GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting

http://www.marco.org/2013/10/15/godaddy-mt

by mh_ • 13 years ago

354 161 13 years ago

marco.org

busterzzz• 13 years ago

I use mt for one of my sites, hope this isn't A turn for the worst.

kbar132• 13 years ago

you should probably prepare for the worst.

wonderyak3• 13 years ago

My least horrible experiences have all been with DreamHost as well.

Our company did reseller hosting for about 5 years and went through all of the acquisition stuff Marco mentions. We had to exit SoftLayer because they were horrible, only to be brought right back.

Hosting is a horrible business. To be good at it and have marketplace success you need to deliver over the top support; which is just unsustainable at scale.

jfb• 13 years ago

It seems like the kind of thing that well-intentioned people can get into without too terribly much capital, only to have things go totally non-linear on them. My own minimal needs have always been perfectly well met by Linode, so I recommend them if anybody asks me (which people rarely do.)

I've heard goodish things about Dreamhost, as well.

CharlesW• 13 years ago

I'm not a fan of "me too"s, but I've been a DreamHost customer since 2001 and use them for smaller sites and may try VPS and/or dedicated with them in the future. I recall one rough patch with them in 2006 (http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an...), but I felt like they did a pretty good job of keeping customers informed and so I stuck with them.

dave5104• 13 years ago

I've been a DH VPS customer for... years now. Don't even remember how long since I upgraded from shared. (And I've been with DH since 2006.)

Coming from the shared environment, having a VPS is infinitely nicer. We would have an issue every month or two on shared hosting, but now it's an issue every year or so on their VPS knocks on wood

My general experience with DH is that uptime is fantastic... but when it rains, it pours for a day or so. But then right back to clear skies for months.

secabeen• 13 years ago

Dremahost VPS is a pretty interesting product, as you still get the unlimited disk and bandwidth of the shared product, but now on a VPS.

driverdan• 13 years ago

DH's shared hosting is bad, possibly horrible. Their shared servers go down frequently. Often they didn't even seem to know the server I'm on was down until I sent a support request. I keep my account for testing and sites I don't really care much about.

wonderyak3• 13 years ago

Shared hosting is really bad in general. If you happen to be grouped up with people that are constantly hitting their resource limits and/or the box is oversold it can be even worse.

yogo• 13 years ago

There is a very simple rule of thumb when it comes to hosting. If your site/business matters then never put it on shared hosting. It's always bad, overselling is what makes it possible to have those low prices. In terms of the noisy neighbor problem shared hosting is a ghetto.

minimaxir• 13 years ago

DH's shared hosting was fine for me and my WordPress blog for 2 years.

Then I hit #1 on Hacker News and bad things happened.

slig• 13 years ago

I've been hosting small sites on WebFaction <https://www.webfaction.com/>. I never had problems of downtime and the support has been reasonably responsive the couple of times I needed.

pjbrunet2• 13 years ago

You never had trouble but come back here in few years. WebFaction registered September 28, 2003. 10 years in business, not bad. But if you start recommending hosts there's going to be a list here 10 miles long.

damon_c• 13 years ago

I signed up with DreamHost a couple of years ago and they sent me my password in plaintext in the confirmation email.

Am I wrong to have walked away immediately?

lelandbatey2• 13 years ago

Web hosting customers are nomads. If your host hasn’t been ruined yet, just wait.

This line right here is absolutely sage wisdom. Here are some of the companies I've bought services from, as well as what I remember happening to them:

    ClubUptime
        Closed in a disastrous closure due to basically being conned.

    DirectSpace
        Still around, haven't changed much

    VolumeDrive
        Very sketchy, I don't really know how they're still in business

    Fazewire
        Local Seattle hosting/colocation company. Originally founded by a guy
        when he was 15, he sold the company when he went to college.

    URPad.net
        Still around, only used them for a short period of time.
    
    OVH
    Amazon
    Digital Ocean

arkitaip2• 13 years ago

Very true. I'm currently happy using Webfaction but I just know it's a matter of time before I have to look for a new hosting company.

cleversoap• 13 years ago

I've been with them for quite a while and one thing I've noticed they do differently is that they will upgrade your service periodically while not changing the price. For example, I've gone from 128MB to 512MB of usable memory for my vhost without paying anything but my $9.99 a month. There are other anecdotes (awesome control panel, good support, etc...) that make me think it's unfair to group them with other hosting providers that never do anything but the bare minimum.

pjbrunet2• 13 years ago

I have a long list too. You need off-site backups because that day will come.

Funny, my first real host (he.net) is still in business. Maybe it's true you get what you pay for ;-)

lelandbatey2• 13 years ago

Haha, I would hope he.net is still going strong, since they're Hurricane Electric and provide a lot moelre than just hosting.

prawn• 13 years ago

True!

Started with one place I can't remember - started with S. It was cheap and allowed multiple small sites to run off one account. Eventually turned to crap and so we bailed.

WebCentral - gave up on their silly control panel.

Used a place in NSW or Vic that started off OK, then was acquired (BlueCentral, I think?) and turned into a bit of a rude disaster. Abandoned that. Had a site break on Friday of a long weekend, so no support until Tuesday...

Had 60+ clients with CrystalTech who were polite and had great service. They were bought by NewTek and started overloading shared servers and tech support went from efficient and polite to slow and especially dim-witted. Bought again by SBA and things got worse. We've gradually shifted dozens of sites to accounts at Linode and that's been a great move for us.

dwd2• 13 years ago

Similar experience.

CrystalTech were very good and only had one issue with a dedicated server in 5 years when a network cable came loose which was fixed after a quick phone call.

WebCentral has a horrific control panel, only one possibly worse is the cutdown Telstra Business version.

