Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company? 456
Posted
by
timothy
from the secret-underground-layer dept.
from the secret-underground-layer dept.
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?"
Things I look for (Score:5, Interesting)
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases, email accounts, FTP accounts - multiple user accounts I can lock down to one domain or folder for these because I might want to job out management for a domain or subdomain. Because I never know today what I'm going to be using it for, and this is a long term relationship that's challenging to get out of.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
I like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them but they've been making me happy for quite a while.
Transparency (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Better than shared hosting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Try Webfaction. Here's why: (Score:2, Interesting)
If they don't have a particular app that you want, it's not that difficult to download and install it yourself.
http://www.webfaction.com/ [webfaction.com]
If you DO decide to join, don't be afraid to use me as your referrer: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=mantic [webfaction.com]
LowEndBox (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better than shared hosting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Things I look for (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not actually unlimited, but it's effectively unlimited storage for hosting purposes. You can't use it for backup. But there's no cap - if you're using it for your website it's permitted. I guess enough people pay the full ride for their mini websites to make up for the piglets. Anyway, it says unlimited right on their home page and nobody's ever bothered me about storage. If one day their word is no good I guess I'll take my business somewhere else. But for now, no worries.
Likewise you don't get unlimited FTP accounts and MySQL databases - but 1000 and 100 is close enough to unlimited for my purposes. Hell, this is starting to read like an ad. If you don't believe me, check it out for yourself.
Isn't it a (Score:3, Interesting)
Good thing you had back ups. Right?
Plan for failure. Keep a backup of your own files. (Score:1, Interesting)
Because I can't help it.
1. Keep a backup of your own files, never trust that your provider has backups. I hear about this happening every day, and it annoys me that you leave such an important responsibility to your host.
Now to the real topic,
1. Look for a host that is willing to work with you. Flexibility is useful later on.
2. Ignore SLA (Service Level Agreements) in general they give you a months fees back, which honestly is nothing compared to the damage you proboly incurred if you're willing to jump through the hoops to get it.
3. Support Support Support. Give your host a try, if they don't respond quickly, then they don't need your business.
4. Look into their history. I once put a server in a datacenter who said "We havn't had a power outage since 1995 unplanned or otherwise" who was so confident in their contractors that they let them flip the transfer switch during business hours instead of waiting for the outage period, which failed and powered the entire datacenter down. They immedaitely threw back to the switch, and quickly blew every breaker in the datacenter. Bad experience.
5. Plan for Failure, Always.
slicehost (Score:4, Interesting)
I like slicehost for a number of reasons, but you have to be willing to use a command line because there is no GUI unless you install one (because you're getting a virtual server with full root access).
Though they do not offer cpanel or anything like that, they do have a minimal admin panel that you can use to configure DNS, MX and set up your server (as well as automate backups, which start at like 5 a month or so).
For 20 a month, you get a 256mb ram virtual slice and around a dozen linux distros you can select from with their admin panel for the slice. If you dont like any of the ones they provide (very unlikely) you can opt to install your own with a set of directions they provide on their wiki (the wiki is also very helpful when setting up your server for whatever you might want to do).
Whenever I need help with a server issue, they email fairly quick (same day) or they have a chat room with people who actually speak English as their first language (or know it well enough you would assume they do). Generally, the people helping you are the same ones who maintain their website or their servers as well, not outsourced help.
Some dont like that they dont have any sort of guaranteed uptime, but eh, I've never really had any servers I have go down for more than an hour or so and it's generally sometime at night if they do. The downtime is generally planned or even if its an emergency, they notify with enough time you can migrate files to another server.
For 20 a month and the freedom of having full server access to install what you want, I'd gladly pay. I still loath when I have some clients who only want to pay 3-5 or whatever a month at some lame shared hosting site and have to deal with cpanel or whatever else, because once you've used the command line and had full control on a remote server it's hard to go back to the panel interface, lol.
as a (now former) web host system admin... (Score:5, Interesting)
We all know shit happens, and accidents can occur. That doesn't excuse not owning up to it when they do. In the case of the russian hacker excuse, the admin who came up with that gem tried to tell the senior admin that's what happened, too. When he found out that he was lied to, he pretty much went ballistic.
