I got all that extra energy from eating turkey and pumpkin pie!! :thumbsup

Brad

This is an excellent thread with many well thought out posts (and some from people that don't get it at all). I thought I would weigh in with my thoughts.

While bandwith itself is at an all time low, it's not going to get any lower, in fact, many of these bandwidth companies have been so concerned about revenue instead of profit, they've lowered their prices so low that they have forced themselves into bankruptcy. I see many hosting companies headed down this same road.

For a REAL hosting company (I define a real hosting company as one that is not a one-man operation) bandwidth costs are the least of it's worrys. As anyone that runs a business knows, employees are the most expensive part of any operation. For instance, my monthly payroll is about $80,000. That doesn't change no matter how many customers I have or what I charge them, and all my customers care about is that I provide them with the service I promised them.

We own our own data center which means that we have to pay a pretty hefty montly bill for that (it also means that I don't have to worry about the company I'm colo-ing in going out of business or doing things to screw me over). It also means that we have to have maintainence contracts on our power, HVAC etc in order to make sure it's always working.

Then there is the cost of equipment. We own more routers, Gig switches, load balancers, regular switches, etc, etc than I care to mention. None of this stuff is cheap.

Also, any REAL hosting company is going to have more than one connection to the internet. While you can spread your bandwidth out among these connections via BGP, it is still going to raise your overall bandwidth costs by having these multiple connections because of the dynamics involved.

Add in office space, and all of the other wonderful miscellaneous items that are the cost of doing business, and before you know it, your FIXED costs can wind up being over $2/GIG.

The reason there is so many different prices from different hosts out there is many reason...

1. As I stated above, some hosts are looking at revenue and not profit. They won't be around for long.

2. Many hosts are 1 or 2 man operations. Now, while there are many excellent 1-2 man operations out there, you have to decide if you are comfortable with this as a webmaster, because 1-2 man operations cannot provide true 24/7 support (I define TRUE 24/7 support as being able to call at any time of day or nite and having an employee answer the phone). Unless you get very creative with scheduling and over work your employees, it takes at the very least, 6 people to make sure that someone is sitting next to a phone 24/7.

3. Some hosts (NationalNet included) will NOT whore out their pricing in order to gain new business. This is not fair to our existing customers. We, and other hosts like us, cannot and will not compete against one man operations with our premier product.

4. Some hosts use pricing trickery (capping you and not telling you that you are capped, etc) to offer "good" pricing. This is taking advantage of most webmaster's ignorance of how hosting works, and is unscrupulous, as far as I am concerned.

All in all, when looking for a host, you have to decide what's important to you and how critical your business plan is. After you've decided on a host based on what's important to you, you probably should not come to the boards and bitch when they are "down again". Obviously, if you're bitching about it, then it proves that maybe what you thought was NOT important, really IS important! Run your business like a business. Don't bitch about a problem...FIX the problem.

Cheaper is not always better, in fact, it rarely is.

Just my :2 cents:

Yes there was one issue which was not handled in the best way but it was resolved and the client was offered compensation for his troubles. It happened were not proud of the fact but it wont happen again because i deal with most every issue on the boards myself from now on. If anyone has a problem with anything they should can speak to me and i will do everything in my power to be sure they are happy.

Now a bit of history and facts about our company.

When datahosters opened its doors the original prices were almost triple what they are today. We quickly grew to over 300 clients in less then 4 months at which time we had a many problems with virtual. Some left and some stuck it out either way they were compensated we gave refunds or extra bandwidth.

We found that most of our problems could be avoided by not allowing free trade scripts on our virtual servers. Since we banned the use of free trade scripts we have had no excessive downtime. Our clients can tell you that our service is far beyond what the price may lead you to believe in terms of quality.

Yes we offer rock bottom prices on unmanaged servers and yes we are a profitable company with almost 500 clients of various sizes. We sell more dedicated plans then most will sell in 3-6 months and we constantly renegotiate our pricing to remain competitive. We also provide services to some very well known clients including but not limited to Choker, Dieselcash, Adult-host.nl, HomeTownCash, Phoenixcontent, and many others.

If our prices were not profitable then we would not be offering such low prices to begin with. We sell volume and our prices reflect the volume that we have. I will not disclose any company secrets about our actual size or operational costs. This is what allows us to remain profitable and extremely cost effective for our clients so its a trade secret.

