Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry
blog.dreamhost.com
blog.dreamhost.com
I've also built several web-hosting (static HTML and PHP/MySQL) systems for ISPs (years ago) along with the management and backup solutions to go with them.
I make a small loss doing the hosting I do for friends, but that doesn't bother me.
I over the years I've often been asked by the people buying my services why I am more expensive than a lot of advertised hosting services.
Ha! More expensive, now there's a joke. The key word is 'advertised'. I basically re-sell capacity below cost and re-sell domain registration at cost plus one euro a year for administrative overhead (read : the cost of sending a yearly invoice through snail-mail).
My hosting services are 'expensive' because this is what the actual cost is.
If I'm running this at a loss in my spare time on a good-will basis, why are there parties out there with full-time staff charging less for (superficially) identical services?
Well, let's see..
Registering a domain with a random party is generally a bad idea. For example, some hosting companies put themselves in the registrant information (as owner). In other words, the domain doesn't belong to you and you do not have control over it. Not something a non-techie will know or understand (unless you explain it to them).
The price for registering a domain is generally lower when you go with a big hoster, because these organizations have bulk registration deals, which lowers the price they have to pay to register an individual domain. Buy 1 domain at 10 euros, buy 1000 at 1000.
Some hosters also play bandwidth games. Ooops, you got linked from a major site and that's caused a spike - which is why your site is now shut down. Please wait 24 hours or upgrade to 'premium'.
Pay extra for email. Oh yeah, this is a popular one. Besides not having proper forwarding facilities (or a POP or IMAP server - forward to one address only), many providers will store any email on their own systems and charge for it. Bonus points for "adding email addresses to your domain", which will cost more (of course).
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12
(You have to turn on showdead in your profile to see spam.)
Otherwise there seems no way to find what the original url was.
I think the items deaded are pretty much spot on, but sometimes I'd like to be able to see what the fuss was about, or points raised in discussions.
As it is, he's happy spamming this site, and we're happy not seeing it. Everyone wins.
Apparently I was the only one interested in PG's anti-spam strategy... Sorry for asking such a stupid question.
http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html
Interestingly, one of the ways to get around information asymmetry problems is testing, certification, and, yes, reviews. But if the review sites are corrupt, that kind of brings you back to square one.
I spend most of my time on the WHT forums in the colo section, and you see plenty of specific threads trying to find the most applicable type of hosting for a particular need ("Looking for a strong 20mbps colo host in Chicago. What do you guys recommend?").
You also get pretty much first-notices of downtimes there, and you even get the sweet notices of the stories such as the big break-in at CIHost chicago several years ago (where the crooks sawed through the wall, tazed the employees, and stole a bunch of servers, meanwhile CIHost was initially claiming that there was just an outage).
A lot of them moved to places like Site5 where they tended not to cut off customers. Sounds great if you're one of these guys using all the resources, but it sucks for the other 50 people on the shared box. I experienced this firsthand where Site5 would sometimes become tremendously slow for no apparent reason, and the support staff would always just say they were "looking into it", but would never come up with a solution after months and months. Meanwhile on Dreamhost, things might not always be as fast as my Xen VPS, but neither would I log in and see a load of 10+. Plus they responded professionally and dealt with serious technical issues with refreshing candor.
I can't really come up with a solution to that, as there's no way to accurately tell if someone knows enough to be reviewing the place.
I recently switched hosting to a place called Spexhost, which is run by some people I knew through IRC. That alone makes me trust it a bit more then some random company.
It would be equally useless for those readers to read your review considering you don't need help with the basics, if they do.
That's why the momentum is definitely the direction of hosted services for most things people need rather than direct web hosting. If you want to host your own website you should either A) pay a few hundred a month for a managed host, or B) learn to be your own sysadmin (which frankly is not nearly as hard as it used to be).
Funny; I don't think I ever logged into my DreamHost account and saw a load any lower than 14-16 on a good day...
12:24:03 up 80 days, 11:29, 5 users, load average: 2.58, 2.16, 2.35
Which is a little on the high end of what I usually see. More importantly, when there has been a problem they've identified it and dealt with it.
top - 20:19:31 up 122 days, 10:00, 1 user, load average: 1.03, 1.78, 2.08Thought it was an excellent blog post and still relevant today and so I posted it after a quick search revealed that it hadn't been posted yet here.
Industry analysts and consulting houses can have similar profit motives for their recommendations and implementations over the years, too.
There was a bogus application that showed how shady some of the software award sites can be, too: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards...
Even grocery and department stores can have financial considerations around product placement and the location and quantity of shelf space for a product that is made available within the store.
When in doubt (and when you can), always follow the money.
All those horrendous price comparison sites, catalog sites, and other junk sites are still out there and still thriving just because consumers are pretty ignorant when it comes to online research. These sites won't be going away any time soon, alas.
I decided to shift focus towards working with hosts (any host) that want to be included in the directory, whether they had an affiliate program or not.
Of course if a host happens to have an affiliate program, I see no reason to not use it as long as your transparent with your users.
Plus it keeps the site free of regular banner advertising.
Maybe there's a market for a hosting reviews site run by some company or some person with a good existing reputation.
Same goes for domain registrations, DNS providers etc.