11 ms·

GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting

354 points by mh_ 13y ago

busterzzz 13y ago
I use mt for one of my sites, hope this isn't A turn for the worst.
- kbar13 13y ago
  you should probably prepare for the worst.
wonderyak 13y ago
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.
- jfb 13y ago
  It seems like the kind of thing that well-intentioned people can get into without too terribly much capital, only to have things go totally non-linear on them. My own minimal needs have always been perfectly well met by Linode, so I recommend them if anybody asks me (which people rarely do.) I've heard goodish things about Dreamhost, as well.
- CharlesW 13y ago
  I'm not a fan of "me too"s, but I've been a DreamHost customer since 2001 and use them for smaller sites and may try VPS and/or dedicated with them in the future. I recall one rough patch with them in 2006 (http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/ http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an...), but I felt like they did a pretty good job of keeping customers informed and so I stuck with them.
  - dave5104 13y ago
    I've been a DH VPS customer for... years now. Don't even remember how long since I upgraded from shared. (And I've been with DH since 2006.) Coming from the shared environment, having a VPS is infinitely nicer. We would have an issue every month or two on shared hosting, but now it's an issue every year or so on their VPS knocks on wood My general experience with DH is that uptime is fantastic... but when it rains, it pours for a day or so. But then right back to clear skies for months.
  - secabeen 13y ago
    Dremahost VPS is a pretty interesting product, as you still get the unlimited disk and bandwidth of the shared product, but now on a VPS.
- driverdan 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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).
- slig 13y ago
  I've been hosting small sites on WebFaction <https://www.webfaction.com/> https://www.webfaction.com/>. I never had problems of downtime and the support has been reasonably responsive the couple of times I needed.
  - pjbrunet 13y ago
    You never had trouble but come back here in few years. WebFaction registered September 28, 2003. 10 years in business, not bad. But if you start recommending hosts there's going to be a list here 10 miles long.
- damon_c 13y ago
  I signed up with DreamHost a couple of years ago and they sent me my password in plaintext in the confirmation email. Am I wrong to have walked away immediately?
lelandbatey 13y ago
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
- arkitaip 13y ago
  Very true. I'm currently happy using Webfaction but I just know it's a matter of time before I have to look for a new hosting company.
  - cleversoap 13y ago
    I've been with them for quite a while and one thing I've noticed they do differently is that they will upgrade your service periodically while not changing the price. For example, I've gone from 128MB to 512MB of usable memory for my vhost without paying anything but my $9.99 a month. There are other anecdotes (awesome control panel, good support, etc...) that make me think it's unfair to group them with other hosting providers that never do anything but the bare minimum.
    - arkitaip 13y ago
      Oh, I agree that Webfaction is very very good at shared hosting. It's just that I've learned my lesson and don't plan to be too attached to them.
    - sumedh 13y ago
      I have an account with webfaction and my mysql DB was using more than 256 mb of memory. I immediately got an email saying that I need to lower the usage or upgrade to higher plan. I was thinking of my next step when I got an email next day that my account has been upgraded to 512 mb memory plan at no cost. Definitely made the right move by moving from hostgator to webfaction.
cylinder 13y ago
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.
- thenomad 13y ago
  If you don't shop on price, there are some excellent hosts out there. But you do have to be willing to pay $20 or maybe even $99 for your completely business-critical, complex infrastructure, rather than merely $2.99 pm.
- iwasakabukiman 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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).
- ohashi 13y ago
  If you think this is the beginning of that phase you haven't been paying any attention at all. Just look up Endurance International Group. They own many (most?) of the major consumer brands and snag up new ones regularly. I can think of two big purchases this year already: DirectI ($110m) and A Small Orange (not sure on sale price)
JEVLON 13y ago
I had a terrible experience with MT a couple of years ago. GoDaddy won't be ruining them. They wrecked themselves.
SteveGerencser 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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-will-you-start-the-fans-please http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-w...), 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.
DigitalSea 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Yup, same- we got outta MT just in time about 4 months ago. Switched to DO.
jacques_chester 13y ago
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.
coderdude 13y ago
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.
- Steveism 13y ago
  As a supplement to your comment, the Philanthropy section of their Wikipedia page is around 285 words. The Controversies section of their Wikipedia page is around 1542 words. Of course links to edit the page and footnote links make these numbers slightly off. Linking to the Controversies section seems rather appropriate considering the disproportionate nature of the two sections.
  - oinksoft 13y ago
    While we're on the topic, this page is heavily astroturfed like those of many large companies. A number of sockpuppets are implicated in the page's history. I enjoyed contributions by "ParsonsRep" [1] which aren't sneaky at all, most edits signed "(I AM AFFILIATED WITH GODADDY.COM)". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsRep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsR...
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. - http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/60573762.jpg http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/6057... - 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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kbar13 13y ago
well, it was a good run, MT. I wonder how many of their employees will leave MT
- davidandgoliath 13y ago
