When Hosts Go Bad…

My most recent annoyance has to be web hosting. My previous web host Manlius went out of business. No notice or warning. I just woke up and the website, email, and domain was dead. Apparently they hadn’t paid the data center and thus the data center pulled the plug. I don’t imagine there will be any refunds without a lawsuit, and who is going to sue for around $50? They served me well for 3 years but I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall. Thankfully, somehow a customer was able to pay the bill ($650) and get the data back online long enough for some (including myself) to get a good backup. I have now moved myself to Site5.com.

You see, being a web host means you are a part of a pyramid scheme. A person can buy a lot of bandwidth and disk space from a company and then fraction them off and resell them at whatever price they want. As evidenced above, this “host” can go out of business overnight taking the money you’ve paid (and your data) with seemingly little recourse for the average consumer (as they host your site in some far away state and possibly live in yet another state, each with their own laws). So the goal as a customer is to buy your way up as high as possible in the pyramid (as those companies will be more financially stable and solvent). Of course, the higher you go, the more expensive it is.

As a first time buyer there are a number of things you should be doing to help your search. Your first step should be to visit a forum like Web Hosting Talk and get a feel for the providers out there. There will be many people offering services and reviewing the qualities of hosts they’ve been with. Web Hosting Talk slants toward the reseller side for discussions as opposed to the single website (shared host) type customer, but what is good for the reseller is usually good for those that only need a shared host. Here is a list of things that I have learned over the past 3 years:

• Start with checking the age of the company on their “About” web page. The Internet didn’t get really big for consumer web hosting till the late 90’s so a company that has been a web host since 98-99 is actually on the “old” side. Use a “whois” (like BetterWhois) and look up the domain of the host and see when it was registered. Does its “Creation Date” match when their company was said to have started? When does the domain name expire? A decent company would pay ahead as it doesn’t cost all that much to do. (Manlius created 1999, registered to 2006 — Site5 created 1999, registered to 2012) If the “About” page focuses more on what data center the company is in rather than about the company then look elsewhere.
• Sometimes things are simple. Look at the design of the website. Do all of the pages work? Are there obvious ways to contact support and sales (preferably a phone number)? Do they pages look like they are a design template or are they custom? (Manlius was based off of a templated structure, Site5 has in house web designers) Most pages with Macromedia Flash banners and music are templated or based off of a template. I think a web host should know how to make a web page or at least have a good design company hired for such a task, templates just smack of a cheap reseller in my opinion.
• Sometimes things are a bit more complicated. The price of the package is one example. It is common for inexperienced hosts to oversell their allotment of bandwidth (or server resources) yet larger companies can afford to risk it. The expectation is that even though they give you 50GB of monthly transfer, they hope you will only use about 3GB. But what if you use all 50GB? You’re eating into their profit margin (as they have to pay for any bandwidth overages). For example, Network Solutions offers 10GB a month @ $10. So thats $1 per GB of transfer. Manlius was at $0.83 and Site5 is at $0.14! To be honest, this data point scares me for Site5. Its a good deal, yet it means a lot of new customers with some possibly overloaded servers. So Site5 doesn’t seem to be worried about bandwidth but if you get some resource hungry websites on their servers you could run into service interruptions (which they have had). In their defense they have in-house engineers that have designed a loading system that is supposed to load balance the servers. Of course the basic plan doesn’t qualify for this service, so if things go bad the only options are to beg for the server to be checked on or be up-sold to the next account package.
• The servers being up does not mean you can access your website. Take uptime percentages with a grain of salt. Sure the server is up 99.9% of the time, but are your web pages accessible that often? Nearly all hosts have access to amazing data centers.. Air conditioning, multiple backbone connections, gas generators, backups etc.. Just realize, regardless of how clean the place is or how well it runs, if your server has too many clients on it, or the host can’t configure the server and your package well, then you’re still in for a world of hurt. So some hosts try and shove home the uptime and data center qualities, at the end of the day these aren’t the important qualities that make a good web host. In fact, the uptime of 99% should be expected and a good data center just goes with the territory. Site5 uses a 3rd party to monitor their servers and show their uptime statistics. Bonus points here as they put their money where their mouth is.
• Test the response time of the company. Start with a pre-sale question to their sales department (make note of sales hours first though). In the event you get the service, try a simple support request (turning on telnet access is usually one easy thing to ask for, it isn’t always on by default and I find it a very handy utility for web work) and see how long it takes to get a response.
• If you don’t already have a domain name (www.blah.com) then when you get one go with a “top” level registrar. Top level registrars are the company’s at the top that handle the domain name registrations. Being a “registrar” can also be resold. I can purchase rights to resell access to domain names as a stand-in for some top level registrar. What this means, is that the top level registrar may not know about you directly as a customer, and thus if your host/registrar goes out of business you have to go through some support hoops to get access to your domain names. This is what happened to me. Manlius (and their registrar company Becomeadomain) are gone. So I have no way of updating the info for my domains (to point to Site5 for example). My only recourse was to contact Directi.com (who sold the registrar rights to Manlius) and get the domain control switched over to their service. I decided to forego this option though and just transfer the domain registration to a different top level registrar (Go Daddy). Network Solutions and Enom are also good options for big top level registrars.

Well, thats how I went about it this time around. Will add more as I see it…