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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
[+] [-] smacktoward|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wwweston|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wheels|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ohashi|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gaoshan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benmorris|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmod|12 years ago|reply
They also have a startup program where they'll subsidize $1000 of hosting for six months: http://rackspacestartups.com/
[+] [-] Terretta|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elwell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bobfunk|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scrabble|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cylinder|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelandbatey|12 years ago|reply
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:
[+] [-] ssafejava|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://reviewsignal.com (reviews scraped from social media / public support requests) [2] http://serverbear.com/ (VPS/Cloud host benchmarks & stats)
[+] [-] arkitaip|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjbrunet|12 years ago|reply
Funny, my first real host (he.net) is still in business. Maybe it's true you get what you pay for ;-)
[+] [-] naiyt|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seldo|12 years ago|reply
(My personal site has been on Site5 for over a decade; they have mostly been pretty good)
[+] [-] macspoofing|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coderdude|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
Godaddy could shit rainbows all day long and I still wouldn't want to give them any money.
[+] [-] nknighthb|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Steveism|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalSea|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SteveGerencser|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sterlingross|12 years ago|reply
You were smart to get out. I haven't yet.
[+] [-] wonderyak|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slig|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damon_c|12 years ago|reply
Am I wrong to have walked away immediately?
[+] [-] jfb|12 years ago|reply
I've heard goodish things about Dreamhost, as well.
[+] [-] arikrak|12 years ago|reply
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-io|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidedicillo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omegote|12 years ago|reply
Pretty much like Apple.
[+] [-] kyoji|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lsc|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mbesto|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noir_lord|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kephra|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SubMachinePun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|12 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I got it 100% right, but I think there are some valid points.