Bad Hosting Companies Do they hurt your business? (long post)
 

How can a bad hosting company destroy your business?

There are lots of ways. Webmasters rely on traffic traded between sites all the time for sales. Wether it be a top search engine listing or a good trade with another site that trasffic is depended upon. When a hosting company goes down because they cannot manage the traffic they are getting you lose.

I am going to explain a few ways hosting companies mistreat their customers in this regard.

1. Name Servers: If a hosting company does not know how to properly set and maintain their name servers it meanes there is a traffic leak. Say their number one name server starts getting a lot of requests, more requests than the server can handle. By default the requests look for a second name server. If that name server is on the same server as the first name server or not configured properly your traffic is lost.

2. Overloading Servers: It has been posted many times where a hosting company gets caught selling virtual servers as dedicated boxes. If your hosting on a machine that has been overloaded the services running on that machine can get so overloaded the requests for your pages get lost. This is caused by many things. Kernels not being properly built, Apache not being optimized, MySql being overloaded, Stats programs running with large log files, I can go on and on for the reasons. Good hosting companies that sell virtual servers have limits on thier servers and make sure these services don't get overloaded.

3. Running Open Mail Relays: If your hosting company is running open mail relays this can run the resources on your server. Spammers scan for these all the time. If they find one that will accept their mail they use it till it gets shut down. This can cause major problems for the websites and programs running on these machines.

4. IRC Programs: IRC and webservers should never be on the same machine. IRC by default allows people to access the server therefore is very unsecure when running on the same server as a website.

Webmasters spend a lot of time setting up thier websites, programs to run thier websites, and setting up traffic trades. They then look for the best price in hosting. This alone can be hurting your business. I am not saying all resellers are bad. There are many resellers out there that offer different services than the parent company where they are hosted. However when I see a reseller that can't properly secure a name server or mail server I make sure people know to stay away from them.

Don't let hosting companies fool you. Want to check out your hosting company? Here are some tests that should be performed before you even consider hosting with them.

1. Check thier name servers. Do they even work? If you have shell access to a server perform the following tests.

a. whois <hosting company url here>
IE: bestwebhost.com

b. when you do the whois it will return the name servers the hosting company is using IE: ns1.bestwebhost.com and ns2.bestwebhost.com Now check to see if these names actually work. First ping them by name.
ping ns1.bestwebhost.com
ping ns2.bestwebhost.com
After you ping them then do a whois on the ip address it returned.
whois xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
This will return who owns the IP block. Now it's not always nesecary for the hosting company to own the IP block but it will let you know who they are reselling for.

2. Check thier mail server for open relays. At http://www.abuse.net/relay.html By default most companies use:

pop.bestwebhost.com
smtp.bestwebhost.com
mail.bestwebhost.com

For thier mail servers.

If it returns a message like this:

THIS MAY OR MAY NOT MEAN THAT IT'S AN OPEN RELAY.

Some systems appear to accept relay mail, but then reject messages internally rather than delivering them, but you cannot tell at this point whether the message will be relayed or not.

You cannot tell if it is really an open relay without sending a test message; this anonymous user test DID NOT send a test message.


Chances are it's an open mail relay ... stay away from these. Your business depends on you recieving your email too if the server is overloaded with spammers then your mail will get bypassed.

3. Traceroute to thier machines: IE: traceroute bestwebhost.com or in windows use tracert bestwebhost.com Look for long gaps in the times. Look for time outs also. * * * is a time out.

4. Ask the potential host to setup a test file for downloading. 1 meg file or better. The good hosts already have these files and will allow you to do this.

There are many more ways to check if your going with a good host but these are the basics that should be done before you even consider a host.

Hope this information helps just 1 webmaster find a decent hosting company.

Thanks,
JFPDude

Great post hun!

:thumbsup

another way to damage your business is when TECHS that you hire disappear for 6 months and leave YOUR BUSINESS HANGING.

Your business was not left hanging I have the paypal refund that I sent to you to prove it.

I left one person hanging because I forgot to get back to him and your not him.

We were lucky enough to have him flake before the contract was signed. In retrospect, I am thankful for that.

Great post

Bump for the afternoon crew

JFPDude, has gracioualy allowed CH33RS.COM to reprint these articles for webmasters in the future to read.

thansk again JFPDude, and keep it up.

http://www.ch33rs.com/hosts.html
http://www.ch33rs.com/security.html

another way they can do you is doing a "like whoa", IE dissapear off the face of the planet with your servers and data

if you don't own your own boxes you are fucked I always try and buy them

Likewhoa disappeared with some boxes people owned also.

But your right if you know how to manage your own servers the best thing is to own your own boxes ... I do.


No problem man enjoy.. more to follow.

not the only ones either :haha

didnt a server admin get busted stealing servers too? hell i was hosting with them (colo i believe??) during that too! been so long,... bad times i try to forget

There is a lot more to that whole debakle that will never be known in full.

Another great reason to perform backups.

Hahaha so true we taught a few people through that deal didn't we ? :winkwink:

a great post ;)
I understand what you are talking about :)

heh 106 views on a subject everybody deals with ... I should have titled it naked paris pics. LMFAO

Good Post! Here's a cool tool that you can run your site thru and see how it measures up.
http://www.dnsreport.com/

Nice post, I'm bookmarking it.

Good post!

Yah, I still have a few clients from that :)

I also helped transfer a whole bunch of people to other hosting companies. Wonder how many remember it.

I remember it vividly. :thumbsup

:winkwink:

LMFAO :thumbsup