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Identifying and Avoiding Dishonest Hosting Providers?
An anonymous reader asks: "Recently I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with the buyout and resulting problems problems of Managed.com by WebHostPlus, Alphared (aka Orangefiber) being dishonest about backup facilities (no power backups and not multi-homed), and CalPop overselling bandwidth. What can we do to protect us from these companies, they all seem to be have web sites and be real companies, but we seem to get scammed by them. The dishonest ones look a lot like the honest ones. We can't afford the attorney's fees or to build a data-center, and that is why we pay the monthly fee to host a server, but the companies do not have what they claim to, nor do they care about the customers. We contacted two attorneys in the United States and they said that the companies didn't have any assets worth going after. What does Slashdot think of these problems and what can we do to avoid them?"
Referrals are a good place to start. Find out more about the data center; don't just hit the buy button on the website. How about taking responsibility for your reliability? That means having a backup plan and being able to quickly move to another facility. Its just like anything else really. Do you homework.
Swing by http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and check them out before putting money down. A really solid community, where SOMEONE will have experiance with any given provider. And many of the members are more on the profesional side of thigns, not what another comment here refered to as "the clueless PHB set".
First off, you can not entirely avoid a dishonest host. Second, your vulnerability depends on the type of service you are looking for.
Dedicated:
If you want to be the safest with a dedicated server, order from one of the providers such as EV1 and TP. You are less likely to be screwed. The downside to this is higher cost and less personalized service. The large companies have their problems, but them disappearing generally is not one of them.
Shared:
No matter what, there is a good chance you will get screwed. It is simply the nature of the industry. There are thousands upon thousands of hosts out there. Before purchasing service, check for comments on the company at WHT (webhostingtalk.com). That will give you an idea of the hosts popularity (based on the number of complaints) and the level of service (based on the types of complaints). Most threads relating to companies are negative (a happy customer has no reason to post). More importantly, take a look at what you are getting. If the host is offering unlimited bandwidth or disk space, stay away. Every host out there counts on you using only a fraction of the resources allocated to you. If you are paying $20 month, do not expect to host a website getting thousands of visitors per day. Simply put, you get what you pay for.
More important than anything else, keep backups. If you don't have a backup from the previous 48 hours, it is your own fault.
Actually, Googling for web hosts makes the process of shopping around even more confusing. A lot of these outfits are either in cahoots or owned by the same person, and they set up websites that purport to offer impartial reviews of several web hosts but which are actually just shills. The way they network the sites together, they get a high pagerank without being obvious link farms.
;)
As far as I can tell, one of the best ways to find a decent hosting provider is to already be a member of a small online (or RL) community where a few other people are web hosting subscribers, and ask their opinions. No, Slashdot doesn't count
Step one: Know what you need. 'Reliable' doesn't mean anything. *How* reliable? To what level? What is an acceptable risk level for the facility your data will be in, or must your data be multihomed? If the latter, failover or clustered? Etc. Make sure that the company can tell you how it will meet all these requirements, in writing, to you and your lawyer's satisfaction before signing a contract.
Step two: Referrals. Who else do they host? Check uptimes. Talk to their other customers. If they won't give you references, or if they can't give you companies you've either heard of or can verify have existed and are independent, walk.
Step three: Read the contract. Better yet, have your lawyers read the contract. Anything fuzzy? Push them on it. If they waffle at all, or look like they're trying to get you to sign terms they might give way on if you push (not the price, the *terms*) DANGER. Established hosting companies should have their risks well set out and know what it will cost them to assume whatever level of risk - at worst, they should simply change pricing if you try to reassign risk, or simply tell you they don't offer that service level.
Step four: GO LOOK AT THE FACILITY. No excuse for that. If your business is going to depend on this facility, you need to see it. No trusting web photos. This is your place of business and your physical plant. If your business depends on it being available, or worse yet on it being something that you describe to *your* customers, it's your responsibility to eyeball it. If you don't know what you're looking for (and if you're a business type, there's no shame in that) then find a technical person to eyeball it with you and pay them for their time.