Currently using VentraIP/Zuver for a handful of VPS servers and they are always friendly and responsive.

voltagex_• 13 years ago

Hosting in Australia seems crazily expensive to me. One of the many reasons we need the NBN.

pm• 13 years ago

Melbourne IT are also a waste of time. I don't know how they're still in business.

ssafejava• 13 years ago

Anecdotes are one of the only real ways to get information on whether or not a hosting provider is any good. At least it cuts through the marketing BS. I generally track hosting company's Twitter accounts too - it's pretty telling what people will say to them. I've been using a few sites to keep on top of it as I bring up some new services:

[1] http://reviewsignal.com (reviews scraped from social media / public support requests) [2] http://serverbear.com/ (VPS/Cloud host benchmarks & stats)

cylinder• 13 years ago

Hosting is like commercial airlines. Everyone wants excellent service, but they shop on price, and expect it to be low. Those who can actually spend a lot, do it themselves anyways (private jets). This could be the beginning of a consolidation phase in the hosting industry just like what took place with airlines.

thenomad• 13 years ago

If you don't shop on price, there are some excellent hosts out there.

But you do have to be willing to pay $20 or maybe even $99 for your completely business-critical, complex infrastructure, rather than merely $2.99 pm.

iwasakabukiman• 13 years ago

The only difference being that once those markets are consolidated to a few key players, they become very different.

You can't just start an airline overnight. It requires massive capital upfront. A hosting company simply requires a server.

larrys5• 13 years ago

The biggest deal with doing hosting is not even the server.

It's a) getting customers but actually even more important b) supporting those customers. c) A good online site to take care of the majority of the issues that come up. d) "c" helps keep down the "rtfm" type calls.

The "iron" and everything else is fairly easy.

So a hosting company is really people if you can solve the people problem you can definitely make money in hosting. Despite what Marco says the average retail hosting customer is not looking to switch their hosting if they get "good enough" service. Most don't even know that there site is down. (They do know when their email is not working of course because that they are constantly checking).

ohashi4• 13 years ago

If you think this is the beginning of that phase you haven't been paying any attention at all. Just look up Endurance International Group. They own many (most?) of the major consumer brands and snag up new ones regularly. I can think of two big purchases this year already: DirectI ($110m) and A Small Orange (not sure on sale price)

d23• 13 years ago

Wait, A Small Orange was bought? This would explain a slight shift I've noticed with them in the last year...

MartinCron• 13 years ago

That is a great analogy. Makes me feel better about spending a little more for Rackspace and Virgin America, whenever possible.

Life is too short to follow the race to the bottom.

yardie• 13 years ago

Except airlines don't have SLAs. Since there are limited seats and limited departure slots the guy with gold membership and the guy with the, almost free, jumpseat are getting the same basic service. There is a lot more variance in hosting than price.

JEVLON• 13 years ago

I had a terrible experience with MT a couple of years ago. GoDaddy won't be ruining them. They wrecked themselves.

SteveGerencser• 13 years ago

In the late 90s i was a partner in a hosting company. To this day every time someone asks me to host a small site on my personal server I get flashbacks and the shakes. Never again. Hosting is not a game for people without very strong nerves. I won't even resell hosting.

sterlingross2• 13 years ago

Hosting is a pretty stressful and thankless industry. Your services can run flawless for years and your clients wont think twice about you, but as soon as the mail server crashes you are somehow evil and ruining their business.

You were smart to get out. I haven't yet.

mattbee• 13 years ago

I disagree - Bytemark have been in business nearly 12 years, thousands of interesting clients, no difficult ones that I've not turned around to my way of thinking :-)

We've just built our own data centre (http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-w...), have launched our own IaaS product (http://bigv.io) and we get a lot of recommendations though as we're based in the UK we're not as big on most HN readers' radars. Not _just_ a plug, but as someone who wanted to go into video games and ended up running a hosting company, I've found it more interesting than I expected.

We still pick up business (and staff) from great hosting companies whose founders run out of steam. So seeing that happen over and over, our big challenge is to put a company structure in place where (one way or another) we don't have to make that awful "nothing will change - honest!" contractual obligation blog post. I've seen it happen over and over in the UK too - anyone remember DSVR? But also Melbourne last year, RapidSwitch, Redstation ... all beloved names with keen founders that got folded into a bigger company and gradually forgotten.

So I'm 1) trying to put in place products that will last at least another 10 years, and as we develop new ones, also have a transition plan to keep service going without ridiculous legacy maintenance 2) thinking about very long-term private ownership plans, turning it to an employee partnership, or anything else that will give new customers the assurance that we're here to stay even after Pete & me step away from it, as we will do one day. It'll be a few more years before anyone should believes us, but I think 12 years is already above average.

larrys5• 13 years ago

"mail server crashes"

Side note. Nothing makes someone willing to pay a new hosting company more money for the same basic low end email service than when they have the inevitable problems getting their email from their current host.

The email is a bit less of a problem now then it was years ago.

The reason?

Many people now want the email forwarded to gmail etc. As such they aren't even aware if there is a service interruption because they are getting email addressed to the gmail and the domain and they lose track of which is which. So it could be hours or even a day until they even know something is wrong. As opposed to pop or imap where they get an immediate connection error.

davidandgoliath6• 13 years ago

My condolences! I love the industry :) It can often be a thankless one, but I derive such a massive amount of joy out of serving.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

This news could not make me happier after moving from Mediatemple completely about 6 months ago. I would say I got out just in time. My experience with Media Temple (I was with them since the beginning and all of the teething problems they had with their hosting in the early days) was fairly good. Support was great, but if you soon find you hit the limit of their hosting pretty quickly. They used to market their Grid Server (gS) plans as being "Digg Proof" and it was once upon a time but then eventually the Grid Server plan lacked behind and getting Slashdotted/Digged meant you had to scale up with burst addons.