That said, check the following stuff:
1) if they are advertising "unlimited bandwidth," what's the actual throughput that they're allowing -- especially if they phrase the actual offer as "unlimited data transfer." Bandwidth usage is tied to memory usage, especially in the monitoring tools that come on cPanel-enabled servers, and so if you're pushing a lot of data it can spike your memory usage and
2) if they'd advertising "unlimited disk space," what are the limits at which their backups stop, if any? whats the amount of disk space? if you're doing shared hosting, which hopefully you're not, then that affects whether or not your account ends up getting moved, at least where I worked, a lot of the job on overnight rotations was moving accounts for disk space management.
3) what are their resource policies? On shared servers, we'd kick people for using more than 1% of CPU, generally. On a VPS, it could get a little higher.
4) if you're looking for a VPS, check what platform they're using for hosting, whether its Xen, VZ, etc. VZ doesn't track memory internal to the container, or really allow for swap space, etc. So, if you were buying a 256M plan from us, you'd really get 1024M memory segmentation which was the "burstable," but memcached would leak out and suck up RAM from the whole server if it weren't installed right (and a lot of people in my department didn't know this or didn't care). If you plan on using something like memcached, you'll want a hardware dedicated server, or a sufficiently large Xen container.
5) super-double check backup policy. We wouldn't back up dedicated servers, for instance. Backups could be configured to push to our array for a fee, or we could turn on local cpanel backups on the server, but if the disks really did go bad then you'd still be fucked if you weren't snapping copies back to yourself via FTP and keeping them local. If you're looking for a VPS or shared hosting, then make sure you know the backup rules -- how much data, and how it gets backed up. For instance, our setup used rsync over an NFS mount, which meant that we'd have a copy of the latest of everything that was there when the backup ran, but if something was corrupted before the backup, we'd have a backup of a broken file.
Some recommendations of companies other than the one I worked for, which I've used for various things and liked well enough are Slicehost and RootBSD. They're both Xen-based, allow a really high level of autonomy, etc. Slicehost pretty much lets you do everything yourself. You can go from no server to vps with root in about 5 minutes with no human interaction. RootBSD takes a bit longer to get set up, but their support people were always really helpful to me, and the added benefit of not being Linux-based, but using FreeBSD though OpenBSD is also a custom option as well.
Re:Things I look for (Score:5, Interesting)
For $15 a year you're not going to get a world-class hosting service. If you look at the hosting providers that mon.itor.us show above 99% uptime, you tend to see similar names every year. Pair.com is my favorite-- they always have great performance and near-perfect uptime. I've been using them for 12 years or so and I've never seen my site down for one minute. They're not the cheapest, but the poster didn't sound like he was looking for the cheapest-- he wants the ones that's reliable and that he won't have to worry about, ever.
(I don't work for them, just a happy customer.)
Re:Free trials. (Score:3, Interesting)
You can insulate yourself from App Engine lock-in by developing your app for Django, which is then portable to a standard server if App Engine turns out to be a problem.
That works, to a point. Similarly, you can develop your app in Ruby, for Datamapper, with the dm-appengine plugin -- and yes, it'll even run Rails.
But ultimately, you're going to want to use some Appengine-specific features. But even then, people have made Appengine-compatible APIs for Hadoop.
their urlfetch service was returning odd results,
That would be interesting to know about.
database operations were failing multiple times per day.
That's actually normal, and by design, which is part of why it'd be hard to develop something truly portable.
See, appengine uses optimistic locking. That means if two instances try to simultaneously update the same entity (or entity-group), the first one to finish will succeed, and the other one will fail. The normal approach is to try again, something like 3-5 times, and your transactions should be small and idempotent.
All of those are desirable qualities for the kind of webapps I want to build, but they aren't a good fit for everything.
No, *avoid* DreamHost... (Score:3, Interesting)
... unless you know you're going to be using them to operate a website that isn't ever going to see real traffic and will never have critical uptime needs.
Here's why: DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. That's right, they oversell. On purpose. They know it, and they admit it, and they have their little rationale as to why it isn't a problem, but it is.
Here's an example: their "unlimited" storage offer. They make this kind of offer betting that most people can't even come up with a use for half that (or, more accurate, courting the segment of the market that won't). They're right in that the vast majority of websites will never have more than tens of gigabytes of contents, and they *say* they're willing to put up with the hassle of the few that do.