  Apparently, quite a few have already in advance of the announcement -- however that's all hearsay.
opendomain 13y ago
My worst experience was with Joyent. I paid a few thousand for web hosting for life that helped get them off the ground. But when I called in one day to get support they kept cutting me off. I was very patient and tried several different avenues but they would not help me. Finally I lost my temper and used the "F" word in their forums so they killed my account completely. I even was able to talk to the founder, and I've got to give him kudos for being a great boss protecting his team - but he would not listen to my side of the story and I Lost all my data and never received any refund. They do NOT know customer service.
larrys 13y ago
"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 13y ago
  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.
  - larrys 13y ago
    Took a look that looks really good. I assume people can also drag a .html etc or a .jpg and it will replace an existing file after verifying (and/or rename)? Good luck!
    - bobfunk 13y ago
      Thanks! So far updates are done by just dragging the whole folder unto the site dashboard again. We'll figure out what files have changes and just upload those. There's also a version history so people can always roll back changes or see how the site looked like before.
meh777 13y ago
meh
systems 13y ago
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 ...
larrys 13y ago
"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.
bishopknight 13y ago
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.
smacktoward 13y ago
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.
- elwell 13y ago
  will upvote with reservations (don't want too many people there, but I think they have handled popularity rather well)
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    I have three instances at rackspace cloud, and all three have 100% uptime for 4+ years. Could not be happier. Of course, running debian stable might have some to do with that.
- benmorris 13y ago
  I share a similar opinion. I compare every host I deal with to Rackspace. I have dealt with them from early on 6+ years ago with their dedicated servers and mail. Their support is the real deal and if you need a managed service level I would not think twice about using them. That being said though if you are going unmanaged you're going to pay a lot more to use Rackspace than other companies.
- gaoshan 13y ago
  Rackspace is the best that our company has ever used. The expense is a factor, though, and many smaller sites aren't willing to bear that burden and that is where the likes of Media Temple comes in. They host most of the smaller sites we manage and I've been quite happy with them. That said, anytime I've had to deal with GoDaddy it has been a huge pain in the ass and I am not confident that this move is a good one for Media Temple's users.
seldo 13y ago
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 13y ago
  >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 13y ago
    >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.
davidedicillo 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
Trufa 13y ago
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.
- joering2 13y ago
  Confirmed from someone who has been them for 4 years now. The only reason I had to (sadly) switch was because I needed fully blown unix machine with SSH access, something that their offer was too pricey for me. But I had great time with HostGator. The nicest thing, other than their friendly knowledgeable tech support chat, was they many times they went off their ways to accommodate my needs like opening ports (sharing hosting), re-installing some mods, reconfiguring .ini files on the fly, etc.
- tomca32 13y ago
  That's exactly the thing I'm wondering about. I'm using Hostgator for around 3-4 years now. Never had any problems with them and the support was always great.
- gmazzotti 13y ago
  I am they client since 5 years ago, and I always saying my partner (after chating or e-mailing their support) that "please do me remember to never change of hosting company". The host is very good but what is really wonderfull is their support (many times they even solve some coding errors I made, so my code works without problem)
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Definitely the best shared hosting I'm aware of. I've had personal sites on HostGator for years and always been happy.
- workhere-io 13y ago
  I've had several accounts with them over the years, and I think they provide a lot of value for the money. Their website design is antiquated, but their hosting works.
jasonvorhe 13y ago
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.)
dctoedt 13y ago
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.
unclebucknasty 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
SubMachinePun 13y ago
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.
arikrak 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
programminggeek 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Video hosting is a good niche too.
naiyt 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
wyck 13y ago
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.
nsoonhui 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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?
quocble 13y ago
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.
NKCSS 13y ago
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)
noir_lord 13y ago
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 13y ago
  I think a lot of VPS hosting is for personal projects or very small business.
valugi 13y ago
we got sold to Go_daddy, the worst company ever.
mbesto 13y ago
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.
k1m 13y ago
For shared hosting I've had a great experience with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net
davidw 13y ago
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.
kephra 13y ago
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.
ebbv 13y ago
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.
kyoji 13y ago
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.
thrillgore 13y ago
Media Temple had to know during the talks that any acquisition would cost them dearly.
newsreader 13y ago
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.
PauloManrique 13y ago
Am I the only one that never had problems with GoDaddy?
kevinwalzer 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
lsc 13y ago
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.

