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As someone who worked for another German webhosting company (not mentioned in the article but more than a million customers), I can tell you that it's extremely
by _ak 13y ago
As someone who worked for another German webhosting company (not mentioned in the article but more than a million customers), I can tell you that it's extremely hard to roll out new versions of typical software (PHP, Perl, MySQL) when you both want to keep your users on the latest (or a reasonably recent) version while not breaking your users' websites. And because there will always be customers unwilling or unable to switch to later versions, you end up running Perl 5.6, PHP3&4, Frontpage Server Extensions (yes, people still use that stuff) and MySQL 4.
That said, Uberspace is still small enough to take care of their users individually when it comes to support. They can keep their architecture simple (well, so does 1&1, but rumor has it that they have 100 people working in their data center only to replace broken parts in their shared webhosting system), and text-only configuration files and not fully automating everything is still feasible and doesn't hurt yet.
Scaling webhosting while keeping up good customer service is hard. That's why your experience with small hosters will often be better.
- untitaker_ 13y agoWith Uberspace you can determine the PHP version to use in a config file. You also run your own PHP interpreter, means you can use your own php.ini etc. I fully agree with you on the scalability of the customer service though.
- _ak 13y agoYes, same thing in the system we built and maintained. But believe it or not, even an upgrade from PHP 5.x.y to 5.x.y+1 can cause existing software to break. With a million customers, some of them will hit even the most obscure bugs.
- zaptheimpaler 13y agoIs it not possible to completely isolate the two different versions? (Something like virtualenv for PHP?)
- _ak 13y agoProviding them with individual versions that they configured isn't a problem at all, even on a per-directory basis. You can do that with Apache and some configuration. The actual problem is more complex: you always have the conflict between wanting users to use the latest version (because of security issues or stuff like that) and not breaking the software they're running.
- grobmeier 13y agoActually 1and1 is running 5.2. Some web software does meanwhile requires 5.3. After all software will break even when there is no upgrade at all. Anyway, i fully agree: providing hosting is a hard business. Imaging what 1and1 needs to do for this huge server farm... wow. It's ok for a lot of low traffic sites without much functionality, but in my case I needed more at one point. Now I have the choice between 5.3 and 5.4. Thats neat.
- sigkill 13y ago>Scaling webhosting while keeping up good customer service is hard Scaling anything while keeping good customer service is hard. Customer service is a function of product as close to perfect as possible and someone being there when shit hits the fan. With large customer base, the probability of someone hitting a snag/bug goes higher, while adding more customer service representatives is only a linear solution to the people problem.
- chokma 13y agoThe amazing thing (as far as I have been following it) is that Uberspace encourages its users to learn to use the command line and SSH instead of restricting them to a "safer" GUI with fewer options. It will be interesting to see if educating a growing user base does scale (as more knowledgeable admins may ask fewer questions and can find their own answers on StackOverflow) or introduces more (and much more complicated) customer support requests over time.