I would argue that Mediatemple kind of killed themselves in many ways, I can't see how GoDaddy will do much worse to be honest. People put them up on such a high pedestal as they got bigger, they just couldn't live up to their glowing reputation because of how big they were growing which is a problem not many companies can say they have, Support stayed timely until the end, but Media Temple lost out to Digital Ocean and Linode big time and just couldn't keep up in the end.

I wish GoDaddy all the best, but for the moment I am very happy with my Linode 1024 virtual server plan which never buckles under anything I've thrown at it thus far. Even hitting the front-page of HN once upon a time didn't cause it to break a sweat.

infinitone• 13 years ago

Yup, same- we got outta MT just in time about 4 months ago. Switched to DO.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

A nitpick: he's saying "high profits" when I think he means "high gross profits". It's an important distinction. The low cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) is offset first by the competition and later by the cost of hiring people the manage it and deal with customers.

coderdude• 13 years ago

I've been a Media Temple customer since 2007 and a GoDaddy customer since 2004 [edit: I say 2004 but I don't think that's possible. I must have switched to them sometime after 2006 but I can't recall who my previous registrar was.]. I like both companies just fine though apparently not everyone has been as lucky. I don't know if GD is going to be a good home for mt since GD specializes in cheaper hosting. But...

GoDaddy does a lot to support their customers. Friendly people over the phone. They've walked my dad through some hosting issues he had when he was trying to set a site up. They call me every couple of months to make sure I'm satisfied with everything (and probably try to sell me on that bundled registration). Making them out to be The Devil is too dramatic. And transparent too when he could have linked to the #Philanthropy[1] heading on their Wikipedia page but chose to focus on #Controversies to support a position.

Steveism• 13 years ago

As a supplement to your comment, the Philanthropy section of their Wikipedia page is around 285 words. The Controversies section of their Wikipedia page is around 1542 words. Of course links to edit the page and footnote links make these numbers slightly off. Linking to the Controversies section seems rather appropriate considering the disproportionate nature of the two sections.

oinksoft• 13 years ago

While we're on the topic, this page is heavily astroturfed like those of many large companies. A number of sockpuppets are implicated in the page's history. I enjoyed contributions by "ParsonsRep" [1] which aren't sneaky at all, most edits signed "(I AM AFFILIATED WITH GODADDY.COM)".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsR...

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. - http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/6057... - look at him with his big happy face, he could choose to spend his time and money in so many ways and he chooses to go and shoot elephants.

Godaddy could shit rainbows all day long and I still wouldn't want to give them any money.

dgesang• 13 years ago

They also supported SOPA: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nmnie/godaddy_supp...

leephillips• 13 years ago

This is depraved. Elephants are one of only several species on Earth that pass the mark test[0], which is thought to indicate that they are self aware and conscious, sharing with us a quality of mind that used to be thought unique to humans.

[0]http://www.pnas.org/content/103/45/17053.abstract

Nux2• 13 years ago

That should be called murder and he should be in jail.

Fsck him and his company.

wtbob• 13 years ago

There's absolutely nothing wrong with assisting a village of poor Africans by killing an elephant.

nknighthb• 13 years ago

When I had a domain registered with GoDaddy, they called and woke my sick mother up just to try and sell me shit I didn't need. When told I wasn't available (not that it wasn't my number, but that I just wasn't available), they threatened to cancel my registration for providing "false" contact information.

I started the transfer to another company an hour later. They have never and will never get another dime from me.

No, this isn't a joke or parody or satire. It's what actually happened. It's a horrible, customer-hostile company.

benihana• 13 years ago

I hated their customer support. I had to call it more than I usually do for a company, and every time, after they fixed the issue, they tried to sell me something. Not a simple little 'no thanks' they tried hard to sell me something. I had to tell them 'no' multiple times on multiple occasions. Take that anecdote for what it's worth.

eeeeeeeeeeeee• 13 years ago

GoDaddy lost me as a customer due to their slimy control panel. You practically need a special AdBlock configuration.

kbar132• 13 years ago

well, it was a good run, MT.

I wonder how many of their employees will leave MT

davidandgoliath6• 13 years ago

Apparently, quite a few have already in advance of the announcement -- however that's all hearsay.

larrys5• 13 years ago

"But it’s also highly commoditized: hosts can’t differentiate their products very much, there’s effectively no barrier to entry, switching at any time is fairly cheap and easy, and most customers buy primarily on price."

I don't agree at all that for many website hosting customers the process is "easy".

A typical web hosting customer is not tech saavy they either have it being handled by their "tech guy" or they can't even remember how their files got onto the server in the first place with their static site and sometimes they don't even know who is hosting their site [1].

[1] Source: We're a registrar and we get the calls and emails of confused customers who have no clue where they are hosted. They don't even know enough to look at the whois and see the dns to give them a hint. Actually you'd be suprised how many times someone will access our whois and think we are their registrar.

bobfunk3• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.

We're working on solving this for static sites with BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com).

Both by giving people an instant way to get their site online, but also by making it dead easy to do typical tasks like adding Analytics or getting forms to work.

larrys5• 13 years ago

Took a look that looks really good.

I assume people can also drag a .html etc or a .jpg and it will replace an existing file after verifying (and/or rename)?

Good luck!

thwarted2• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.