354 points by mh_ 13y ago

busterzzz 13y ago

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

kbar13 13y ago
you should probably prepare for the worst.

wonderyak 13y ago

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.

jfb 13y ago
It seems like the kind of thing that well-intentioned people can get into without too terribly much capital, only to have things go totally non-linear on them. My own minimal needs have always been perfectly well met by Linode, so I recommend them if anybody asks me (which people rarely do.) I've heard goodish things about Dreamhost, as well.
CharlesW 13y ago
I'm not a fan of "me too"s, but I've been a DreamHost customer since 2001 and use them for smaller sites and may try VPS and/or dedicated with them in the future. I recall one rough patch with them in 2006 (http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/ http://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an...), but I felt like they did a pretty good job of keeping customers informed and so I stuck with them.
- dave5104 13y ago
  I've been a DH VPS customer for... years now. Don't even remember how long since I upgraded from shared. (And I've been with DH since 2006.) Coming from the shared environment, having a VPS is infinitely nicer. We would have an issue every month or two on shared hosting, but now it's an issue every year or so on their VPS knocks on wood My general experience with DH is that uptime is fantastic... but when it rains, it pours for a day or so. But then right back to clear skies for months.
- secabeen 13y ago
  Dremahost VPS is a pretty interesting product, as you still get the unlimited disk and bandwidth of the shared product, but now on a VPS.
driverdan 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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).
slig 13y ago
I've been hosting small sites on WebFaction <https://www.webfaction.com/> https://www.webfaction.com/>. I never had problems of downtime and the support has been reasonably responsive the couple of times I needed.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  You never had trouble but come back here in few years. WebFaction registered September 28, 2003. 10 years in business, not bad. But if you start recommending hosts there's going to be a list here 10 miles long.
damon_c 13y ago
I signed up with DreamHost a couple of years ago and they sent me my password in plaintext in the confirmation email. Am I wrong to have walked away immediately?

lelandbatey 13y ago

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

arkitaip 13y ago
Very true. I'm currently happy using Webfaction but I just know it's a matter of time before I have to look for a new hosting company.
- cleversoap 13y ago
  I've been with them for quite a while and one thing I've noticed they do differently is that they will upgrade your service periodically while not changing the price. For example, I've gone from 128MB to 512MB of usable memory for my vhost without paying anything but my $9.99 a month. There are other anecdotes (awesome control panel, good support, etc...) that make me think it's unfair to group them with other hosting providers that never do anything but the bare minimum.
  - arkitaip 13y ago
    Oh, I agree that Webfaction is very very good at shared hosting. It's just that I've learned my lesson and don't plan to be too attached to them.
  - sumedh 13y ago
    I have an account with webfaction and my mysql DB was using more than 256 mb of memory. I immediately got an email saying that I need to lower the usage or upgrade to higher plan. I was thinking of my next step when I got an email next day that my account has been upgraded to 512 mb memory plan at no cost. Definitely made the right move by moving from hostgator to webfaction.

cylinder 13y ago

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.

thenomad 13y ago
If you don't shop on price, there are some excellent hosts out there. But you do have to be willing to pay $20 or maybe even $99 for your completely business-critical, complex infrastructure, rather than merely $2.99 pm.
iwasakabukiman 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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).
ohashi 13y ago
If you think this is the beginning of that phase you haven't been paying any attention at all. Just look up Endurance International Group. They own many (most?) of the major consumer brands and snag up new ones regularly. I can think of two big purchases this year already: DirectI ($110m) and A Small Orange (not sure on sale price)

JEVLON 13y ago

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

SteveGerencser 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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-will-you-start-the-fans-please http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-w...), 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.

DigitalSea 13y ago

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 13y ago
Yup, same- we got outta MT just in time about 4 months ago. Switched to DO.

jacques_chester 13y ago

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.

coderdude 13y ago

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.

