Web Hosting Horrors and Solutions

[cbscreative]

Web site hosting is one of those volatile industies that has changed so rapidly that it's amazing anyone can survive the turmoil. I know we have members here such as vangogh who offer web hosting, so I hope to get a balanced perspective in this thread from both those who do hosting, and the rest of us who are affected by it.

I am starting this discussion because it affects all of us in business who have web sites. If nothing else, every business owner would do well to choose a hosting provider VERY carefully.

There are extreme cases like FeaturePrice who have gained a lot of enemies, but I think the price of hosting coming down to dangerously low levels, and a fiercely cutthroat market, have fueled a huge problem.

Being in web design, I have dealt with many hosting companies. One thing I have noticed is that even some that were very good a few years ago have slipped to a service level so low it is mostly non-existent. Personally, I think they are trapped. They can't raise their price but can't afford to provide service either. When angry customers leave, they can't easily replace them because there are so many low price providers that they have no way to stand out and attract much new business.

To make matters worse, the low prices come at the expense of cutting somewhere. In addition to poor customer service, maybe they risk security, use slow equipment, have poor load balancing, experience excessive downtime, don't perform proper maintenance, do less backup, and are understaffed with stressed out people of limited experience and high turnover.

You as the customer will never directly see this, it won't be included in the tour, and hosting companies fighting for their survival will never admit these problems. But I suspect these problems are running rampant in the industry. Customers are seeing the effects even if they aren't understanding the cause.

This is my observation, but since every business with a web site can be adversely affected by choosing the wrong hosting company, I wanted to open up this discussion for the benefit of all small business owners here.

[Comtrad]

I think it's a combination of scam sites, affialite sites, adwords sites, etc... that people are trying to make a quick buck from and want the cheapest crap so they can hopefully make the money back that they were ripped off from.

If people bought for quality instead of price, things would probably be much better.

It doesn't help with all the affiliate hosting sites out there either.

[Corey Bryant]

I fully agree with you Steve. It was very difficult for us to provide a custom level of support that so many of our customers were used to. And since I basically ran that part and due to my recent diagnosis, we decided to sell the company.

Most of the companies though that contacted us could not afford to purchase our clients. They wanted us to maintain the billing while they provided the support. For us, this did not feel right and fortunately we found someone large enough that could afford us.

Most of our customers are friends and acquaintances of myself so it was a very difficult decision but providing the 24 hour support was even more difficult at times. We did have a company to help us, but most, if not all, only wanted to deal with me.

It is just like most any other business. You want to provide the best customer service but then having 5 or 6 people calling you at once for minor changes etc can get a bit difficult.

[webarama]

It's the old addage, you get what you pay for. I operate 2 web hosting comapnies. One is focused on providing shared web hosting, the other on enterprise hosting.

The shared hosting environment is on which we have seen a massive change in over the past 7 years we've been in business. There are a lot of new players, many of which appear to be 'one man bands' who come and go like the wind. Some of our clients have left us for these promised lower prices, only to return once they discover that it's simply not possible to operate a business on no margin. We don't discount, never have, and we provide top notch support to all of our clients. It's this quality which has kept us going over the past few years, even when faced by increasing competition in relation to price.

In the enterprise area, we don't suffer from this same syndrome at all. Large corporates know that quality comes at a price, and they will pay for that quality each and every time.

[cbscreative]

Although I mentioned an experience I had late last week on another thread, I thought I would bump this old discussion again because the experience fits this topic perfectly. It makes a strong case for why it is so important to choose your hosting company very carefully.

Last week one of my clients had their site hacked because of poor security on their hosting company's servers. It did not happen only to my client, but other customers of the same hosting company. Fortunately, the attack was discovered on the day it happened.

Rather than launch into all the dirty details of what happened and give you the sad tale of having a web site commandeered by hackers, I think a better point I can make is that I was not surprised that this company was vulnerable to attack. The warning signs were there. Things were not right. I was actually in the process of helping my client sign up with a new host when the hacking was discovered.

The warning signs of having the wrong hosting company may come in many forms, but should be noticable if you pay attention. You might notice inconsistencies in your email. Maybe your online forms are taking a long time to be delivered (or maybe they are not being delivered at all). Perhaps you are seeing your site down, especially if it is frequent or for long periods. If your site is running significantly slow, that's a sign of trouble if it happens often.

When the problems are often and many, the customer service will be slow or just plain bad. If your gut instincts are telling you to find a new hosting company, don't wait for a disaster.

Imagine how you'd feel if someone typed in your web address and got offensive material you did not put there. It happens, and more often than you probably realize. If it happens to you, most of your day(s) will be shot, and you'll be dealing with the mess instead of being productive.

[JWDesignCenter]

OMG, so talk about horror stories... i'm waiting for the end of the month to switch from my horrible hosting service at Gate over to something new and better. In the last month or so i've had the worst problems with my emails not being able to get through from either end. Last week I called the techs because I was having more problems than normal. Now I don't know about all of you, but when you call and speak with a "tech" you expect them to have some knowledge about computers and the systems they are running. I also expect them to have some at the very least basic knowledge of the different problems that typically occur with their software. I presented my problem to these techs (that the outgoing server wasn't picking up my emails and the tech actually had the nerve to tell me he would google it and see what he could come up with. I could do that! He then proceeded to blame anyone and everyone else for the problem. I spent about 3 grand proving it was there problem and they still don't agree... arg!! I was absolutely livid. I cannot wait to switch to my new company and finally have reliable emails again (by the way if any of you emailed me and I didn't respond, that is probably the reason for it).

