Quote:
Originally posted by pradaboy
seriously some people don't get what it takes to keep something like FTV up... shitty little hosting companies spamming their crap.
I'm baffled that you can't resolve things with Isprime, they're top-notch from what I know. If you're really keen on moving NatNet Jupiter or Ch00pa are your best choices. All top-notch
forget the rest :glugglug
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What makes a good host?
Everyone always asks what makes a good host? Is it the SLA (Standard Level Agreement) that is the most important? Is it the ability to answer my trouble tickets within minutes/hours/days? Network and Disaster recovery issues? How important is it to have multiple providers? Is the price important? Why would you want to have a hosting company that is local to your place of business? All these questions have to be evaluated before you make the decision to put your web presence into someone else?s hands.
SLA:
Standard Level Agreement is only valuable when it is written correctly. You have to realize that most (90%) of hosting companies out there are buying there bandwidth from one of the biggest providers like (Sprint, MCI, Cogent, MFN/ AboveNet, Qwest, and XO), and can only offer SLA at the same level as there providers. For instance if Sprint offers 99.5% uptime, then your provider can only do the same unless they will bank on the fact that you will not notice.
As far as creative writing in that contract, you have to be careful and READ it not just glance at it. Most contracts out there will be 20-50 pages long and you will have to spend some time reading it. Some companies will give you 99.99999% or even 100% SLA but will allow themselves 5 hours a month on regular scheduled maintenance as well as 5 hours a month for emergency maintenance. With 720 hours in a regular month (24 X 30) subtracting 10 hours of downtime will give you actual uptime of 98.65%.
Trouble tickets:
How fast is your trouble ticket answered in the middle of the night? What about Saturday night? These are important issues to consider during host evaluation. If your hosting company does not have some sort of monitoring software like (LINK) they will not know if your server just went down at 3:52 AM on Saturday morning. Ask your host to show you a sample of there monitoring software, also ask them about there procedure as far as servers going down in the middle of the night.
No matter who you go with or how much you pay, you WILL experience down time and you WILL have issues. The important thing to consider is how they will handle it, and will they take the blame for issues caused by there mistake? Unfortunately downtime is inevitable and the only question you should ask yourself is ?How fast will it be resolved? And how will you know about your issue??
Most shared trouble tickets should be answered in a matter of hours, a day at most. And most Managed service issues should be answered in a matter of minutes (an hour at most). Once in a while you will have a longer downtime simply because it could be a serious issue that is outside of your hosts? control. This brings us to the next point, Network / Backup / Disaster recovery.
Network / Backup / Disaster recovery:
Ask your host about there network infrastructure and disaster recovery plans. If a host is located in the middle of a large Career Hotel/Hub chances are they are using someone else?s generators and might not have a direct or at least an accurate answer for you.
If your hosting is important to you and you are running a web based business, here are a few things to look for:
? Your host needs to OWN there generator and have regular maintenance on it
? It would be better if your hosting company actually owned there space rather then renting a cage or a rack from someone else
? Your host needs to have AT LEAST 2 redundant bandwidth providers so in case one goes down you have at least another for some time
? Make sure they have some sort of security in there facility and ability to deter vandalism / theft
Price:
The battle over pricing has gotten fiercer over the past few years. With new products and services out every day, hosting company?s are able to lower there overhead and therefore lower your bottom line. With that said lets examine shared hosting industry.
In shared hosting, you as a customer are sharing your web space over a control panel like (H-Sphere, C-Panel, Plesk, etc.) with 100 ? 1,000 other users. Because the hardware costs are relatively low, depending on services you should be able to get good quality hosting between $5 and $15 a month.
Now, here is the single most important question you should ask yourself when considering the price of shared hosting.
How important is my site to me?
If you have a small travel agency and you get 30 visitors a day on your site and 10-20 emails a day, and your business could live without hosting for 1,2 or even 5 hours, you probably would be just fine with a $5 a month plan. You will have some down time, but it would not hurt your business practice. On the other hand if you run a small online store and get 1,000 or even 500 visitors a day on your site and you sell a couple of hundred dollars worth of products per day, then you should strongly evaluate your hosting provider. Maybe you should look at a company that offers better services and therefore charges a bit more.
No matter how old the cliché is, it is still the best one for this question ?You get what you pay for?? Yes it?s true, excellent service does not have to cost a lot, but when it?s too cheap you should at least do more investigative research on the company.
On the managed or dedicated/colocated side of this business price is even more irrelevant to your hosting companies? evaluation. With that said keep in mind that most companies will be more willing to give you a price break if you buy more then 10-15 Megs of committed traffic. When you buy more traffic/bandwidth it gets cheaper and cheaper. If you go out and try to purchase 1-10 Megs of bandwidth you will get prices on both sides of the spectrum. The lowest I have ever seen for 1 Meg of bandwidth committed is $45-$50 and the highest is $400 directly from Verio. Now obviously $400 is outrageous and anyone paying that much (I have a great 1979 Yugo for sale) but beware of cheap bandwidth prices.
Quote:
Scam: here is the biggest scam in the hosting industry in bandwidth resale. When you buy 1 Meg of traffic chances are you will not use a full 1 Meg for the entire month. It is also very likely that you will only use about 40-50%, but you may burst for few a minutes during high traffic peaks. What many hosting companies have done in the past and are still doing today, is take 2 different people that both pay for 1 Mbps and have them share the same Meg of allocated bandwidth. Basically, they are banking on the fact that when you burst the other company will probably not and vice versa. Therefore a hosting company can sell you bandwidth for $50 p/Mbps and sell it to another company at the same price making $100 p/Mbps.
Now many people say who cares? Well here is the reason why you should care. Have you ever typed in a url of a site you know exists, or a link on the site and it brings up ?The page can not be displayed?? Well what just happened is that secession that you just initiated did not have enough bandwidth to display, in hosting terms that is called packet loss. So how would you like for your customer to try to order something from your site and get that page over and over again? Well that is what will happen if both you and another person that shares your bandwidth have high traffic on both of your sites at the same time.
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Location:
Data center location is NOT only important if you will be colocating your servers. Yes, it is important to the people who will need constant physical access to there servers on daily, weekly or even monthly basis, and you should look for an easily accessible/reachable location from your home or business.
At the same time, it is also very important to have a data center located in the ?Safe Zone?. When we say a safe zone, we mean located in seismic free area. Located close to a major metropolitan area, but at the same time far enough to be safe of any terrorist or natural disasters.