
GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting - mh_
http://www.marco.org/2013/10/15/godaddy-mt
======
smacktoward
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.

~~~
wwweston
> 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.

~~~
ibelong2u
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.

~~~
wwweston
> We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical
> websites.

If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be
honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can
rely on.

DreamHost is not one of those businesses.

> There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to
> unlimited hosting plans.

Something something the road to hell something...

------
larrys
"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.

~~~
bobfunk
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](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.

~~~
thwarted
_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.

~~~
davidandgoliath
I don't know if I'd go out of my way to blame their horrible panel on upsell
attempts, or confusion. I think they honestly hide most advanced features away
because they don't want to invite an extra 50,000 phonecalls a day.

The less trouble a user can cause, the better -- particularly at that scale.
For more advanced users it merely invites frustration, however.

~~~
thwarted
You may be right... I'm not willing to login to godaddy right now (have to dig
up credentials), but their marketing materials on the unloggedin site are
_much_ improved over how I remember (six or eight months ago?). The services
are differentiated better and the value-adds for each service are actually
related to that service (rather than the aggressive cross-pollination of
service offerings).

------
cylinder
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.

~~~
iwasakabukiman
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.

~~~
larrys
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).

------
lelandbatey
_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

~~~
prawn
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.

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

~~~
ryantownsend
If you happen to be doing Rails development, it may be worth checking out
Ninefold: [http://ninefold.com/pricing](http://ninefold.com/pricing) [no
affiliation of mine]

~~~
axx
If you don't mind renting a server in germany, checkout Railscloud
([https://railscloud.de/](https://railscloud.de/))

~~~
dwd
Germany has good value but there are a number of issues with hosting overseas.
Latency is one - in Australia one of the cheapest hosting companies is based
in Perth but the latency is double that of Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane.

The other consideration is the legals. Moving the server to Germany not only
puts your data under EU/German jurisdiction in addition to AU, the new privacy
laws to take effect next year will mean disclosing to your clients and they to
their clients that personal data is stored outside of Australia.

------
naiyt
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.

~~~
porker
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...)

~~~
naiyt
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.

------
seldo
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
>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.

~~~
davidandgoliath
>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.

------
unclebucknasty
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
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.

~~~
unclebucknasty
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.

------
coderdude
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.

~~~
moocowduckquack
The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. -
[http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/04/6057...](http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/04/60573762.jpg) \- 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.

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

Fsck him and his company.

~~~
fmdragon
Look into it a bit deeper. That was an elephant that terrorized a village in
Africa. It was sanctioned to be put down, no different than a rabid dog.

~~~
moocowduckquack
He is very very rich, if he had particularly cared about protecting the fields
rather than shooting elephants perhaps he would have paid for the installation
and upkeep of a fence.

His own comment on the affair was "These people have literally nothing and
when an elephant is killed it's a big event for them, they are going to be
able to eat some protein." Now personally I supect that there are better ways
for Bob to go and increase the protein in these people's diets, other than
shooting elephants.

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

------
SteveGerencser
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.

~~~
sterlingross
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
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...](http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-will-
you-start-the-fans-please)), have launched our own IaaS product
([http://bigv.io](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.

~~~
ericabiz
As someone who also ran a hosting company (2001-2007, when I sold it--the
acquiring company is still in business and doing fine today), there are some
people who are building hosting companies for the long term, and many others
who will sell given the right $ amount and timing.

Some of the best hosting companies I've been with were run by "lifers" (which
is what you sound like to me, too.) You've got a good team, a system, and
you're profitable and growing your customer base. You're enjoying yourself, so
there's no point in selling.

There are many others for whom the support gets to be too much, or they
haven't charged enough to make a profit--in my case, it was both. If you can't
make a profit, you can't put the systems in place you need to run a great
business, so you kill yourself getting up at 3AM when a customer texts your
"emergency support" line. Eventually, you burn out, sell it and move on.

Unfortunately, with hosting being as price-sensitive as it is (I like the
comparison to airlines someone else made in this thread), there will always be
companies that start up, have an owner that runs him/herself into the ground,
and sell.

You "lifers" are in many ways smarter than the rest of us. I applaud you for
not giving up and not giving in to the price war. Here's hoping other hosting
company owners will read these comments and realize there is an alternative to
full burnout mode.

~~~
davidandgoliath
Congrats again Erica! :)

------
wonderyak
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.

~~~
driverdan
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.

~~~
wonderyak
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.

~~~
mgkimsal
1996 was my first shared hosting. 96-97 was OK, but I had a project for a
client that got shut down after a few days. It was a small ecommerce project,
and we got shut down for 'resource abuse' \- CPU was spiking and network was
going crazy. Had a week of back and forth emails and I think phone with their
'support.

They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries
("those are inefficient" they kept arguing). After a week we were reinstated -
turns out there was someone else running spambot on another hosting account on
the same server. But... we were "ecommerce" so obviously must have been the
root cause of a spiked CPU. I vowed at that point to not use shared hosting
again, and haven't since 1998.

It's been nicer with cheap VPSs over the last few years - easier to get
clients set up with their 'own' servers. I know that VPSs are shared as well,
and I've seen issues where one VPS abused resources to the point where it
affected mine, but that's been pretty rare (2x in the past 5 years I can think
of), and it's always easier for people to track down, isolate and resolve.

Also, it was one anecdote point, and was 15 years ago, and was just 'bad
service' but life is too short to try to be putting projects as risk to save a
few bucks. Projects/sites generally have enough troubles - dealing with shared
hosting is just one more thing that can go wrong, imo.

~~~
wonderyak
Sounds like you've been using VPSs for a while. Do you have an opinion on the
virtualization tech used for various hosts (xen, virtuozzo, etc).

~~~
mgkimsal
Sorry for the late reply. Actually I've been running leased bare metal servers
for most of the time. In the last couple years I've had some clients and
projects on linode and digital ocean, but still have bare metal servers for
most other stuff.

I haven't knowingly used virtuozzo for anything so I can't say. Most VPS I've
had have been xen-based, but the hardware behind it seems to make more of a
difference. I've got two virtualized xen projects right now, and same code on
seemingly same virtualized hardware specs still yield pretty different results
on some tests.

------
arikrak
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](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
_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
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.

------
davidedicillo
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
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.

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

[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](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
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.

------
mbesto
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.

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

------
kephra
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.

------
SubMachinePun
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.

------
davidw
[http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons](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.

------
jacques_chester
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.

------
nsoonhui
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?

~~~
mgkimsal
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?

------
newsreader
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.

------
larrys
"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.

------
k1m
For shared hosting I've had a great experience with
[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)

------
programminggeek
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
Video hosting is a good niche too.

------
ebbv
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.

------
Trufa
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.

~~~
gingerlime
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...](http://www.shoutmeloud.com/hostgator-sold-endurance-endurance-
group.html) [2][http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting-
res...](http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting-results-in-
undeliverable-email/)

------
NKCSS
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)

------
systems
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 ...

------
kevinwalzer
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
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.

------
dctoedt
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.

------
bishopknight
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.

------
wyck
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.

------
kbar13
well, it was a good run, MT.

I wonder how many of their employees will leave MT

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

------
quocble
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.

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

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

------
jasonvorhe
I am a proud user of Uberspace (see
[https://uberspace.de](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.)

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

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

~~~
kbar13
you should probably prepare for the worst.

