6 ms·

Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry

139 points by jadence 18y ago

jcapote 18y ago
I knew it.
tokenadult 18y ago
I have my own problems with Dreamhost, which I think hurts my business sometimes.
tlrobinson 18y ago
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?
davidw 18y ago
Hosting is a 'market for lemons': http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html 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 18y ago
  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.
  - devicenull 18y ago
    That's the real problem with reviews.. I know there's a bunch of false ones for various hosting sites, since the tech support was unwilling to walk people through basic processes, or code their entire site for them. I can't really come up with a solution to that, as there's no way to accurately tell if someone knows enough to be reviewing the place. I recently switched hosting to a place called Spexhost, which is run by some people I knew through IRC. That alone makes me trust it a bit more then some random company.
    - netcan 18y ago
      Well, if things like not providing not providing this kind of support are bothering the reviewers then they are likely to bother readers. It would be equally useless for those readers to read your review considering you don't need help with the basics, if they do.
      - davidw 18y ago
        There's also a bias in terms of what gets people worked up enough to comment: bad service, or really, really good service. Ok and pretty good service are less likely to get people excited enough to post reviews and commentary.
      - dasil003 18y ago
        The thing about web hosting is that it's undervalued by people due to price competition. A lot of people think it's reasonable to pay $5 for a hosting account and they expect everything to work perfectly and get support if they can't figure something out. Well if they spend one hour of staff time a year helping you then the profit margin is essentially shot. That's why most cheapo shared hosts just offer crap service. It's not worth it to even try. That's why the momentum is definitely the direction of hosted services for most things people need rather than direct web hosting. If you want to host your own website you should either A) pay a few hundred a month for a managed host, or B) learn to be your own sysadmin (which frankly is not nearly as hard as it used to be).
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
- chops 18y ago
  That's precisely why I find sites like WebHostingTalk.com so valuable. You can talk with others who are interested in all sorts of Web Hosting-related information, moreover, you get to actually converse with some of the web hosting providers' owners. I spend most of my time on the WHT forums in the colo section, and you see plenty of specific threads trying to find the most applicable type of hosting for a particular need ("Looking for a strong 20mbps colo host in Chicago. What do you guys recommend?"). You also get pretty much first-notices of downtimes there, and you even get the sweet notices of the stories such as the big break-in at CIHost chicago several years ago (where the crooks sawed through the wall, tazed the employees, and stole a bunch of servers, meanwhile CIHost was initially claiming that there was just an outage).
  - vaksel 18y ago
    Don't forget the discounts section.
johns 18y ago
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 18y ago
  That would require that your users have an implicit distrust of hosting reviews, which they almost certainly don't.
  - johns 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      When the fake review sites see one that says "No-BS", exactly how long until 10 of them say "No-BS"?
      - johns 18y ago
        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.
  - beza1e1 18y ago
    There is the difference between "make something people want" and "make something people need". It's much harder to make money with the later approach and probably impossible to get rich.
almost 18y ago
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.
- Andys 18y ago
  JoelOnHosting.com?
- corentin 18y ago
  Maybe we just need hosting review website review websites.
  - almost 18y ago
    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
tontoa4 18y ago
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.
pg 18y ago
This is true. Fake review sites are one of the top categories of spam here: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12 http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12 (You have to turn on showdead in your profile to see spam.)
- jfornear 18y ago
  Why doesn't this Jaheem character get banned? lol
  - alex_c 18y ago
    Because then he'll just create a different account. As it is, he's happy spamming this site, and we're happy not seeing it. Everyone wins.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      kind of a honeypot then? nice.
    - jfornear 18y ago
      I figured that was the idea.
      - palish 18y ago
        You are so slick.
        jfornear 18y ago
        ? Apparently I was the only one interested in PG's anti-spam strategy... Sorry for asking such a stupid question.
        palish 18y ago
        Sorry, I didn't mean to be dismissive. It was a good question, and please keep asking them. I've just been having a bad day -- just got through an epic almost-breakup-but-not-quite-broken-up girlfriend problem. So to be clear, I apologize.
mpk 18y ago
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).
sutro 18y ago
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.
- mikeyur 18y ago
  Tubes are clogged so we're falling back on the original dump truck method.
- jadence 18y ago
  I posted this as I was reminded of it when I read through the comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432299 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.
Jasber 18y ago
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.
Hoff 18y ago
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-scam/ http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards... 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.
Caged 18y ago
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.
petercooper 18y ago
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.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
rochers 18y ago
I've been using Dreamhost for years to host The Black Stripe (http://www.theblackstripe.com http://www.theblackstripe.com) and while there were some rough times at the beginning, things have gotten much better in the last 2 years. I recommend them as a host for my freelance clients because they are so cheap for what you get. If anyone is looking for a dreamhost promo code, you can use HACKERNEWS to save $65 off the first year (or more) of hosting.

