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

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

#161

Post by wonderyak » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 7:45 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #136

wonderyak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1996 was my first shared hosting. 96-97 was OK, but I had a project for a client that got shut down after a few days. It was a small ecommerce project, and we got shut down for 'resource abuse' - CPU was spiking and network was going crazy. Had a week of back and forth emails and I think phone with their 'support. They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries ("those are inefficient"…

Sounds like you've been using VPSs for a while. Do you have an opinion on the virtualization tech used for various hosts (xen, virtuozzo, etc).

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

#162

Post by dwd » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

axx wrote: post #139

ryantownsend wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happen to be doing Rails development, it may be worth checking out Ninefold: http://ninefold.com/pricing [no affiliation of mine]

If you don't mind renting a server in germany, checkout Railscloud ( https://railscloud.de/ )

Germany has good value but there are a number of issues with hosting overseas. Latency is one - in Australia one of the cheapest hosting companies is based in Perth but the latency is double that of Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane.

The other consideration is the legals. Moving the server to Germany not only puts your data under EU/German jurisdiction in addition to AU, the new privacy laws to take effect next year will mean disclosing to your clients and they to their clients that personal data is stored outside of Australia.

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

#163

Post by furyg3 » Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

stevewillows wrote: post #126

wwweston wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a long time. Dreamhost is like a decent all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Not the best product, but it's worth the money you pay. As you said though, their goofy attitude toward outages and such isn't good. I like the transparency of their status site, but when shit goes wrong I don't want a cat-meme reference.

The sushi bar is a decent analogy.

I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click install of wordpress or some other project, or just a shell to bypass some firewall, upload some large files for a while, it's great.

I would never, ever put anything where I needed real uptime on Dreamhost, because performance varies wildly. If a project was getting serious, I'd use Linode, Rackspace, or Amazon.

I also recommend to everyone that they separate out their domain name purchases from their hosting provider.

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

#164

Post by FedRegister » Fri, Oct 18, 2013, 3:14 PM UTC

furyg3 wrote: post #163

stevewillows wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a long time. Dreamhost is like a decent all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Not the best product, but it's worth the money you pay. As you said though, their goofy attitude toward outages and such isn't good. I like the transparency of their status site, but when shit goes wrong I don't want a cat-meme reference.

The sushi bar is a decent analogy. I use dreamhost as a sort of project sandbox, and for that it works pretty well. If you need a place to do a one-click install of wordpress or some other project, or just a shell to bypass some firewall, upload some large files for a while, it's great. I would never, ever put anything where I needed real uptime on Dreamhost, because performance varies wildly. If a project was gettin…

I make it a point to always separate the following things, especially with services that I run for others:

    Domain name purchases
    DNS hosting
    Email hosting
    Web hosting

That way any of the layers in the stack can be replace with sufficient planning and if, say, email is down then the web hosting should still work.

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

#165

Post by michaelvanham » Sat, Oct 19, 2013, 1:35 AM UTC

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…

A friend of mine asked me today for an easy way to get a website going for his wife's beauty salon. I recommended him to bitballoon.com after learning about it here. It looks very slick and easy to use. Thanks.

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

#166

Post by mgkimsal » Sat, Oct 19, 2013, 8:51 PM UTC

wonderyak wrote: post #161

mgkimsal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1996 was my first shared hosting. 96-97 was OK, but I had a project for a client that got shut down after a few days. It was a small ecommerce project, and we got shut down for 'resource abuse' - CPU was spiking and network was going crazy. Had a week of back and forth emails and I think phone with their 'support. They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries ("those are inefficient"…

Sounds like you've been using VPSs for a while. Do you have an opinion on the virtualization tech used for various hosts (xen, virtuozzo, etc).

Sorry for the late reply. Actually I've been running leased bare metal servers for most of the time. In the last couple years I've had some clients and projects on linode and digital ocean, but still have bare metal servers for most other stuff.

I haven't knowingly used virtuozzo for anything so I can't say. Most VPS I've had have been xen-based, but the hardware behind it seems to make more of a difference. I've got two virtualized xen projects right now, and same code on seemingly same virtualized hardware specs still yield pretty different results on some tests.