So the title says it all.
I’d like to hear from the providers, because I wonder… is it really worth it for you?
I understand the basics, marketing mambo jumbo, but still… is it? is it worth it for you?
I remember once seeing a website from a provider that I found out about in let, I think it was one of Frantech brands (@Francisco), that somewhere in the website copy there something along the lines of “we’re selling at this price as a favor to you”.
I wuoldn’t want a supplier of mine to be doing me a favor, I prefer when everyone is getting something out of the deal.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a cheap deal as much as the next guy, but I also liek to feel safe in my choices, specially when it comes to hosting my memoirs.
It’s worth it if you pack the hell out of a server. The difference between someone like Fran or some trash company is that the best minds are at the top and not a board or a bunch of clueless business people with no knowledge of how it works. So you get Fran being Fran, making sure those servers function with zero organizational roadblocks.
Each provider will be different. From my point of view, some providers will sell at rock bottom prices to get recognition - and some of them can use it to make more money (look at AlphaRacks - terrible service, hosting for few bucks a year but I certainly don’t think they are running out of money), some of them can’t (GalaxyHostPlus and many others).
Depends on market too, you can see me offering shared for 84p on let, but I wouldn’t do that on wht boss.
EDIT: I also think diversity is needed. you can’t just sell a million billion cheap packages. Like a free host… they offer you the free hosting but you know that paid plans always there. It’s similar, you can buy a cheap web plan with maybe some limits, and you’ll know that you can pay more standard rates for better specs, and the cheap plan can help you mould your expectations of service before upgrading.
So what do you think when you see tons of tickets getting your way because that server you filled with 84p accounts goes offline due to a layer7 attack for instance, or because it filled all the HTTPS slots, or craps your IP and now you have to explain what you’re doing to fix it, to all those clients that need to keep their multi-million sale contracts sent by email?
Same thing as if you fill it with 6 customers and one happens to run the shittiest web app of all time, 4 million SEO pages, etc
Strong DDOS protection can help, dedicated IPs can help but DDOS protection is probably more reasonable/scalable. Front end caching proxy can alleviate most Apache child issues, where Event MPM honestly resolves most of them to begin with.
To answer your original question I’d think if I wasn’t aware that things go wrong, and what connotations cheap deals give off to certain types of customers, I just wouldn’t offer the deal. By selling it, that’s me saying I’m aware tickets could mass up, and id have to take responsibility for answering, yeah. You definitely can’t just make a automated hosting site, offer dollar hosting and let it run like clock work. But if you only sell what you can manage and have other areas of the market you can also provide for on the side, you can do reasonably well.
Specifically, I think it’s good to limit the “so cheap people WILL bite” deals, as to not fill servers up. The 84p deal is limited to 50 uses, and they have two servers/locations to pick from. Both of which have the specifications to handle more than 50.
I don’t think so, because the density of clients in a server haves a direct relation to the number of events similar to that one.
And I have the feeling that the more problematic one tend to move between the cheapest offers cause they keep getting caught.
I know a hosting provider that told me they don’t even want the clients that go for this cheap offers. The provider worded it in a nicer way.
So more costs to be covered by a dollar plan, on a crowded server.
Yeah but you balance it out by the number of servers behind it, etc. A physical server should run at least 2 or more shared hosting servers (VMs) to reduce issues caused by raw requests to single instances of web server applications, probably have all of your racks behind one filtering system for protection.
I’ve definitely seen one person do more to damage a single server than tens of thousands of their neighbors combined, purely by content hosted.
I think that’s a very readable thing to do. Limiting the number of people that can take on an offer. Sadly not everyone does it.
I’m the kind of client that submits a support ticket each time a site of mine goes offline. And I always ask for a justification, the “Its been resolved” isn’t sufficient for me. I want to know what happened.
So as you can guess, I submit several tickets per year. Would you take me in? Or would you end up telling me to fk off? Or in nicer terms, to manage my expectations?
I guess you mean I should not have to ask for it to get it?
If yes, then yeah, I agree.
But if I don’t ask, then most of the times what I get is a variation of “its fine now, carry on”.
I request details so I can face the same question myself, and I find it more professional to come out what explain what happened from the get go, as well as what was done to prevent it from happening again, if possible.
I don’t judge clients based on the quantity of requests, it’s more of whether you’re rude in the ticket or being genuine. If our service was going down (more than just a cpanel update or such) that there was enough tickets documenting it to get to me, the real problem is the actual downtime, not the tickets. We’ve recently had a hardware replacement, so when that server was offline, I specifically explained the failure and the plan to replace it (as well as tweeted it) - I understand the need to justify stuff like that in a ticket. As long as you’re not being rude.
No real numbers, it’s all pretty relative and “best effort” predictions based on your market and existing trends. At a gator themed host we ran 4 to each physical system, each being filled with tens of thousands of domains at low-medium capacity. For the most part it actually worked fine, the top issue being Apache failing because we had no caching proxy in front of it. We ended up using Varnish (not sure why that over Nginx tbh) to capture and cache users as they were determined to be the individual cause of the Apache issues (it was almost always just one customer either extremely popular or having a shitty self-scraping wp-cron made worse by xmlrpc.php attacks).
Not much about shared hosting has drastically changed since my days there, WP is still on top, cPanel still the standard.
I’0m not understanding this part.
Do you mean that a cpanel update or such don’t deserve to be justified/explained?
That there needs to be a certain amount of tickets for it to warrant an explanation?
I don’t care if other people besides me submit tickets, its not my place to judge their sense of urgency when it comes to their websites.
I don’t usually take more than 5 minutes to submit a ticket. And I don’t think I’m wrong about doing it.
All downtimes can deserve justification, the example of a cpanel update would be on the lower end of the scale because it’s easy to explain, and is usually a simple few minutes process. Other issues might need more explanation of they’re ongoing
I have made tickets within 0-5 minutes of a service downtime, but I’ve just been lucky enough that the providers I’ve used are on top of any problems and there’s a reply a few minutes later explaining the problem and course of action.
