing that can go wrong, imo.
I subscribed to a tmdhosting VPS package, and the IO throughput was simply horrible. I collected the IO statistics, and I emailed the support team and asked it to move me to another hardware node which was less overloaded. 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 w…
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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…
Love the depth of your outage notifications incidentally. One big problem for me - sadly stuck on shared hosting - is that the host never tell me a) when things go down and b) when they change things [that often seem to break sites].
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Hosting in Australia seems crazily expensive to me. One of the many reasons we need the NBN.
If you happen to be doing Rails development, it may be worth checking out Ninefold: http://ninefold.com/pricing [no affiliation of mine]
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…
> and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff We've used Rackspace Cloud and Linode for several years and found Rackspace Cloud performance to be significantly worse than Linode for CPU and IO. Like, not even close. Prices are about the same. Support experiences are also similar (quick, competent responses from both sides). The only reason we keep the Rackspace stuff around is because we want to have a relatively wide separa…