I think this is partly because of providers like godaddy who have massive up-sell attempts and navigation misdirection to confuse people into purchasing all their value-add services when all you wanted was to purchase a domain or use their DNS services. It's the rare provider who just wants to do one thing well rather than be horizontally integrated and do a bunch of things half-assed. Unfortunately, people prefer one-stop shopping, but the integration doesn't make it easy to differentiate the offerings as services that don't need to be provided by a single provider. Like you can use godaddy as a registrar, but the ability to not use godaddy as the DNS provider too is buried and hidden. They purposely conflate what can be two separate services.

EDIT: I do remember canceling some godaddy service at one time and the process was super easy. Called and said I want to cancel service, wait time on the phone was low, and there was no questions asked.

kngspook• 13 years ago

JFYI: it seems like the images on your homepage aren't loading properly. (OSX, Firefox 24.0)

rwbt• 13 years ago

Cool. Never knew about Bitballoon and seems like it fits the project I'm working on right now perfectly.

michaelvanham• 13 years ago

A friend of mine asked me today for an easy way to get a website going for his wife's beauty salon. I recommended him to bitballoon.com after learning about it here. It looks very slick and easy to use. Thanks.

scrabble• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more.

My father-in-law works for a small business that launched a static site earlier this year. They pay $80/month for "maintenance" on that static site.

I just launched a static site last night. Total cost? $10 / year.

If this was an easy thing for most consumers then they wouldn't be paying $950 / year more than I am.

systems• 13 years ago

its a nice post, and the note that MT was planning for exist since day one is insightful ... i didnt know that

but i cant help but feel, the MT story was forced into this post to make the much general point that most hosting companies are horrible

also, he does seem to miss a smallish fact MT or he doesnt raise it clear enough .. MT was not a great host .. it was an expensive mediocre host ... but i think he probably did downplay this a little to make his louder statement that things will get worst for MT ... mainly because the founders left

i have to disagree, MT wasnt, he sort of admit it, the founder was never a believer he admit it ... MT didnt loose much

plus if hosting is such a comodity and MT wasnt good .. the customers should feel they really lost anything

again i believe marco used MT story as just an excuse to make this post ...

larrys5• 13 years ago

"there’s effectively no barrier to entry"

Made this point in another comment but want to stress the biggest barrier to entry is being able to provide customer support and handling the "rtfm" type calls. So it's a people problem. In the sense that you could start doing hosting as one individual but at a certain point you'd have to hire someone to take care of the support calls that a larger customer base (than one person can handle) would require.

bishopknight• 13 years ago

I've been with Media3 Webhosting since 1999 for all my clients ( mainly for Coldfusion Hosting ) and the great thing about them is I can get a live person within a minute to a few minutes, any time.

smacktoward• 13 years ago

As long as we're sharing hosting anecdotes/recommendations, I'll throw in my two cents: I've dealt with umpty gazillion hosting companies over the last 15+ years, and the only one that has consistently impressed me to the point where I recommend them to clients without any reservations is Rackspace. Both in their dedicated server offerings and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff. (Rackspace Cloud doesn't have as much bleeding-edge whiz-bang stuff as AWS, but they make up for it IMO with excellent tech support/customer service.)

They're generally more expensive than the competition, but you get what you pay for, you know? I'm sitting here trying to think of a time when Rackspace has ever let me down, and I can't. Being able to have that kind of confidence in your hosting environment is nice.

Marco is correct that shared hosting is a disaster area, so much so that Rackspace doesn't really compete there, so I'm always hesitant when people ask me to recommend a shared host. I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else.

elwell• 13 years ago

will upvote with reservations (don't want too many people there, but I think they have handled popularity rather well)

chris_mahan• 13 years ago

I have three instances at rackspace cloud, and all three have 100% uptime for 4+ years. Could not be happier. Of course, running debian stable might have some to do with that.

benmorris• 13 years ago

I share a similar opinion. I compare every host I deal with to Rackspace. I have dealt with them from early on 6+ years ago with their dedicated servers and mail. Their support is the real deal and if you need a managed service level I would not think twice about using them. That being said though if you are going unmanaged you're going to pay a lot more to use Rackspace than other companies.

gaoshan• 13 years ago

Rackspace is the best that our company has ever used. The expense is a factor, though, and many smaller sites aren't willing to bear that burden and that is where the likes of Media Temple comes in. They host most of the smaller sites we manage and I've been quite happy with them. That said, anytime I've had to deal with GoDaddy it has been a huge pain in the ass and I am not confident that this move is a good one for Media Temple's users.

cmod• 13 years ago

I've been a delighted Rackspace user for over a decade (!!) now. Recently switching from dedicated server to their cloud service.

They also have a startup program where they'll subsidize $1000 of hosting for six months: http://rackspacestartups.com/

wwweston2• 13 years ago

I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else.

It's notably worse than a number of other commodity experiences I've had.

Dreamhost aggressively oversells. They're hardly unique in this, but they admit and embrace it like nobody else I've seen.

Because of this, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to in order for everything to actually work. If you break the unwritten rules (even if you haven't broken the written ones), they will shut you down (sometimes without notice) and accept your cranky departure if you're unhappy about it.

Or maybe before then they'll have a severe service outage that causes you grief, make a funny blog post about it, and despite your amusement, you'll get the sense that something wasn't really addressed and leave.

If I had to recommend any shared hosting I've been on, it'd be Hurricane Electric. Over the decade I kept a small account there, my experience was the opposite of Dreamhost: they may have given less for the price, but they stood totally behind it (and a little further) and were always up.

stevewillows• 13 years ago

I've been with Dreamhost for quite a long time. Dreamhost is like a decent all-you-can-eat sushi bar. Not the best product, but it's worth the money you pay.

As you said though, their goofy attitude toward outages and such isn't good. I like the transparency of their status site, but when shit goes wrong I don't want a cat-meme reference.

ibelong2u• 13 years ago

With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc.