139 points by jadence 18y ago

jcapote 18y ago

I knew it.

tokenadult 18y ago

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

tlrobinson 18y ago

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?

davidw 18y ago

Hosting is a 'market for lemons': http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html 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 18y ago
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.
- devicenull 18y ago
  That's the real problem with reviews.. I know there's a bunch of false ones for various hosting sites, since the tech support was unwilling to walk people through basic processes, or code their entire site for them. I can't really come up with a solution to that, as there's no way to accurately tell if someone knows enough to be reviewing the place. I recently switched hosting to a place called Spexhost, which is run by some people I knew through IRC. That alone makes me trust it a bit more then some random company.
  - netcan 18y ago
    Well, if things like not providing not providing this kind of support are bothering the reviewers then they are likely to bother readers. It would be equally useless for those readers to read your review considering you don't need help with the basics, if they do.
    - davidw 18y ago
      There's also a bias in terms of what gets people worked up enough to comment: bad service, or really, really good service. Ok and pretty good service are less likely to get people excited enough to post reviews and commentary.
    - dasil003 18y ago
      The thing about web hosting is that it's undervalued by people due to price competition. A lot of people think it's reasonable to pay $5 for a hosting account and they expect everything to work perfectly and get support if they can't figure something out. Well if they spend one hour of staff time a year helping you then the profit margin is essentially shot. That's why most cheapo shared hosts just offer crap service. It's not worth it to even try. That's why the momentum is definitely the direction of hosted services for most things people need rather than direct web hosting. If you want to host your own website you should either A) pay a few hundred a month for a managed host, or B) learn to be your own sysadmin (which frankly is not nearly as hard as it used to be).
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
chops 18y ago
That's precisely why I find sites like WebHostingTalk.com so valuable. You can talk with others who are interested in all sorts of Web Hosting-related information, moreover, you get to actually converse with some of the web hosting providers' owners. I spend most of my time on the WHT forums in the colo section, and you see plenty of specific threads trying to find the most applicable type of hosting for a particular need ("Looking for a strong 20mbps colo host in Chicago. What do you guys recommend?"). You also get pretty much first-notices of downtimes there, and you even get the sweet notices of the stories such as the big break-in at CIHost chicago several years ago (where the crooks sawed through the wall, tazed the employees, and stole a bunch of servers, meanwhile CIHost was initially claiming that there was just an outage).
- vaksel 18y ago
  Don't forget the discounts section.

johns 18y ago

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 18y ago
That would require that your users have an implicit distrust of hosting reviews, which they almost certainly don't.
- johns 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    When the fake review sites see one that says "No-BS", exactly how long until 10 of them say "No-BS"?
    - johns 18y ago
      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.
- beza1e1 18y ago
  There is the difference between "make something people want" and "make something people need". It's much harder to make money with the later approach and probably impossible to get rich.

almost 18y ago

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.

Andys 18y ago
JoelOnHosting.com?
corentin 18y ago
Maybe we just need hosting review website review websites.
- almost 18y ago
  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

tontoa4 18y ago

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.

pg 18y ago

This is true. Fake review sites are one of the top categories of spam here: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12 http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12 (You have to turn on showdead in your profile to see spam.)

jfornear 18y ago
Why doesn't this Jaheem character get banned? lol
- alex_c 18y ago
  Because then he'll just create a different account. As it is, he's happy spamming this site, and we're happy not seeing it. Everyone wins.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    kind of a honeypot then? nice.
  - jfornear 18y ago
    I figured that was the idea.
    - palish 18y ago
      You are so slick.
      - jfornear 18y ago
        ? Apparently I was the only one interested in PG's anti-spam strategy... Sorry for asking such a stupid question.
        palish 18y ago
        Sorry, I didn't mean to be dismissive. It was a good question, and please keep asking them. I've just been having a bad day -- just got through an epic almost-breakup-but-not-quite-broken-up girlfriend problem. So to be clear, I apologize.

mpk 18y ago

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).

sutro 18y ago

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.

mikeyur 18y ago
Tubes are clogged so we're falling back on the original dump truck method.
jadence 18y ago
I posted this as I was reminded of it when I read through the comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432299 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.

Jasber 18y ago

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.

Hoff 18y ago

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-scam/ http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards... 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.

Caged 18y ago

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.

petercooper 18y ago

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.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

rochers 18y ago

I've been using Dreamhost for years to host The Black Stripe (http://www.theblackstripe.com http://www.theblackstripe.com) and while there were some rough times at the beginning, things have gotten much better in the last 2 years. I recommend them as a host for my freelance clients because they are so cheap for what you get. If anyone is looking for a dreamhost promo code, you can use HACKERNEWS to save $65 off the first year (or more) of hosting.