5 ms·

This race to the bottom has reached a point that it's harming customers. It's okay to be more expensive than the competition if you provide a better service.

jsjohnst 7y ago
Imho, that point was reached in hosting over 15 years ago (which is why I sold the hosting company I had back then). We’ve seen some short lived upticks periodically since then, but they all end up going back to shit as they tried to scale.
walrus01 7y ago
Personal opinion, it's really important in the ISP/hosting world to identify what market categories are a race to the bottom, and if at all possible, refuse to participate in them. I look at companies selling $5 to $15/month VPS services and try to figure out how many customers they need to be set up for monthly recurring services, in order to pay for reasonably reliable and redundant infrastructure, and the math just doesn't pencil out without: a) massive oversubscription b) near full automation of support, neglect of actual customer issues, callous indifference caused by overworked first tier support Conversely, as a customer, you should be suspicious when some company is offering a ridiculous amount of RAM, disk space and "unlimited 1000 Mbps!" at a cheap price. You should expect that there will be basically no support, it might have two nines of uptime, you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups, etc. If you use such a service for anything that you would consider "production", you need to design your entire configuration of the OS and daemons/software on the VM with one thing in mind: The VM might disappear completely at any time, arbitrarily, and not come back, and any efforts to resolve a situation through customer support will be futile.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  There is the same risk of being kicked off when using Amazon AWS. The rules are different, but there will be situations where you lose everything (imagine you become visible for a political reason and the landscape shifts a bit).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yks 7y ago
  Unfortunately there is no guarantee that I receive any better support at the more expensive provider though
  - walrus01 7y ago
    At a certain price point, yes there is, if you're paying $800/month for hosting services to a mid sized regional ISP with presence at major IX points. That ISP cares about its reputation, and cares about the revenue it's getting from you. I can tell you that as a person whose job title includes "network engineer", we have a number of customers who have critical server/VM functions similar to these people who had the DigitalOcean disaster. If something goes wrong, an actual live human being with at least a moderate degree of linux+neteng clue is going to take a look at their ticket, personally address it, and go through our escalation path if needed.
    - nikanj 7y ago
      Having paid substantial amounts for various services over the years, paying hundreds of dollars per month doesn't automatically make you into a priority. There seems to be a sweet spot for company size here. Too small companies can't support you even though they really want to. Large companies are busy chasing millions in big contracts, and don't really care about your $800 per month at all.
      - walrus01 7y ago
        Very good points. What I would recommend is to use a mid sized ISP in your local area where you can meet with people in person. At higher dollar figures there should be some sales person and network engineer you can meet in their local office, meet for coffee, discuss your requirements, and have something of a real business relationship with. You and your company should be personally known to them. If you are just some semi anonymous faceless person ordering services off a credit card payment form on a website, all bets are off...
- lelanthran 7y ago
  "you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups" That's going to be true no matter which cloud provider you choose. Their ToS almost certainly include terms which allow them to kick you off and refund any monies for any reason whatsoever. Good luck if you bought into their entire ecosystem and can't move elsewhere on a whim.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    That's going to be true no matter which cloud provider you choose My company provides services to fortune 100 companies, and we host literally petabytes of data on their behalf in Amazon S3, but we don't have offsite backups. We (and they) rely on Amazon's durability promise. We do offer the option of replicating their data to another cloud provider, but few customers use that service -- few companies want to pay over twice the cost of storage for a backup they should never need to use when the provider promises 99.999999999% durability.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      For AWS it doesn't make a lot of sense to protect against AWS itself losing data since you're paying them a premium for that. Backups in this model would be logically separated so a user/programmer error can't wipe out the only copy of your production dataset.
    - zhte415 7y ago
      I don't know the data you're holding. If it is sensitive data, like customer anything, would it infact make sense not to have offsite backup? Reasoning: Your contract with Amazon promises durability and I'm sure there's a service level agreement with penalty/liability clauses. By implementing a redundant backup, you're replicating something that you don't legally need to have, double-or-more due diligence on the offsite backup security/credentials, and in case of a failure of Amazon create a grey area with clients "Do you have the data, or do you not?" In short, there could be a very good business reason not to do offsite backups.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
- Blackthorn 7y ago
  Ten years ago, I had a pretty reasonable $10/mo account, that I eventually moved to a $20/mo account because I needed more resources to keep up with traffic. I'd expect that, as more transistors have been packed blah blah blah, that such a $10/mo account would have gotten better, not worse, since then.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    Support and staffing costs are not subject to Moore's law.
    - cwyers 7y ago
      Neither is bandwidth.
      - walrus01 7y ago
        bandwidth does drop in price, and increase in capacity, at a fairly rapid rate. Look at what an ISP might pay for a 10GbE IP transit circuit in 2008 vs what you can get a 100GbE circuit for today. But peoples' bandwidth needs and traffic also grow rapidly.
  - davidgerard 7y ago
    > I'd expect that, as more transistors have been packed blah blah blah, that such a $10/mo account would have gotten better, not worse, since then. This is what Linode do - they keep you on the same payment level, but raise what you get for it.