We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. As you would imagine, the server performance on any shared hosting depends on you and your neighbors adhering to them.

I'll agree with you, shutting down a customer without notice is not acceptable. Maybe if a customer is actively trying to scam the hosting provider by violating the terms... but I think even in that case, customer should be given a 24 hour eviction notice so that they have time to transition elsewhere.

hobbes• 13 years ago

Seconded. When Dreamhost works, it is excellent. When it fails, it fails really, really badly and the support is often shockingly inept.

Just two examples from my painful membership:

1. I transferred a domain back into Dreamhost. Due to a bug in their system, it was immediately dropped and entered the redemption period, and asked me for a large redemption fee. Support was wholly unable to acknowledge any problem on their part, and only resolved it when I posted the issue on Webhostingtalk.com

2. After requesting a refund onto my credit card after another hideous incident, rather than crediting my card, they debited it. Again, support were completely unable to acknowledge any problem on their part. Instead, when I asked the reason why my card was debited, they said I was charged for "services" - but were unable to itemise the services I had been charged for when challenged. They only refunded the money as "courtesy" rather than an acknowledgement on their part.

Dreadful.

If your storage requirements are small, I strongly recommend medialayer.com. For a budget option, I recommend asmallorange.com

wheels• 13 years ago

and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff

We've used Rackspace Cloud and Linode for several years and found Rackspace Cloud performance to be significantly worse than Linode for CPU and IO. Like, not even close. Prices are about the same. Support experiences are also similar (quick, competent responses from both sides).

The only reason we keep the Rackspace stuff around is because we want to have a relatively wide separation between our production webservices and our website / monitoring so that if one goes down that we can announce / detect that from a wholly separate network.

talkingquickly• 13 years ago

I'd second this. Particularly CPU performance on Rackspace has been hugely worse than Linode on comparatively sized instances. To the point I've had to use 8GB instances on Rackspace for CPU bound tasks which are fine on 1 or 2GB Linode instances.

We're currently considering a migration from Rackspace to Linode for this very reason so we'll temporarily be running a complete version of our infrastructure on both and replaying traffic on both.

Once we've done this I'll try and post some detailed benchmarks.

alexkearns• 13 years ago

I use both Rackspace and Linode. Both have been pretty good but Rackspace has been phenomenally reliable - I'm talking 100% uptime for the past couple of years (according to Pingdom) for my main service. Linode has been less reliable, though not bad by industry standards. I am planning to launch a new product next year. Will definitely be using Rackspace for it - that reliability is worth the extra expense and lower spec.

ohashi4• 13 years ago

Shared hosting is tricky. There are a million brands and lots of flavors of the week. The really small guys, some of them are probably great. It's really hard to tell though, they are 1-2 person operations that last for who knows how long. The scaling/growth problems causes a lot of pain for the owners/operators and customers. Scaling up takes a lot of skill, and then many of them get bought out by a bigger company. And then your service and experience change, especially if it was a couple person operation.

All those unscalable things they did for you to get and keep your business? They don't last forever.

So you decide to use a bigger company. And it's not the same, but it's generally more reliable. And some of those companies do a much better job than others. Some are actually pretty good. You like RackSpace, there are a few companies out there that people like as much if not more too. A few even compete in the shared hosting space.

I track most of these big companies and dreamhost is middle of the pack. Better than GoDaddy but below some other brands.

Take a look for yourself: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare

Maybe next time someone asks you about it, you can let them figure out what they need. No company is perfect, but some are definitely better liked by their customers than others.

shiftpgdn• 13 years ago

You ought to kick in a little disclaimer that you run Reviewsginal. :)

Terretta• 13 years ago

Rackspace instances, no issues.

Rackspace cloud sites, terribly unpredictable performance with frequently obscene (20s+) latency, then categoric denial of actual measured issues for months... followed by begrudging admission, a swap of networking hardware, and a respite for a few months... until it all starts again. This pattern is much too frequent in their forums. I suspect they assume the customer's code is always at fault, so won't really look into their network layers unless coerced. A real shame.

seldo• 13 years ago

I think Marco is overly dismissive of shared hosting; the web should be inclusive and easy to use, and for lots of people with uncomplicated hosting needs shared hosting is a fine choice. See also: Heroku, AWS, any other level of abstraction you care to pick. Many developers outgrow shared hosting, but that doesn't mean the category is intrinsically bad.

(My personal site has been on Site5 for over a decade; they have mostly been pretty good)

macspoofing• 13 years ago

I think Marco is overly dismissive of shared hosting

Is he? It sounds like he's deriding the hosting business (the providers, the prices, the way the customer is passed around, etc.), rather than the idea of shared hosting.

but that doesn't mean the category is intrinsically bad.

Again, the category isn't bad, all the major players in that category are crap.

davidandgoliath6• 13 years ago

Again, the category isn't bad, all the major players in that category are crap.

But, you could state the same thing about bigbox stores, and any large retail experience. You'll never get the boutique experience with an entity doing their best to squish profit out of volume.

All the 'major players' get a bad rap collectively but only because bad news spreads fast, and reputations get destroyed for random instances of bad news.

davidedicillo• 13 years ago

I remember in 2001 when it was almost a badge of honor to be hosted on (MT), especially if you were one of those website that got the free hosting in exchange of their logo on the page.

omegote• 13 years ago

I was going to write exactly this. It was so absurd... there were people who placed the logo on their footer without actually having any service from MT. This certainly marked my impression about MediaTemple, I've always considered them a snobbish, overpriced company.

Pretty much like Apple.

Trufa• 13 years ago

I would like to know what other people experiences are with regard to Hostgator. Honestly, I chose because I didn't know many other options at the time but I've never had any sort of trouble and their chat assistance is pretty awesome.

