

Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry - jadence
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/04/web-hostings-dirty-laundry/

======
mpk
I do a little web hosting on the side. Only for friends or companies that are
run by friends, though. Depending on what they want I charge somewhere between
10 and 40 euros a year. If you don't know the dollar/euro exchange rate, just
assume it's 1:1 for now.

I've also built several web-hosting (static HTML and PHP/MySQL) systems for
ISPs (years ago) along with the management and backup solutions to go with
them.

I make a small loss doing the hosting I do for friends, but that doesn't
bother me.

I over the years I've often been asked by the people buying my services why I
am more expensive than a lot of advertised hosting services.

Ha! More expensive, now there's a joke. The key word is 'advertised'. I
basically re-sell capacity below cost and re-sell domain registration at cost
plus one euro a year for administrative overhead (read : the cost of sending a
yearly invoice through snail-mail).

My hosting services are 'expensive' because this is what the actual cost is.

If I'm running this at a loss in my spare time on a good-will basis, why are
there parties out there with full-time staff charging _less_ for
(superficially) identical services?

Well, let's see..

Registering a domain with a random party is generally a bad idea. For example,
some hosting companies put themselves in the registrant information (as
owner). In other words, the domain doesn't belong to you and you do not have
control over it. Not something a non-techie will know or understand (unless
you explain it to them).

The price for registering a domain is generally lower when you go with a big
hoster, because these organizations have bulk registration deals, which lowers
the price they have to pay to register an individual domain. Buy 1 domain at
10 euros, buy 1000 at 1000.

Some hosters also play bandwidth games. Ooops, you got linked from a major
site and that's caused a spike - which is why your site is now shut down.
Please wait 24 hours or upgrade to 'premium'.

Pay extra for email. Oh yeah, this is a popular one. Besides not having proper
forwarding facilities (or a POP or IMAP server - forward to one address only),
many providers will store any email on their own systems and charge for it.
Bonus points for "adding email addresses to your domain", which will cost more
(of course).

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pg
This is true. Fake review sites are one of the top categories of spam here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12>

(You have to turn on showdead in your profile to see spam.)

~~~
axod
I may be the only one, but I'd rather the link was left as clickable, even if
the item has been deaded.

Otherwise there seems no way to find what the original url was.

I think the items deaded are pretty much spot on, but sometimes I'd like to be
able to see what the fuss was about, or points raised in discussions.

~~~
petercooper
Agreed. Dead worries me and I'm very happy I turned showdead on - not because
spam shouldn't be deaded, but because I've seen plenty of legitimate comments
"deaded" on threads..

~~~
pg
The reason you see dead comments is not because they've been individually
killed, but because they were posted by banned users. Often it's obvious from
the comments why they were banned, but there are some who oscillate between
reasonable and trolling.

~~~
petercooper
That's useful to know - thanks! It's a shame that good comments die with the
user, though, although I expect few users with consistently good comments are
banned anyway.

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davidw
Hosting is a 'market for lemons':

<http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html>

Interestingly, one of the ways to get around information asymmetry problems is
testing, certification, and, yes, reviews. But if the review sites are
corrupt, that kind of brings you back to square one.

~~~
dasil003
Not only that, but even if the reviews are honest, the reviewers may not be
reasonable at all. For instance, there was a rash of complaints about
Dreamhost a few years back because of cutting people off for too much CPU
usage. This is usually from people running PhpBB and WordPress with a zillion
poorly-written modules, who were too cheap to pay for a VPS or something more
appropriate to their traffic levels.

A lot of them moved to places like Site5 where they tended not to cut off
customers. Sounds great if you're one of these guys using all the resources,
but it sucks for the other 50 people on the shared box. I experienced this
firsthand where Site5 would sometimes become tremendously slow for no apparent
reason, and the support staff would always just say they were "looking into
it", but would never come up with a solution after months and months.
Meanwhile on Dreamhost, things might not always be as fast as my Xen VPS, but
neither would I log in and see a load of 10+. Plus they responded
professionally and dealt with serious technical issues with refreshing candor.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
> _Meanwhile on Dreamhost, things might not always be as fast as my Xen VPS,
> but neither would I log in and see a load of 10+._

Funny; I don't think I ever logged into my DreamHost account and saw a load
any lower than 14-16 on a good day...