Our current prices also reflect the fact we don't offer expensive control panels and it allows us to lower the overhead. If you want all the bells and whistles then you pay a bit more for what you want. The savings don't get passed to our pockets this money is put back in our clients pockets. This is our way to reward clients for doing business with us and help them to grow with us.

Its no big secret that our prices are low and its no secret we have given not 1 but 2 free servers to members of the GFY community in the past 4 months. I doubt a company that was knee deep in debt could afford to give away free dedicated servers and free bandwidth included.

Anyway i just wanted to contribute some facts since our name was mentioned and there are many great hosts out there. I also think ISPrime is a great company and if i did not work for datahosters they would be my choice any day. Keep in mind when shopping for a host managed services and telephone support can have a big impact on cost.

:thumbsup

Good post.

As I mentioned before...now if some of you hosters would take the same time that you spend on this bbs, and apply it to your customers, you might have a winning formula.

True facts...over the past 3 days, I have sent emails to 4 of the hosts that continually push their services on this board. And, yes, I am asking for nothing smaller then a 10 mbps dedicated...and yes, I tell each host that I already have a couple of dedicated boxes...and I have been in this business for a enough years to accurately know my power requirements.

Here's the responses ...one responded within 1/2 an hour
....one responded 18 hours later...now it's been almost another 16 hours and I still haven't received a response on additional questions
...the other 2, I haven't heard a damn thing from

And the irony is, every one of these 4 have been on this board and continuing to post, while I wait for a response.

Like I said before...I am on Cogent now..I pay $400 for 10 mbps (and I use almost very ounce of it), plus $100 a month for my servers... I have had one outage in over 2 years...and customer support has NEVER taken more then 5 minutes to get back to me 24/7. Looks like the better deal to me....

:thumbsup WOW! Congrats SinEmpire on starting such a great thread! Being new to the hosting industry myself, the last ten weeks have been quite an eye opener!

:disgust Without going into all of the dirty sales tactics that I have noticed in this short time, what your post has shown me (reminded me of) is that there are some standup people in the industry as well.

I have never minded good competition but at the end of the day I can have a :drinkup drink with a fair competitor. Perhaps it is because there are so many young individuals within the industry or just the anonymity that the web offers that makes people so bold in what and how they say things.

Bottom line somone already mentioned Karma and what goes around, comes around. With that in mind I'll just keep the Golden Rule in mind and follow it as a guide!:winkwink:

To all of you who have taken the time to offer me friendly help:helpme and professional criticisim, please accept my gratitude.

Happy Holidays to All!

SinEmpire: Your nameservers are located on the same network.
How do you provide redundancy with that structure?

I wouldn´t host some serious business with a host that don´t provide at least three namesevers located on three separate networks.

And last.. more than a single nameserver have no effect unless the complete serverpark is clustered. Different nameservers pointing to the same webserver dosent protect me from downtime.

I like your way of host-thinking SinEmpire. Will contact you for a deal next week.

this thread is why gfy is actually useful sometimes - aside from blowing off steam:Graucho

kudos to brad et al. for thread.

it's most excellent and i'm learning a lot. Thanks

2 of you who have been posting on this thread and bragging about your "great service"...how about checking your email..there's a customer here who is trying to give someone some business..and can't get a reply.

I'm curious. It sounds to me that you like your current host (as evidenced by your last paragraph) yet you are sending email to other hosts looking for quotes?

One easy example: Hotmail have low (and here we are discussion LOW) downtime compared to that amout of data their servers are serving each day. Why?

Whois output from Internic.net showing number of nameservers @ hotmail.com

Hey Brad, you know I don't post on any Hosting related threads, but in this case I had to stop in and say you are right on. Like usual your thoughts are very well written and very true and valid.
I can't wait to see you in Vegas, and this time we need to sit down for a bit.....
Once again, great thread.

I am VERY!! happy with my current host. But, I always prefer to have my dedicated servers on more then one network. Then, if they go down for any reason, my entire business doesn't come to a halt. Plus, for my key Search Engine pages and member site, I also mirror all of my material on completely different networks.