I would like to know if I'm actually just lucky or if other people have had this experience too.

joering2• 13 years ago

Confirmed from someone who has been them for 4 years now. The only reason I had to (sadly) switch was because I needed fully blown unix machine with SSH access, something that their offer was too pricey for me. But I had great time with HostGator. The nicest thing, other than their friendly knowledgeable tech support chat, was they many times they went off their ways to accommodate my needs like opening ports (sharing hosting), re-installing some mods, reconfiguring .ini files on the fly, etc.

tomca32• 13 years ago

That's exactly the thing I'm wondering about.

I'm using Hostgator for around 3-4 years now. Never had any problems with them and the support was always great.

gmazzotti• 13 years ago

I am they client since 5 years ago, and I always saying my partner (after chating or e-mailing their support) that "please do me remember to never change of hosting company". The host is very good but what is really wonderfull is their support (many times they even solve some coding errors I made, so my code works without problem)

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Definitely the best shared hosting I'm aware of. I've had personal sites on HostGator for years and always been happy.

workhere-io2• 13 years ago

I've had several accounts with them over the years, and I think they provide a lot of value for the money. Their website design is antiquated, but their hosting works.

shreyasubale• 13 years ago

Hostgator is awesome, Their support is pretty good. I have 4 VPS servers running there and never faced any problem. Their customer support is also awesome.

gingerlime• 13 years ago

Will not recommend Hostgator at the moment, even though I used to recommend them for years.

I was using HG for probably 7 years or so. But I believe they recently got acquired by EIG[1]. I'm not saying there's a connection, but I've experienced several incidents that made me change my mind.

At some point I was moved to new servers. The migration process was very sketchy. HG did not send notification emails about the migration on time, which meant once the migration took place, I had to try to figure out which DNS changes to make (were not provided), whilst the service was effectively down.

Afterwards they've had a rather major issue with their email servers, which got blacklisted as a result of a large amount of spam being sent from compromised Joomla apps[2]. This resulted in many forwarded emails to bounce and (my) customers being both aware of the forwarding (which wasn't always desirable for me), and that their emails bounced. The Hostgator response to this incident was painfully slow and they did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the effect on their customers.

I already had shared hosting services running with webfaction, so I moved most of it away to them. For more heavy-weight hosting, where I need more control, I use Linode and AWS.

[1]http://www.shoutmeloud.com/hostgator-sold-endurance-enduranc... [2]http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting-res...

jasonvorhe• 13 years ago

I am a proud user of Uberspace (see https://uberspace.de) - unfortunately they are based in Germany and therefore all of their amazing documentation is in german too. They have adopted a Dokuwiki-based documentation and their support on Twitter (@ubernauten) and via mail is kind, fast and amazingly personal. It's a real shame they have no plans to expand to an international market. They claim that the quality of their service and the documentation would suffer if they'd go the dual-language route so they'd rather not do so in order to keep their current quality.

Their datacenters are located in Frankfurt so the roundtrip to the US might come with a latency you'd want to avoid, but you should at least try them anyways. They will gladly offer their support in english, but consider that english isn't their native tongue. You can even send them GPG encrypted mail.

Uberspace is quite young (they started in the beginning of 2011 afaik) but they've only improved during all that time and there was no decline in their service quality after word got around that they are the go-to provider for german customers seeking shared webhosting. They offer anything from ruby/rails to python to nodejs, mongodb, postgresql - and even php in different versions from 5.3 to 5.5 including almost all revelant point releases. They only offer 10GB of storage which is not easily expandable but they place no limit on the amount of Uberspace-accounts you create, so if you are hosting different projects you can simply scale them to different accounts which might end up on different nodes. (which are never too overbooked that it might impact the performance - and if it does, they'll upgrade the hardware to fix that!)

You decide what you want to pay! They want at least 1EUR per month but you can adjust your price to anything you want and you can even change your prices on a monthly basis. They say that they want all people to be able to state their opinion on the internet and that's why they're hoping that people with a bigger budget chose to set their price to their recommendation of 5-10EUR per month. But they will never beg you to pay more if you stay with 1EUR and your service won't suffer either. (I have several accounts and a 2 of them have the default price and I got amazingly fast help via mail despite only paying 1EUR for these accounts)

You don't need to give them any personal data if you simply want to create an account (all you need is <8 letter username and a password or OpenID). They will give you a fully usable Linux-account on one of several dozen CentOS-powered servers in return and you can even run your own services (via djb's daemontools) or ask them to open up a higher (>61000) port for you if you want to host a xmpp-server or something. You can't get unencrypted (as in non-TLS) IMAP/POP3/SMTP and they don't offer FTP because of its bad security. Instead you'll work via a fully capable SSH-connection and have SCP/SFTP-access to transfer files. Their webinterface is simpyl called "dashboard" and offers only the most basic stuff like creating virtual mailaccounts and password and SSH key-management. They're giving you your own IPv6-address and their servers have been dual-stack from the beginning. You can also create your own SSL-certificate for your own domain (which you don't even need to register/transfer at Uberspace, just add the domain to your account and setup your DNS and you're done.

If you're up to the challenge and have lots of experience as a Linux-systemsadministrator, start your own Uberspace-service outside of Germany and you'll get rich within a year if you can offer their commitment and service.

I'll never ever go back to lame hosting providers where I'll have to fiddle with crude and slow webinterfaces. At least for me the roundtrip to Sweden is acceptable and their documentation is understandable when translated to english by Google.

On the topic of Marco's claims regarding hosting providers I can simply state from my experience that Uberspace seems behave diametral to his expectations so far.