Step five: If you're concerned about their available bandwidth, ask to see bandwidth reports. Ask for peers who can verify their connectivity. When you visit a facility, ask to see the external switching facilities and rough-count circuits if you have to. If you're still concerned, then tell them you want legal guarantees (with penalties) in the contract for available bandwidth - they shouldn't bat an eye at that, since the more bandwidth you (verifiably) use, the more they should be able to bill you, probably. If they balk at potential penalties for short bandwidth, there's likely a problem. Typically, they themselves will offer tight bandwidth monitoring just so they can bill you for those bits.
Step six, and final for me: HAVE A BACKUP PLAN. Things can and will go wrong. The best hosting provider out there might suffer incredibly bad luck and multilevel catastrophe. EVERY admin will have horror stories of 'the two things that would never go wrong together' going wrong. My favorite is a switching center in downtown Boston having *both* of its redundant data pipes being taken out by construction on the same day by the Big Dig, on opposite sides of the building. This might mean having a small backup system in another center on the smae provider. It might mean having a staging system in a home office that can be brought live on limited bandwidth. I don't know, that's *your* problem. It might just mean having a really good PR checklist. But HAVE A PLAN.
Sure, if you're not dependent on an uptime number, these steps may not be necessary. But if, as the question seems to imply, your success or failure will be tightly coupled to the reliability of your hosting provider, then there's no substitution for Doing The Work.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
For the most, it will be hard to avoid, especially when another company aquires your former host. I ran into this recently when WHP (yep, the same company in the OP) bought out Netbunch. It went from a crown jewel of a hosting company into a nightmare almost overnight.
Blotched migrations (why keep the nice shiny fast servers, when we can move you to our own slow oversold ones?), horrible support (tickets unanswered for weeks or closed without reply), constant downtimes (usually 2-6 hours / day for weeks on end), and completely incompetent techs (Can even follow simple instructions it seems).
WHP doesn't seem to have a grasp on how to handle migrations, nor cares to learn from their mistakes. Just google them to see their handy work all over the place. Which leads to the best advice anyone can probably give, research the host fully first. A hosting provider not showing up in any of the webhosting forums is not always a bad thing, as it seems to be human nature to complain 10x as much as praise. Along as the host isn't "new" then you should have plenty to go off of.
Also, find out when they were started, and be sure to google the whois address and the support's telephone number to see if you get any hits. A lot of bad hosting providers have multiple sites under different company names, but ofcourse have the same main office and the same support hotline.
Two ways:
1. Hack a server or two and have a poke around the network yourself to see what they have.
2. Assume the worst when talking to them. If you say with full and complete confidence that you know they're lying, they'll admit it (if they are).
ResidntGeek
http://www.dreamhost-sucks.com/
Dreamhost is nice for a small site, but there is an unpublished CPU limitation that you can't go over, meaning that unless you're serving a few large static files, you're going to hit that cap before you ever hit their oversold promises. I use dreamhost, and they're OK, but you should know their limitations.
By the way, if you DO decide to use dreamhost, use the MAX97 code instead... the parent's code gives them $90 and you $7. MAX97 takes the entire referral fee off your bill.
Somewhere in there, you will have a credit analyst. Make friends with this person. They will have access to Dun & Bradstreet reports, paydex scores, and a host of other information about the hosting provider. They are the best people in most companies to research other companies -- because that's what they do for a living.
In a smaller company, it might make the most sense to speak to the department head/CFO, because you don't want their normal sales analysis, but rather a dependability analysis (similar, uses many of the same things, but not automated).
If you have questions, ask for CPA certified financials -- or at least a letter of attestation from a CPA firm that says they own/lease the multiple facilities, lines, etc. and that the company and pricipals are financially sound.
You'll want to be able to apply legal pressure if possible and you won't want some weird law in another country to trip you up. As an example, the company I work for is not based in the USA and has worked on some oil exploration data orininally gathered by the USSR in Iran. Obviously getting that back to the clients via an ftp site in Texas (one of the best economic options) would be a bad idea in case some loonie decided it was in his nations intrest to show it to a lot of people - most likely eventually including competitors of our client because spooks would need an expert opinion. Other countries have other laws designed to stop money laundering or have some effect on terrorism (or use that as an excuse) which could have unexpected consequences and hit you will collatoral damage - as well as the obvious theives which are hard to get if they are in another country.