But then again, why am I giving an explanation. I have sent emails to various hosts explaining in detail my requirements...that would make me a serious potential customer... Instead..I see them posting on this board...and jumping on little Virtual hosting orders...apparently they have never heard about the 80/20 rule in business.

In the grand scheme of things, name servers have very little to do with overall redundancy. For instance, unless I have two different locations, if my network is down, having a name server somewhere else does no good at all. While you may be able to resolve my domain names, you still can't get to the sites.

In a properly set up name server environment, the secondary name server is automatically updated by the primary. Should the primary go down, the secondary will answer requests. Also, anyone who is serious about redundancy will have a spare primary server set up ready to put in place should the primary fail. This can be achieved very easily.

As for your hotmail question...if you do a traceroute on those 4 name servers, you will see that they all wind up on the same network. While you may occasionally see a company that has their name servers on two different IP blocks, there are very few that actually have their name servers on entirely different networks located in different facilities (for the reason I explained in my first paragraph).

Name servers are just hardware. Keep spares around and all is good. Making sure that the sites and network are always up is the most important part, and that's done through an overall plan. :thumbsup

I'm not sure if this last paragraph was directed at me, but if you have sent an email to our sales email address, because of the holiday, my sales people may not have checked their email (although I contacted one of them and they didn't have anything in their box that they hadn't already responded to). If you would like, you can send an email to me at bill AT national-net DOT com, however, I can tell you that I can't come close to $400 dollars for a 10 meg line and won't even try. :)

Me too.

Please show me under $1/gig with the reliability of Rackspace (not my only host, but one of many) with all of its full redundancies and countless measures to ensure 99.999% uptime.

Phil is a pimp.

Nope, this wan't directed at you. Sorry for the confusion. And no, I haven't in any of my emails indicated the current price I am paying or the network that I am hosting on now. Nor, do I expect to receive non-cogent bandwidth for anywhere near the price that I am paying now.

To add additional cogent servers would defeat my main goal of ensuring redundancy, so I am looking for non-cogent hosts.

LBBV: I am with you, completely. Thats what I meant with,

Downtime is our biggest enemy - in fact the whole internets weakest point. Why should it be so hard for hosts to understand that? And even if they do.. redundancy must not fail in any level!

So can you shut down Hotmail? I dare ya. Hehe...

LOL

LOL!!! Well, the last time I shut down hotmail, they weren't very happy with me :Graucho

Seriously though, for a service like hotmail, I would bet that the name servers are actually a very small part of their whole redundancy and security plan. I can only imagine the number of people that they have working on that particular service!

I'm glad we agree. :)

One of the things that some of our customers have heard me say is "knowing what I know about the internet and how it works, what with 1000's of networks, routers, servers, switches, then throw in the human element, I'm amazed that it even stays up at all!"

All it takes is one fat-fingered network engineer to cause a whole bunch of problems.

SinHost uptime: :thumbsup
SinHost support: :thumbsup

Two thumbs up. :)

Jak

I just have to say... this is how I feel about the subject. Multiple spares when it comes to networking hardware (switches et al), a spare primary nameserver just sitting there waiting... $10k in spare inventory so I can throw a server together or fix a broken one in no time.

We are a smaller company... our salaries are only around $20K per month. Bandwidth still is our biggest cost.

In descending order:

bandwidth
salaries
rackspace
harwdare
office space (and everything included like insurance and whatnot)

We have put together a pretty solid product - we haven't had a network outage in two years. Sure we have had some servers go thru a hardware issue or a wild home made script eat up all available file handles or something but those problems are all easily resolved.

Webmasters are just easily fooled by glitz and glam.

This has been a fun thread, I always enjoy when us hosts can toss some thoughts around :) Sometimes I see you good guys sitting threads out when I think everyone would like to also hear what you have to say.

With regard to the DNS server question, LBBV answered it appropriately I thought. I have two DNS servers on the same network that update one another. If I was offline, it wouldn't matter if I had a nameserver in some other far off place. The practical reason to have two nameservers is to protect against hardware failure in at least one unit and also so that it is okay to do a reboot on a nameserver if in fact one is needed.

NatNet is infinitely larger than me, unequivocally. You're absolutely right about the costs of redundant routers, equipment, employees and the million other things being exceptionally high. Me, I'm running a newer hosting operation. While I am not as sophisticated or large as your operation I believe that in time I probably will be. Entering the market as a host this year allowed me to take advantage in negotiations with my facility, upstream provider, decreases in hardware costs and much more. I simply pass these savings along to my customers.