~~~
dasil003
Ask them to move you to a different server:

12:24:03 up 80 days, 11:29, 5 users, load average: 2.58, 2.16, 2.35

Which is a little on the high end of what I usually see. More importantly,
when there has been a problem they've identified it and dealt with it.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I did, multiple times, and they refused, even when I told them I would leave
because of that...

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sutro
So right now the old I-hate-Java-frameworks post from 2005 and this one from
2006 are both front page "news." Has the internet finally run out of actual
news? Perhaps it is a dump truck, after all, as opposed to a series of tubes.

~~~
jadence
I posted this as I was reminded of it when I read through the comments here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432299>

Thought it was an excellent blog post and still relevant today and so I posted
it after a quick search revealed that it hadn't been posted yet here.

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Caged
I did the crappy logo for the #1 hosting company on that site when I was a
young Padawan. Think I'm going to go take a shower now.

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Hoff
Payola and affiliate programs and such are not particular news.

Industry analysts and consulting houses can have similar profit motives for
their recommendations and implementations over the years, too.

There was a bogus application that showed how shady some of the software award
sites can be, too: [http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-
awards...](http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/)

Even grocery and department stores can have financial considerations around
product placement and the location and quantity of shelf space for a product
that is made available within the store.

When in doubt (and when you can), always follow the money.

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johns
Sounds like a market opportunity. No-BS Hosting Reviews. Affiliate free.
Require proof of being a customer (placing an HTML file on their server) to
reduce gaming. Sell ads, but make a clear distinction between reviews and ads.

~~~
prospero
That would require that your users have an implicit distrust of hosting
reviews, which they almost certainly don't.

~~~
johns
If you google for hosting reviews, and find one that says "No-BS", contrasted
against the others, it may stand out. You'd have to develop a reputation for
being reliable, like any other site.

~~~
sokoloff
When the fake review sites see one that says "No-BS", exactly how long until
10 of them say "No-BS"?

~~~
johns
That's a good point. Good branding and good execution could overcome that.
There are a lot of successful sites out there that position themselves as the
no-crap version of crappy sites that do very well.

------
tokenadult
I have my own problems with Dreamhost, which I think hurts my business
sometimes.

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petercooper
They're right, but I doubt this post will have much effect. It's a profitable
game and of the thousands of people who click through to that hosting review
site, very few are already Dreamhost customers, have read Dreamhost's blog,
or, heck, probably even know what a "blog" is.

All those horrendous price comparison sites, catalog sites, and other junk
sites are still out there and still thriving just because consumers are pretty
ignorant when it comes to online research. These sites won't be going away any
time soon, alas.

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Jasber
I'm actually launching a hosting review site right now (tonight) so it's
interesting this came up. I've found this is very much the case across all
hosting review sites.

I decided to shift focus towards working with hosts (any host) that want to be
included in the directory, whether they had an affiliate program or not.

Of course if a host happens to have an affiliate program, I see no reason to
not use it as long as your transparent with your users.

Plus it keeps the site free of regular banner advertising.

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tlrobinson
Wow, they aren't even shy about it: all of the advertisers on their front page
(except adsense) are also in the top 10 list. Shouldn't that be a conflict of
interest?

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almost
But they just seem so trustworthy!

Maybe there's a market for a hosting reviews site run by some company or some
person with a good existing reputation.

Same goes for domain registrations, DNS providers etc.

~~~
corentin
Maybe we just need hosting review website review websites.

~~~
almost
Brilliant! All we need to do now is set up a hosting review website review
website review website and we'll be all set!:p

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tontoa4
A web hosting review site sounds like an opportunity to make money. But like
all profitable ideas, the competition reaches a critical mass and the
inefficient die.

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jcapote
I knew it.