[bill benson]

Steve, since you kind of bumped this from another thread, let me tell you about a cheap host I have used. Bare in mind that much of this is speculation, but probably fairly accurate.

Mr. cheap host decides to go into the hosting business in the 2002 time frame (I'm guessing). He gets a web site, rents space on a server somewhere, gets clients...

He isn't that technically knowledgeable. For the basic stuff he's ok. Only email support. As time goes on, he leases his own server, and 24/7 staff to handle problems.

Time continues, he buys some servers and has the 24/7 staff.

------------------------------------

When I first started out, I used a host that did a lot of hand holding. I needed that at that time. I had no idea what I was doing. I was paying $25 per month for that for one domain. After a while, I saw an ad for the above host for 1.50 per month. That's a big difference.

Aside from the features you need, asp, php, mysql, frontpage, bandwidth, storage, whatever, you need disaster recovery. You can go with all kinds of high end hosts and have them sold without your knowledge or some other disaster and you are dead in the water. My cheap host above could be in an accident and not pay his bills. All of a sudden my site goes down. I know people that haven't had phone calls returned from a high end host because they were sold. Their sites were down for two weeks.

If you have a critical site, my opinion is to have a "hot standby host". That host can be a cheap host. If your site goes down because of of problems with your host, change nameservers and you are up. They say 48 hours for propagation, but I have found it to be hours recently.

I also know of some "big" hosts that prey on the inexperienced and take domain names hostage. I watched that happen to a friend of mine.

I guess what I'm saying is quality is good, but backup is better. No matter where you host, if its a site that is making you money, put a duplicate site on a cheap host. A reseller plan is only $10 per month.

[cbscreative]

Thanks, Bill. Good points, especially about the difficulties you can face if a hosting company is sold, and that seems to be a common problem. Making sure you actually own your domain name is another extremely important issue. Some hosting companies, and web designers that include hosting (and let me emphasize some), will offer a great package deal only to register the domain in their own name so they own it, not you.

If you are reading this and you're in doubt about who owns your domain, enter your domain name in www.whois.net and make sure your name is listed as the registrant.

[vangogh]

Steve I guess I missed this thread the first time around. Hosting is a lot more cutthroat than I realied when I first started on it. So much so that I'm going to rebrand myself more as an seo and web designer and pretty much drop the hosting except for seo and design clients.

Aside from enjoying the design and seo aspects of the business more I don't think I can realistically offer hosting services the way I would like. In the future I may come back to it, but near term I'm going to move away from it except for clients of my other services.

I think too many companies are trying to compete on price and some of those really low price hosting packages are probably best to avoid. You're not going to get unlimited hosting for $2.99/month.

What happens is hosting companies oversell space and bandwitdth on thier servers. Most people will never use all of the disk space they get with their account so for example I could sell you 5GB of space knowing at most you'll only use 1Gb. I could then sell that same 5GB I sold to you to 4 other people.

Overselling is actually fine if not done too much. Say overselling 20% of a server is perfectly fine. If your web host is paying attention they can simply move some accounts to another server if people do end up needing all the space with their account.

The problem is when people oversell 500%, 600%, 1000%. Those are the people who are offering things that seem to good to be true. The unlimited hosting for 99 cent thing.

The best thing to do when deciding who to use as a web host is send them an email and ask a few questions. It's less about the questions than it is to see how soon they respond and what kind of a response you get. If they don't provide good service to a potential customer they're unlikely to provide better service once they have your money.

It's also good to identify what your needs are. You probably don't need 200000GB of space so don't be misled into thinking the company offering more is automatically better.

Bill makes some good points above. If hosting is new to you and you're lost about how to manage your account or how to upload files to the server then it's worth it to spend a little extra money each month for the hand holding you'll get. Even at $25/month hosting is not expensive.

If you are more comfortable managing things on your own then the customer service probably isn't as important to you. Of course it will always be important if something goes wrong with your site.

be careful about your domain too. I actually think it's better not to purchase a domain and hosting from the same company. When you do purchase a domain make sure you own the domain. With some hosting companies they end up owning the domain and if you ever have problems later and want to swtich hosts you may find you can't

I've had good experiences registering domains with GoDaddy, though if you use them as a registrar read what you're clicking. If you just click the biggest link or button you may end up buying hosting too.

[Sparky1]

I have just started the Hosting Game to go hand in hand with my Turnkey store. What I can't get my head around is these life time hosting packages for $127 or these 2.99 a month packages.

I was pleased to see that Van's hosting packagers are not all that different then mine. I have been fretting about charging what I think is sustanable while seeing these insane packages.

I am not sure how they can be sustainable or be able to serve their customers. Some issues that customers have take hours to solve or resolve. At 2.99 a month that is not a very good return on your time.

I am going to assume that eventually this movement to super cheap hosting will level out and return to some reasonable range.