I’m currently hosting this web site, and others, with a company that was really reliable. It was a one-man shop, very personable, advertised with grass-roots marketing. I liked it a lot.
And then at some point, it changed. I had to cancel a web site, and instead of the usual prompt, courteous service I had come to expect, I got the run-around from some woman I’d never met before. I called to complain, and talked to some man I’d never spoken to before and, worse yet, he didn’t know what I was talking about. As far as he knew, I didn’t seem to exist as a customer. Apparently, this was the case with a lot of early customers. Paypal wasn’t enough information for them, and they wanted me to fill out this massive, time-consuming information form about myself before they would give me back any of the money I’d already paid for the web server.
I was extremely busy that day, and what I was getting paid to get the job done that I was working on outstripped the money I’d lose by not getting a pro-rate back. Ultimately, I gave up on getting any pro-rated fees back, cancelled that PayPal subscription, and just chalked up my lost twenty bucks to experience.
Recently, I had a similar experience. I needed some technical support, and instead of getting the knowledgeable guy I usually did, I got some flunkie who had no idea what I was talking about. The dude obviously didn’t know FreeBSD (the operating system which hosts barnson.org). Eventually, I got to talk to the guy that I knew well, and he resolved the problem in short order.
But recently, there have been outages. LONG outages. Hours. I can see the ones that last more than just a few minutes by looking back at my logs, because I have “cron jobs”, or automated processes, which take care of some housekeeping on this web site every 20 minutes. The site was unavailable for almost 3 hours in the middle of the night last night. And yesterday, during the day, there was a one-hour outage.
These outages aren’t documented or explained. I suspect that the “boss” that I used to always talk to when there was a problem has moved on to better things, and the business is now in the hands of incompetents who, worse yet, don’t care about the quality of their service.
So I’m thinking of moving webhosting providers. My budget is $30.00 per month. I strongly prefer a UNIX-like environment, and preferably one where I have “root”, or equivalent access, so that I can set up new services. Although I liked the “small shop” feel of my current provider, they’ve lost it. It’s not a priority; uptime and courteous, professional customer service is. I need about 3GB of storage for all the MP3’s and photos I keep here. Who do you recommend?
Go With Mass
Matt, for security purposes, I’m going to email you my host selection rather than post.
My recommendation is to go with mass. Meaning, sign up with a provider that hosts thousands of sites. It’s cost-effective, you get 99.9% uptime, reliability, 24-7 support and the comfort of knowing that a big company with thousands of customers isn’t going to fold tomorrow.
I interpret the current hosting market to be driven by residential hosting and commercial hosting. Over the past five years, the hosting market has shifted away from free, ad-driven host spots (geocities and your_isp.com/yourname) and evolved to a volume approach. Companies realized they could stabilize fixed costs by stuffing big rooms with lots o’ servers and win by volume — signing up thousands of people for less than $10 a month. It helps when the costs of hardware drops and improvements in automated software eliminate the reliance on staff to watch every movement.
To the contrary, commercial hosting is now a bundled-service offering for a high price. I was looking at $350 a month for an ISP that wanted to provide my business with a phone, high-speed internet and hosting package. If I broke apart the package, hosting alone would cost in the $100 range. Ummm…no thanks, too high.
My advice is to stay away from the hosting companies that have this glossy homepage, but then sound shoddy when you call. The AATE uses omnis.com which was great at first, but then you call their automated phone menuing and the same guy who answers tech support picks up for billing. Uh oh. That smacks up four freaked-out people who haven’t slept in two weeks sitting in a trashed room trying to keep their 3 servers from crashing.
The problem is that the market structure changes over the course of two years. The service offerings get better, prices drop and new players emerge. I understand where you’re coming from in asking advice, because it’s hard to know and find today’s trusted providers. No hosting company is taking out 30 spots on Thursday night prime-time. Thus, to reconnect to today’s market, I suggest looking at an independent review source, such as a tech magazine. I believe that tech magazines run hosting review articles frequently, akin to trash-mags boasting “1,567,457” HOTTEST sex tips only in THIS issue!
Problems Lately
Matt,
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having problems lately with my business’ web host. Already four times this year, I’ve experienced long outages. The host techies explain that it’s all because of DNS attacks. I don’t know if my host’s processes for protection are weak, or if this is common to all web hosts these days. Anyway, I’m sorry if you ended up going with my recommended host provider and are also dealing with the downtime.
In other news, I’m WAY displeased that my home ISP (TW RoadRunner) decided to introduce panel advertising on the web email. Not cool! I use my work computer as the sole machine for taking emails off all host servers. When I’m at home I check all email via the web. It bothers me that my high-speed online provider, for which I’m paying $45 a month, decided to start with the advertising. Once MPLS rolls out its free wi-fi to all citizens, I’m going to dump TW over this very issue.
DNS and blame
Well, it’s a convenient fact that yes, there have been major, massive, unprecedented attacks on DNS so far this year. They’ve taken down internet services for very large hosting providers repeatedly.
The ones who don’t get hit as much? The smaller hosting companies.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing that these guys can do about it other than build more infrastructure to handle that kind of domain. Sad fact of life: they are at the mercy of the hackers.
That said, however, many are using this as a convenient dodge. The attacks happened February through March. If someone’s trying to blame it on the DNS DDOS attacks right now, they’re lying or really reaching.
I have stayed with my existing provider; good or bad, I have a good deal of control. One of these days, if I feel like I’m too rich, I have a hosting provider in mind for about $120 a month.
May be a while 🙂
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Matthew P. Barnson
Back For Suggestions
I still stand by my response post from two years ago, in that high-volume mass hosting companies are a viable solution for small businesses. However, my hosting company, LunarPages, has really started to fall down with continued outages and slow service recovery.
Does anybody have suggestions for good hosting companies? Currently, I’m paying for my business hosting about $10/month including a dedicated IP.
TIA for any recommendations.
$10 a month
I use Vortech Hosting for this server. For your $10 a month, I could host you on the same box I use, and you know the tech support guy 🙂
Anyway, they have some decent plans for pretty cheap. I’m doing some research on new hosting providers, though, because at $89 a month to rent a box full-time, I’d like to see how much more I can get.
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Matthew P. Barnson