But the problem is, if you offer a service, eventually, some significant number of people will find a way to use it. I noticed, for example, that their storage offer (a mere 200GB three years ago) essentially made them the cheapest game in town for backing up a lot of data to a remote location, as well as being a pretty good web hosting deal, so I decided to move some of my hosting over, and take advantage of the space for backup. Gradually other people noticed this to, and so over time, people were actually starting to use what DreamHost sold them. When you oversell, this obviously becomes a problem.
So, what did they do? They imposed new rules: you had to pay extra (3-4 times extra) to use that amount of space if the files stored weren't part of a website. That's right: different prices for different bits on the same disk.
Since I found the distinction pretty arbitrary and annoying, I decided to see what would happen if I did a bit of coding and essentially produced a simple web interface for what became a personal backup website. I'd pretty clearly met the letter of the law. DreamHost didn't agree, and said it didn't matter whether or not I had because my intent was clearly just to get around their restriction. They didn't back down; I paid their additional fees, but after a few months, found it irksome enough that I left.
I'm fairly lucky, because I had plenty of time to take my ball and go home. There are some people out there who have found their accounts suspended and even deactivated because of spiking demand -- not even demand that actually saturates a pipe or otherwise exceeds any of the limits they tell you about when they're selling, mostly just enough demand on shared boxes that causes Apache to crash or lock up. These people have essentially had to suddenly migrate under conditions where their access had been cut off.
And this is all before you get to general uptime and systems health. I don't know what it is, but they had a lot of hiccups in the time that I was with them. Some of the explanations really did sound like things beyond their control, and if I hadn't experienced better, I would assume that this just happens sometimes. Their connectivity got cut off, their email servers fail, they change their subdomain host naming system without telling you... no, uptime and predictability were not their strong points.
But the bottom line for me comes back to the first thing I said. Because they oversell, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. If you cross the later line -- even well before you get to the former -- it's pretty clear they will not only accept your departure but in some cases they will actively throw you over the side of the boat. This is an annoying but possibly acceptable state of affairs for a limited hobby website, but if you count on someone like this for a business or client website, I think it's likely that you or the client will eventually regret it rather strongly.
If you want someone rock solid reliable, I've had an account with Hurricane Electric [he.net] for 12 years. They e
Re:DreamHost (caveat emptor) (Score:2, Interesting)
Dreamhost was pretty good for most of the time I used them (~5 years) and I liked some of the extras they provided, like XMPP hosting for your domains. I wasn't as happy with the excessive Google integration toward the end of my use, but it was optional, so it was not a deal breaker. Unscheduled downtimes happened occasionally but were dealt with promptly. SSH access was nice, and they didn't mind http-related cron jobs (if I remember correctly).
However, be wary of their referral program. I got a few referral kickbacks and the support quality seemed to degrade, ending with mistaken termination of service and a tech support brick wall when I tried to resolve it. Either they frown upon you actually using the referral kickbacks they offer, or I had horrible luck; I'd guess the former. They do everything via email and support tickets, so there's no telephone contact; if you do have a problem with support, you're going to have trouble getting around it.
In summary: pretty good hosting and value, but think twice about using the referrals and make sure you keep frequent backups in case things go sour.
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Sorry I'm posting this AC; I haven't logged in to Slashdot in many years and I can't remember my password. I should probably make a new account (don't have the same email address, so password recovery is not an option), but I'm not ready to give up on my 90k ID just yet.
VPS (Score:4, Interesting)
You get what you pay for. If you want total control, man up and take it! Get a VPS from Linode or Slicehost and configure the server exactly how you want. They offer similar service for similar prices. To get you started, Linode has a LAMP StackScript available that can have you up and running in about 2 minutes. From there, configure Apache for multiple vhosts and you're all set.
The downside is that ultimately, yo're responsible. The upside is that they don't touch your stuff and are expandable nearly instantly
Re:Make sure you go over the contract very careful (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like something AffordableColo / DTI would do when I worked for them (by them I mean him, the one guy who ran it and would _unplug_ servers just to reap fees for "rebooting crashed servers".) I quit after less than two months working for Mr. Charles Baker, and I've offered to testify in the class-action, should it come to fruition. Search webhostingtalk.com for cbaker17 if you really want to see how many customers he abused this way before the company folded.
Always research your hosting company before you do business with them. Always.
That being said, I'm hosting on Slicehost and have loved it since day one.