Inevidably, as I grow, many costs will increase. As that happens I will respond as needed. In the interim, I am proud that the end result of my efforts is in fact a high performance network for my clients and uptime that is easily in the 99.999% range. I've got spares for hard drives, cpus, fans, power supplies, routers, switches, cat5, fiber and a list of other things too. Shit inevidably happens, it's only prudent to be prepared.

I do run a small operation! I keep costs low by doing most of the sales myself and paying a huge comission to other people that refer sales so that I don't have to have the carry of a sales staff. Honestly, most of my new clients are referrals from satisfied customers. I don't know how many employees one would think I need but I can assure everyone that the two full-time tech support people I have now in addition to other contractors is plenty. When my volumes increase, I'll add more.

I rarely worry about my "trade secrets"... My SinTalk program has been copied over and over again yet I still lead the industry with my phone sex business. If anyone else wants to go through the headache to get into the hosting business, they're damn welcome. As far as I'm concerned, it's virtually impossible for any new company to break out and succeed in today's market unless they're really savvy.

People can laugh and poke fun at my pricing for dedicated being lower than many... but at the end of the day I'm delivering the same tangible result, even if the way I got there was a little bit different. Nothing in my hosting business is financed and now that I'm over the first "hump" it's turning into the cash machine I knew it would. Having everything bought and paid for means that my monthly math has become really simple. <lol>

In the midst of many bad hosts, there are alot of great hosting companies to choose from. This is a buyer's market, no doubt. As with any other business that evolves inevidably some giants will fall and some small companies will never break out. One thing is for sure though, the "retail" and "wholesale" cost of ANY industry never stays the same year after year. Technology is smarter, quicker, cheaper and so are good employees... if you haven't noticed, we're in a recession. It only seems appropriate that some of these things would lead to a savings for customers.

Oh, I might as well babble some more.

I don't allow any spammers on my network... and I've always paid my upstream providers. I'm a perfect fucking client for Verio and they know it. Today they sell me 200mbit, 1st quarter 2003 it'll be 500mbit and by the end of next year it'll easily be far beyond a gigabit. Doesn't seem big enough? Oh well, I'm plenty happy with those figures and wouldn't be surprised if I exceed them. Included with growth will be other service enhancements, hardware upgrades, staffing increases. I might never be the biggest fish in the pond but I have no doubt that I'll continue to grow my six digit hosting salary while always improving service to my customers. For me, that's enough.

Someday... someday... there will be a piss and moan thread on GFY about SinHost. We're bound to trip, eventually, everyone does. When it happens, I'll take the flames and told-you-so's that are probably due to come my way. However, I can guarantee you that when we do I'll not only own up to it but commit every possible resource to communicating with our clients and resolving the problem ASAP. That's all any one of us good hosts can do.

At $1500 for 10mbit and a server I'm way cheaper than some hosts, more expensive than some others. Ultimately, I'm plenty happy with my margins. If I wasn't doing something right, I wouldn't own every piece of hardware at the colo. Does anyone else have a debt free hosting company :winkwink:

Cheers,

Brad

Most of the large sites (Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, etc., etc.,) are hosted in multiple locations that are all built like rocks. These guys spend MILLIONS on their hosting per month. I know Yahoo is in at least 6 different data centers across the United States with 3 different providers. Same with Google. Big bucks for this stuff and how often do they go down?

Brad,

I've followed your posts and your progress the last few months, and I would definitely have to say that you are in the select group of people who I feel truly understand the hosting business and the importance of doing it right :) While you may be smaller than us, because of the way you approach the business makes you a great fit for many webmasters.

There is still plenty of room for good competition, but my concern is that while there are a few good hosting companies out there, for every 1 good hosting company, there are 6 more that are looking for a quick buck instead of looking at the long range "big" picture. Thus the reason for so many ugly hosting threads on this board, which of course, sometimes makes the entire hosting industry suspect.

The bottom line is that when everything is running great, no one ever hears a word about a particular company, but when things are NOT running great, they are in everyone's eye. It's the old "what have you done for me lately" mentallity...