First of all, don't go with 'flashy' hosts that try to woo you with their whiz-bang web design unless it's one of the big, well-known hosts. By this, I mean look at their website design. Does it look like a template? The sort that involve stock art pictures of people. If so, stay away.
You know.. I actually never thought of that but it's totally true. My web host's site had no CSS when I joined and the tables were all borked so bad I had to call them. $60/year for a gig of space and 3 gigs of bandwidth and my sites are the fastest I've visited (no links to avoid being labeled a whore). Since I know the guy, I'll leave the name of my host out of it.
I will, however, mention bargainname.com. Their website is almost 1997 vintage (it works but it's barely even HTML 4), but I've bought ~20 domains from them at $8/year (likely higher now) with no strings attached. I've even transfered to another domain provider for free (when a different hosting service forced me to). I'm not affiliated with bargainname in any way. They're owned by "dotster".. whoever that is..
Btw, bargainname may have sold my mailing address (how would I know), but apart from *possibly* that, I've never even shopped for another domain reseller since I've found them.
Latewire
Especially at the low end, you have to do a bit of searching on sites like SitePoint forums or WebHostingTalk. Keep in mind, almost every large web host will get a bad review now and then; however, as long as there doesn't seem to be a large number of complaints, you're off to a good start. Unfortunately, with hosting, it is possible to offer pretty decent basic hosting packages at very low prices. If the host is good everything is automated, hardware is cheap (for everyone), and bandwidth at a datacenter is cheap. So it's not safe to assume that you get what you pay for.
The best thing to do IMHO, is to get a personal reference from either a comparable website to yours or a friend who actually uses the product. For instance, when I was looking at VPS's about two years ago, it was very reassuring to find out that Damn Small Linux was hosted with the provider that I had short-listed (and eventually chose).
We are a small ISP/hosting/consulting firm and just because we're small doesn't mean we can't/don't offer quite a few of "extras" like generator power multi-homed and plentiful backup space. Just because a company is small doesn't mean they can't provide. But at the same time you can't take their word for it either. Find out where their facilities are and ask for a tour. Sometimes a tour might not be possible due to security restrictions on facilities, but that doesn't make it any less likely that they can't provide. For example we are in a building that's shared by about 30 other companies. While I could allow you access to our areas, I couldn't get you into the rest.
Doing your homework is always best. The internet is a wonderful tool and when used properly the answers to all your questions are out there. I say this often, and it holds true in just about everything. Cost is always a concern noone wants to spend more than they have to, but if someone is selling you an entire cabinet for $400/mth power included, I would question where they are making their money. That's not to say that you should willingly pay $2000 for a single cabinet, but cost and quality are usually related to each other.
Referrals are probably one of the best ways to go. Because we are small and are forced to compete with the big guys we have to cut corners. While I refuse to cut corners where it matters, I have to shave on the "extras" that aren't necessary for operations. For example, instead of spending $100k on advertising a year, we buy equipment. Instead of buying $2k desks and $8k conference tables, we buy....equipment. I think you get the idea. Since we spend very little money on advertising our growth comes specifically from word of mouth. There are plenty of good providers out there just like us that operate the same way.
That used to be the case.
The world has gotten to be too litiguous for this. 5 years ago people would not have had any doubts before posting that a company sucks.
Nowdays people will think 10 times before doing that. For example, if I have some shitty experience with a company I usually post the exact description of a problem I run into with all relevant details including a mail trail where applicable. No emotions. No expletives. I have noticed that I am not the only one doing this lately. Noone wants to get sued after all.
If you search for "Company Name" + sucks you are likely to limit your set of results to posts by kids who do not think about having to deal with the fallout from their actions. In many cases they do not know what to do, how to do it, have not bothered to read the product description and do not know what they have bought.
I usually use "Company Name" + problem for searches like this. It gives better results lately.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Dreamhost are actually very forward about their CPU situation:
o ut-overselling/ A Q
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-ab
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/CPU_Minutes_F
I hope that helps. Ive been using Dreamhost for several moderately high bandwidth sites over the past year and I have no complaints at all, infact I enjoy their 'professionally unprofessional' stance (re the newsletter).