Steveism 13y ago
As a supplement to your comment, the Philanthropy section of their Wikipedia page is around 285 words. The Controversies section of their Wikipedia page is around 1542 words. Of course links to edit the page and footnote links make these numbers slightly off. Linking to the Controversies section seems rather appropriate considering the disproportionate nature of the two sections.
- oinksoft 13y ago
  While we're on the topic, this page is heavily astroturfed like those of many large companies. A number of sockpuppets are implicated in the page's history. I enjoyed contributions by "ParsonsRep" [1] which aren't sneaky at all, most edits signed "(I AM AFFILIATED WITH GODADDY.COM)". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsRep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ParsonsR...
moocowduckquack 13y ago
The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. - http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/60573762.jpg http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/6057... - 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.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kbar13 13y ago

well, it was a good run, MT. I wonder how many of their employees will leave MT

davidandgoliath 13y ago
Apparently, quite a few have already in advance of the announcement -- however that's all hearsay.

opendomain 13y ago

My worst experience was with Joyent. I paid a few thousand for web hosting for life that helped get them off the ground. But when I called in one day to get support they kept cutting me off. I was very patient and tried several different avenues but they would not help me. Finally I lost my temper and used the "F" word in their forums so they killed my account completely. I even was able to talk to the founder, and I've got to give him kudos for being a great boss protecting his team - but he would not listen to my side of the story and I Lost all my data and never received any refund. They do NOT know customer service.

larrys 13y ago

"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 13y ago
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.
- larrys 13y ago
  Took a look that looks really good. I assume people can also drag a .html etc or a .jpg and it will replace an existing file after verifying (and/or rename)? Good luck!
  - bobfunk 13y ago
    Thanks! So far updates are done by just dragging the whole folder unto the site dashboard again. We'll figure out what files have changes and just upload those. There's also a version history so people can always roll back changes or see how the site looked like before.

meh777 13y ago

meh

systems 13y ago

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 ...

larrys 13y ago

"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.

bishopknight 13y ago

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.

smacktoward 13y ago

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.

elwell 13y ago
will upvote with reservations (don't want too many people there, but I think they have handled popularity rather well)
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  I have three instances at rackspace cloud, and all three have 100% uptime for 4+ years. Could not be happier. Of course, running debian stable might have some to do with that.
benmorris 13y ago
I share a similar opinion. I compare every host I deal with to Rackspace. I have dealt with them from early on 6+ years ago with their dedicated servers and mail. Their support is the real deal and if you need a managed service level I would not think twice about using them. That being said though if you are going unmanaged you're going to pay a lot more to use Rackspace than other companies.
gaoshan 13y ago
Rackspace is the best that our company has ever used. The expense is a factor, though, and many smaller sites aren't willing to bear that burden and that is where the likes of Media Temple comes in. They host most of the smaller sites we manage and I've been quite happy with them. That said, anytime I've had to deal with GoDaddy it has been a huge pain in the ass and I am not confident that this move is a good one for Media Temple's users.

seldo 13y ago

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 13y ago
>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 13y ago
  >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.

davidedicillo 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

Trufa 13y ago

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.

joering2 13y ago
Confirmed from someone who has been them for 4 years now. The only reason I had to (sadly) switch was because I needed fully blown unix machine with SSH access, something that their offer was too pricey for me. But I had great time with HostGator. The nicest thing, other than their friendly knowledgeable tech support chat, was they many times they went off their ways to accommodate my needs like opening ports (sharing hosting), re-installing some mods, reconfiguring .ini files on the fly, etc.
tomca32 13y ago
That's exactly the thing I'm wondering about. I'm using Hostgator for around 3-4 years now. Never had any problems with them and the support was always great.
gmazzotti 13y ago
I am they client since 5 years ago, and I always saying my partner (after chating or e-mailing their support) that "please do me remember to never change of hosting company". The host is very good but what is really wonderfull is their support (many times they even solve some coding errors I made, so my code works without problem)
snowwrestler 13y ago
Definitely the best shared hosting I'm aware of. I've had personal sites on HostGator for years and always been happy.
workhere-io 13y ago
I've had several accounts with them over the years, and I think they provide a lot of value for the money. Their website design is antiquated, but their hosting works.

jasonvorhe 13y ago

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.)

dctoedt 13y ago

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.

unclebucknasty 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

SubMachinePun 13y ago

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.

arikrak 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

programminggeek 13y ago

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 13y ago
Video hosting is a good niche too.

naiyt 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

wyck 13y ago

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.

nsoonhui 13y ago

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 13y ago
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?

quocble 13y ago

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.

NKCSS 13y ago

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)

noir_lord 13y ago

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 13y ago
I think a lot of VPS hosting is for personal projects or very small business.

valugi 13y ago

we got sold to Go_daddy, the worst company ever.

mbesto 13y ago

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.

k1m 13y ago

For shared hosting I've had a great experience with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net

davidw 13y ago

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.

kephra 13y ago

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.

ebbv 13y ago

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.

kyoji 13y ago

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.

thrillgore 13y ago

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

newsreader 13y ago

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.

PauloManrique 13y ago

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

kevinwalzer 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

lsc 13y ago

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.