(I am not being paid for this and I'm also not affiliated with Uberspace other than being a happy customer.)

dctoedt• 13 years ago

I've been happy with server289.com for my personal site for several years now. The one time I had an issue (which turned out to be pilot error on my part) they were quite responsive and very helpful.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

And before it was Ev1Servers, what is now IBM, was RackShack. So, it was RackShack, ev1, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, IBM. We started as a dedicated customer with RackShack, then on to a managed customer on ThePlanet. FWIW, we are on the same dedicated rack as when with ThePlanet, though SoftLayer tried to sell us on their "pod" solution (i.e. VPS).

So, we are overpaying for our current hardware, but haven't had the stomach for another migration. Contrary to what the article states, small companies with already limited resources don't want to spend time moving a moderately complex infrastructure around, on top of the considerable work already on the table.

But, yeah, GoDaddy engages in questionable practices. Automatically adding stuff to your cart (and/or making it confusingly easy for you to do so), bumping renewals to 5 years by default, and otherwise making their UI "consistently inconsistent" in ways that miraculously always seem to benefit them are part of the equation. To be pushy with upsells is one thing, but they take it a step further.

These are kind of ingrained business practices and part of the same ethos that says selling IT services with sex is OK. It is hard to imagine them acquiring a company without that company getting at least a little of that stink on them.

Osiris• 13 years ago

GoDaddy is revamping and changing a lot of those billing practices. With new management, there is a push to simplify even at the cost of conversions with the hope that a better reputation will push further customer growth.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

That's promising. If you are willing to watch out for their gotchas, you can manage. And, they make some things super simple and relatively affordable (e.g. SSL certs). Having accumulated a good number of domains there over the years, I haven't wanted to switch.

So, that shadier/confusing stuff is unnecessary. They have a chance to be a really good company. Glad to hear they are working on it.

SubMachinePun• 13 years ago

I work next to Media Temple in Culver City, and FWIW, those MT employees in their new GoDaddy hoodies partying with their taco truck seemed pretty happy this afternoon with their new SOPA-backing overlords. I'm not sure if the reaction is supposed to imply something positive that I'm just overlooking.

arikrak• 13 years ago

What's interesting about standard shared web hosting (mainly used by small PHP-based sites) is how most of them are secretly owned by one company: EIG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group

Many people spend time comparing the different services, but in truth they're all the same!

Also, you get much better specs with the free tier of OpenShift, but I guess that will change once enough people switch to it (just like AppFog changed their free tier).

workhere-io2• 13 years ago

Many people spend time comparing the different services, but in truth they're all the same!

The fact that many of them have the same parent company doesn't mean that their servers, features, support, uptime, etc. are the same. So they're no more the same than Facebook and Instagram are the same social network just because they have the same owner.

mprovost• 13 years ago

EIG's business model is to buy up smaller hosting companies pretty much just for the customer base and then migrate them all onto the same shared infrastructure. They keep the front end sites operating the same but it's all the same on the back end. They've done it so many times that they've gotten quite good at the migrations, and then whatever random hardware the original company was using is discarded. Usually noone from the company being taken over ends up working for them, support is sent to their offshore call centres (who actually do a decent job). Most web hosting companies are fairly small operations and usually have a single owner or maybe a few partners who are just bought out and the employees are all let go.

They're able to maintain the appearance of having a bunch of competing companies and you can shop around for the best deal, which they will change around periodically, but it's always the same thing underneath.

Source: Worked for two webhosts acquired by EIG.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

Is it me or is there a place in the market for higher quality, less commodity type hosting services. Right now things are segmented by type of hosting in very technical ways, but we're now seeing more value added hosting for things like rails (heroku), wordpress (wp engine), etc.

I think people will always pay for service, quality, and experience. Whoever can deliver that consistently will make money in hosting.

justincormack• 13 years ago

Video hosting is a good niche too.

naiyt2• 13 years ago

I worked in webhosting for about two years, and can attest to the fact that it's a horrible world. We were pretty good at our jobs, but the company was experiencing some really nasty growing pains, and the product was pretty bad as a result.

One of the big pains in the webhosting world is maintaining legacy systems...we had about 15,000 clients on ancient servers running RHEL4, under a proprietary VPS platform. (And as far as I know, a big chunk of them are still there.) Needless to say, this resulted in a really crappy service for the clients on those servers, and there never seemed to be a big push to get everybody migrated off of them and onto our newer servers running cPanel. We were working towards it, but it was a big endeavor that would leave a lot of clients extremely upset when things invariably went awry. So rather then putting some good development time towards automating the process as much as possible and hiring more support for those accounts that didn't migrate properly, the problem just sat there for years.

porker3• 13 years ago

I feel your pain for legacy systems. Mine is just one shared hosting server for clients I've had for years - clients whose sites still require PHP 5.2 and break if it's upgraded.

Short of ditching them I haven't figured out what to do. I'd hate to be a shared hosting company where thousands of sites break when the server software is upgraded (not to mention Wordpress installs getting hacked every day...)

naiyt2• 13 years ago

We had a non-neglible number or clients still running on PHP 4. =( It's a dilemma indeed, because upgrading all of the servers and software is bound to break a huge portion of the websites, many of which have been loyal clients for years. (But don't have the dev experience to fix things.) Not upgrading things leads to degrading service, and upgrading things leaves a lot of clients with broken websites.

Also: hacked WordPress sites. The bane of my existence. I must've dealt with several hundred of them in my time.

wyck• 13 years ago

I always considered MT to be a marketing company so this seems to be a perfect fit. I mean that literally because I always joke that they are the designer jeans of hosting.

nsoonhui• 13 years ago

I subscribed to a tmdhosting VPS package, and the IO throughput was simply horrible. I collected the IO statistics, and I emailed the support team and asked it to move me to another hardware node which was less overloaded.

