Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company?

v1x writes "I have had an account with my current web hosting company for a few years, with 3 domains being hosted there (using Linux/PHP/MySQL). Recently, all three of these websites stopped functioning, and upon checking the site, all my directory structures were intact, whereas all of the files were gone. Upon contacting their technical support, I was given the run-around, and later informed by one of their administrators that none of the files could be restored. Needless to say that I am looking for a different web hosting company at this point, but I would like to make a more informed choice than I did with the current company. I have read a similar Slashdot article (from 2005) on the topic, but the questions posed there were slightly different." Reader mrstrano has a similar question: "I am developing a web application and, after registering the domain, I am now looking for a suitable web hosting provider. It should be cheap enough so I can start small, but should allow me to scale up if the web site is successful (as I hope). The idea is simple enough so I do not need other investors to implement it. This also means that I don't have a lot of money to put on it at the moment. Users of the website will post their pictures (no, it's not going to be a porn website), so scalability might be an issue even with a moderately high number of users. I would like to find a good web hosting provider from day one, so I don't have to go through the pain of a data migration. Which web host would you choose?"

Re:Things I look for

[LostCluster]

Yep. All hosting resources are finite, so anybody offering anything "unlimited" is clearly overselling what they have. I'd look for somebody who quotes a higher-than-I'll-ever-need number as proof that they're limiting potential hogs.

Re:Try Webfaction. Here's why:

[rotide]

I'm a random slashdot poster and just an fyi.

Your whole post was pretty much void after you linked your referral link. The fact that _you_ get benefits from people signing up makes me think your review might be biased.

I mean, if you don't sell me on their service, I'm not going to give you your referral bonus.

Simple point, if you really want people to trust your review, don't post your referral links.

Again, that was just my opinion on your post, I'm not saying you're wrong.

Re:Things I look for

[ircmaxell]

Read the fine print when you sign up for an unlimited account. I've seen "unlimited bandwidth" accounts that were capped by the 1.5 mbps uplink to the internet. Sure, it's "as much as you can fit out over our pipe", but the question to ask is how big that pipe is. Same goes for disk space. Same goes for CPU time. Actually, CPU time is the bigger resource, since more often then not, you'll get an angry call saying "pay more, or we'll shut off your site for excessive cpu usage"... Unlimited is just an advertising term. There are so many other limitations on it, that the advantage is on the side of the hoster.

That being said, I much prefer a VPS (Managed or unmanaged). Sure, it'll cost a few $$$ more, but you get everything spelled out in advanced. You get an x% share of a y CPU box guaranteed. You get a z mbps uplink, and i gb of san based disk storage. Plus, with a VPS, if your site does grow, you can just increase the vm's specs up to 1 full server without having to migrate (assuming a decent host)...

Re:Make sure you go over the contract very careful

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell your stories as anonymous coward. The company can't prove it was you. And besides, if what you're saying is true, then they can't sue you for libel. If you could be sued for printing the truth, more reporters and news channels would be in courts.

I hate companies that are incompetent and try to cover it up with lawsuit threats.

It will help all of us to get honest feedback from customers.

Backups

[bradgoodman]

I used Webintellects - for several years. One day they had a hardware failure which took down my server. When they restored it - their backup process was found to be...lacking. They could only restore my site from a ONE YEAR OLD backup!

Long story short - If the data is critical - trust no-one - use multiple different sources which you control for the data!

Re:Try Webfaction. Here's why:

[Mantic]

That wasn't a review in some non-biased comparison between multiple hosts. It's my biased opinion.

I'm not a professional critic trying to be as non-biased as possible. I rather like Webfaction and think it's worth a shot. If you shared something really cool that I ended up purchasing, I wouldn't hesitate to give you credit. That's what the whole referral business is for.

A snake-oil thing to do would be if I tried to trick people into clicking the link. Instead, I offered the referral option AFTER posting a direct link to their site.

"I mean, if you don't sell me on their service, I'm not going to give you your referral bonus." Exactly, hence my disclaimer "If you DO decide to join, don't be afraid to use me as your referrer." Besides, I believe the bonus is only for those who register an account. Clicking does nothing for me.

Anyway, thanks for your honesty!

Re:Things I look for

[soundguy]

If you really expect "unlimited" resources for a trivial amount of money, you're a clueless cheapskate and no reputable hosting company wants you as a customer. Companies that advertise "unlimited" anything have mountains of fine print in their TOS. If you become inconvenient to host because you actually believed their line of bullshit on the front page and attempt to use large amounts of disk space or bandwidth, your account will be deleted for any number of petty excuses like excessive CPU cycles or memory usage.