jsjohnst 7y ago

Imho, that point was reached in hosting over 15 years ago (which is why I sold the hosting company I had back then). We’ve seen some short lived upticks periodically since then, but they all end up going back to shit as they tried to scale.

walrus01 7y ago

Personal opinion, it's really important in the ISP/hosting world to identify what market categories are a race to the bottom, and if at all possible, refuse to participate in them. I look at companies selling $5 to $15/month VPS services and try to figure out how many customers they need to be set up for monthly recurring services, in order to pay for reasonably reliable and redundant infrastructure, and the math just doesn't pencil out without: a) massive oversubscription b) near full automation of support, neglect of actual customer issues, callous indifference caused by overworked first tier support Conversely, as a customer, you should be suspicious when some company is offering a ridiculous amount of RAM, disk space and "unlimited 1000 Mbps!" at a cheap price. You should expect that there will be basically no support, it might have two nines of uptime, you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups, etc. If you use such a service for anything that you would consider "production", you need to design your entire configuration of the OS and daemons/software on the VM with one thing in mind: The VM might disappear completely at any time, arbitrarily, and not come back, and any efforts to resolve a situation through customer support will be futile.

alexis_fr 7y ago
There is the same risk of being kicked off when using Amazon AWS. The rules are different, but there will be situations where you lose everything (imagine you become visible for a political reason and the landscape shifts a bit).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
yks 7y ago
Unfortunately there is no guarantee that I receive any better support at the more expensive provider though
- walrus01 7y ago
  At a certain price point, yes there is, if you're paying $800/month for hosting services to a mid sized regional ISP with presence at major IX points. That ISP cares about its reputation, and cares about the revenue it's getting from you. I can tell you that as a person whose job title includes "network engineer", we have a number of customers who have critical server/VM functions similar to these people who had the DigitalOcean disaster. If something goes wrong, an actual live human being with at least a moderate degree of linux+neteng clue is going to take a look at their ticket, personally address it, and go through our escalation path if needed.
  - nikanj 7y ago
    Having paid substantial amounts for various services over the years, paying hundreds of dollars per month doesn't automatically make you into a priority. There seems to be a sweet spot for company size here. Too small companies can't support you even though they really want to. Large companies are busy chasing millions in big contracts, and don't really care about your $800 per month at all.
    - walrus01 7y ago
      Very good points. What I would recommend is to use a mid sized ISP in your local area where you can meet with people in person. At higher dollar figures there should be some sales person and network engineer you can meet in their local office, meet for coffee, discuss your requirements, and have something of a real business relationship with. You and your company should be personally known to them. If you are just some semi anonymous faceless person ordering services off a credit card payment form on a website, all bets are off...
lelanthran 7y ago
"you're responsible for doing all your own offsite backups" That's going to be true no matter which cloud provider you choose. Their ToS almost certainly include terms which allow them to kick you off and refund any monies for any reason whatsoever. Good luck if you bought into their entire ecosystem and can't move elsewhere on a whim.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  That's going to be true no matter which cloud provider you choose My company provides services to fortune 100 companies, and we host literally petabytes of data on their behalf in Amazon S3, but we don't have offsite backups. We (and they) rely on Amazon's durability promise. We do offer the option of replicating their data to another cloud provider, but few customers use that service -- few companies want to pay over twice the cost of storage for a backup they should never need to use when the provider promises 99.999999999% durability.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    For AWS it doesn't make a lot of sense to protect against AWS itself losing data since you're paying them a premium for that. Backups in this model would be logically separated so a user/programmer error can't wipe out the only copy of your production dataset.
  - zhte415 7y ago
    I don't know the data you're holding. If it is sensitive data, like customer anything, would it infact make sense not to have offsite backup? Reasoning: Your contract with Amazon promises durability and I'm sure there's a service level agreement with penalty/liability clauses. By implementing a redundant backup, you're replicating something that you don't legally need to have, double-or-more due diligence on the offsite backup security/credentials, and in case of a failure of Amazon create a grey area with clients "Do you have the data, or do you not?" In short, there could be a very good business reason not to do offsite backups.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
Blackthorn 7y ago
Ten years ago, I had a pretty reasonable $10/mo account, that I eventually moved to a $20/mo account because I needed more resources to keep up with traffic. I'd expect that, as more transistors have been packed blah blah blah, that such a $10/mo account would have gotten better, not worse, since then.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Support and staffing costs are not subject to Moore's law.
  - cwyers 7y ago
    Neither is bandwidth.
    - walrus01 7y ago
      bandwidth does drop in price, and increase in capacity, at a fairly rapid rate. Look at what an ISP might pay for a 10GbE IP transit circuit in 2008 vs what you can get a 100GbE circuit for today. But peoples' bandwidth needs and traffic also grow rapidly.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  > I'd expect that, as more transistors have been packed blah blah blah, that such a $10/mo account would have gotten better, not worse, since then. This is what Linode do - they keep you on the same payment level, but raise what you get for it.