The support person refused to do so, but instead, asked me to subscribe to a dedicated server. I explained that I didn't need a dedicated server, as it was clear from my statistic that all faults were on their IO throughput side. He just won't listen and still insisted on up-selling me a dedicated server.

What a horrible experience! Anyone encountered the same thing as I do? Is IO throughput a PITA for your hosting experience?

mgkimsal3• 13 years ago

perhaps that was their (poor) way of saying that all the non-dedicated platforms would be just as bad, and dedicated was the only way to get you the IO you wanted?

quocble• 13 years ago

Oh for the love of god. MT was one decent hosting company, now bought out by the people shits all over themselves and their customers.

NKCSS• 13 years ago

Hmm, the recommendations at the end of the article still seem pretty pricey to me. I'm personally a fan of LeaseWeb; been renting servers with them for 5 years now and still very happy, at a good price (~€100 for 100MBit unmetered, quadcore xenon x3440, 16GB ram, 2x2TB HDD and ESXi 5.1)

noir_lord• 13 years ago

If I need to host multiple simple sites they go onto one of my linode instances that is set up for multiple sites.

If I need to host a more complex or demanding web application it goes onto a dedicated linode (or may share one).

Dedicated servers that are reliable are very very expensive (Hetzner in my direct experience is nowhere near reliable) where with linode across 3-8 linodes at various times I've had no down time in coming up for 5 years.

Fantastic support, they don't oversell their machines.

Sure if I shop around I can get a similar spec (whether it delivers who knows) for half the price but is it really worth saving 20 bucks if I don't sleep at night worrying about my vps provider going down.

I also like DO, I still won't host anything important with them but for a quick dev/test box they are pretty good.

I've never really gotten why the VPS market is quite so price conscious the difference between 5 a month and 20 a month is so meaningless in the grand scheme of things (I suspect I spend a lot more than 15 a month on coffee on the way to work).

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

I think a lot of VPS hosting is for personal projects or very small business.

mbesto• 13 years ago

My experience is the following: not everyone has the same consistent experience with every host, but some are definitely better than others.

That being said, the companies I've had good experiences with, have heard others, and will continue to use/pay are: AWS, Linode, DigitalOcean, and Webfaction (webfaction is amazing for a small cheap shared hosting environment). Other ones that cross my mind are OVH and Hetzner.

k1m• 13 years ago

For shared hosting I've had a great experience with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net

davidw• 13 years ago

http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons - this seems somewhat relevant: "Web Hosting - A Market for Lemons".

I'm not sure I got it 100% right, but I think there are some valid points.

kephra• 13 years ago

The most important advise is: Unbundle domain contract and hosting contract. Do not eat the bait of the free domain!

About softlayer: Its possible to bargain with them. We have E-2620 servers there, official starting price at $879, and we pay $299/month including more RAM and a small network. So they had been willing to undercut co-location calculation if you ask them. I dont know if this is still possible after IBM. I guess their sales team now knows better how to barter with big customers.

ebbv• 13 years ago

I work in the web hosting industry and this is a pretty good analysis, and fairly accurate.

I would say that usually the hosts that are trying the hardest are the smaller ones that are not "household names" yet. Once they break out and start growing really fast, that's when the people who made it happen tend to check out and let things fall apart.

kyoji• 13 years ago

I really feel the need to plug Nearly Free Speech, my host of choice:

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

Definitely not aimed at large(r) sites, but for my static sites and a few WP installations it works fantastically. The control panel takes some getting used to, but the "pay for what you use" business model more than makes up for the rough edges. Its all À la carte and I love it, I've been a customer for 5 years with no problems.

thrillgore• 13 years ago

Media Temple had to know during the talks that any acquisition would cost them dearly.

newsreader• 13 years ago

I'm definitely in the minority here but I just don't see how "GoDaddy is a horrible company run by horrible people selling horrible products." I dealt with GoDaddy in the past and have an active account with them. I think that their prices are reasonable and their customer service is good enough – at least for me. I do find that navigating through their website is a pain and definitely not designed for a non-technical person, but that alone doesn’t make it horrible.

PauloManrique• 13 years ago

Am I the only one that never had problems with GoDaddy?

kevinwalzer• 13 years ago

Don't pay for hosting. Run your own box on a static IP. I've done it for a decade for the 12+ sites my business operates for its various brands. The traffic is fairly light, sites are mostly static, but the cost savings add up.

SaulOfTheJungle• 13 years ago

My geek side really wants to run my own box but as I am currently paying $50 a year to host 4 websites, it's difficult to justify the electricity bill plus the cost of a static IP.

lsc• 13 years ago

I think it's interesting how shared hosting has such a terrible reputation.

Really, it's sad, because it's pushing a lot of folks who really shouldn't be running their own servers into the VPS market.

Thats the thing, though; VPSs, generally speaking, have much harder limits. It's harder for that one user to make the server suck for everyone. I mean, it's not as good as a dedicated server, but it's a big step up from the isolation available in shared hosting.

Now that the market price for VPSs has fallen almost to the shared hosting level, I wonder if services that implement a shared-hosting like environment within managed VPSs will take off? Something where the user doesn't have root, where it's managed by the hosting company (presumably automatically) but where there is only one user per virtual.

There are PAAS providers that operate that way, sure, that will let you run languages better than PHP... but there doesn't seem to be an ecosystem of PAAS providers that are all compatible, like there is with php shared hosting.

What interests me about this sort of "PHP as a service" is that unsophisticated users are used to dealing with shared hosting. They understand the limitations. And they want the resource isolation of a VPS solution, even if they are unable or unwilling to put in the sysadmin work required.

GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting

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