Also, domain registration and web hosting have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Any hosting company that tries to tie the two together as one product is scum and should be avoided. Go register your domains with any Enom or WildWest (GoDaddy) reseller and then go get your hosting somewhere else.

Remember, shopping for hosting on price is a fools game. SLAs and quality service cost a shitload of money. If you don't pay for them, you won't get them.

Re:Make sure you go over the contract very careful

[Tablizer]

DO YOUR OWN BACKUPS. Service providers either don't do them, or they don't do them right.

I second that. It was not that they intentionally fubarred them, but rather there were some configuration misunderstandings/differences that got in the way. And switch off mySql's auto-key reuse setting.
   

Re:Things I look for

[Mistlefoot]

Unlimited means that a few heavy traffic websites who try to utilize "unlimited" will cause your site to load like molasses. You ARE going to be on a shared box.

Buying into a host that offers unlimited is only setting yourself up for dealing with that. Unless you expect your provider to deal with it by limiting those heave traffic users (and if they do while trying to maintain high profits, well there goes unlimited).

Re:Things I look for

[xous]

Hi,

As a systems administrator at a hosting company I'd suggest you do the following:

* Use a 3rd party registrar. A real registrar not a reseller of a reseller of a reseller of a registrar. Do not keep domains that have any value with your hosting provider.
* Use a 3rd party backup service. Do not depend on your hosting providers backups.

Those are the two biggest mistakes I see customers make all the time.

Since you haven't really given us anything to work with regarding bandwidth, space, and resource usage I can only provide generalized suggestions.

Research the hosting company.
* Real legal entity for the company.
* Own their own data center (preferably date centers) or at the very least hosted in a respectable DC.
* Read customer reviews. Your not looking for a perfect score. I'd find that suspicious. Don't heavily weight reviews either way as every hosting company pisses off some warez kid and some companies that I've worked for previously have paid staff to post good reviews. One in particular even owns and hosts their own promotional sites while setting the setup the site to appear as a happy customer's site.
* Talk to their support/sales staff. Ask questions that are difficult.

Pay more than $6.99/mo or whatever the current gimmick for unlimited everything plus the moon.

Do you really want to know why?

Average hosting company pays front of the line employees around $8/h. Most of these are horrible techinicians.

Let's say you put in 6 tickets a month. You've effectively cost them $1.01 for that month.

Now lets say this company has semi-competent technicians at $16/h which you buy you about 25 minutes of tech time per month. This doesn't even factor in hosting costs which aren't cheap.
 

We run in to this all the time at work

[Sycraft-fu]

We offer centralized storage to faculty, staff and students. It is highly fast and reliable. We've got a couple of NetApp 2020s that have multiple disk redundancy, will e-mail NetApp to have a disk overnighted if one fails, and take snapshots every couple hours. That is then backed up to a tape library nightly, which has its tapes rotated out to an offsite location. The idea being we can survive some heavy shit and get your data, including you doing something like deleting it (hence the snapshots).

However, we run in to problems with research groups and such who want a ton of space. We are happy to give it to them, for a price. Well they go and look at a harddrive on Newegg and say "But a 1TB harddrive is only $90! I shouldn't have to pay any more than that!" They can't seem to understand the idea of reliability in storage. Of course then when information stored only on a cheap desktop drive fails, they come crying about how critical it is and how we have to recover it for them.

I just wish everyone would remember that when you store data on a single, consumer drive, you are counting on luck to keep it from going away. You may well get lucky, and not have a failure. Many people are lucky in that regard. However it is purely luck. If the drive fails, you are SOL in many cases. If your data really matters, you'll have it backed up. The more important the data, the more aggressive the backup system.

Yes, this is going to cost more. Deal with it. The idea is more or less to say "Even if X happens, I still want my data, and I want access to it on a certain timeline." You determine what X is, and what timeline you need, and then design a solution that'll work.

You'll also notice

[Sycraft-fu]

That the good ones have higher prices. Yes, Pair is expensive. You can literally find companies that'll give you a year of hosting for what they charge for a month... Think there might be a reason for that?

I've also used them for a long time, and there's a reason I keep paying their prices. They are solid, fast, and they don't get hacked. Getting hacked is something many people don't think about but I've had problems on other hosts. A site gets owned because the hosting company didn't keep their servers up to date.

In my case, Pair actually did have an outage. The server I was on had a hardware failure... Site was back up in less than 20 minutes. That is a real measure of good support. When a problem does happen, they have a system in place to fix it fast.

At any rate, hosting is like so many things in life in that you get what you pay for. If you look for a "unlimited" plan (which are never truly unlimited) for bottom dollar, you'll get bottom quality. If you are willing to pay more, you get better quality. Pair is my favourite, but there are other quality choices too. Just be aware that they are going to cost money.