Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Complete Hosting Providers?

Kludge writes "In 2000 there were thousands of email/web hosting businesses. In 2013 not much has changed. To get my email/web/webmail/domain/VOIP/public-key/XMPP/VPN hosting I have to deal with five different service providers. Where are the complete hosting providers? The absence of competition in this area drives many to Google, making data siphoning easy for the NSA. Why has hosting not advanced in the last 10 years? Where are the hosting providers that make end-to-end encrypted email/web/VOIP/XMPP easy and automatic for all my clients?"

Comments

Shameless plug.

[philip.paradis]

I'm a senior engineer at FireHost, and we can provide managed infrastructure and installation assistance for the things you've listed, complete with managed SSL VPN access for all your employees.

Again, this is an admittedly shameless plug, but it does answer the question.

Re:Ummm

[Z00L00K]

I agree TFA has it wrong - there is a lot of competition going on all the time and the large amount of services that exists are good for most of us.

I can only guess that the writer of the TFA is lazy and not willing to search for the best suitable alternative. And if you want an all-in-one solution set up your own server.

Re:the cloud killed hosting providers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hostgator... was purchased by EIG a while back (joining ranks with Bluehost, among others). It's just all that much worse now. While the support provided by Hostgator was generally adequate even in relatively recent history, forced migrations and a slew of bone-headed business decisions were made... and now their support staff is generally tied up coping with the after effects. They could have easily vanished into "The Cloud", but there is something to be said for dedicated hardware. When you sell support as a service (a full staff of dedicated support admins cost more money than one might think), you need to make sure your _product_ isn't being contaminated by the doings of the factory. Indeed, these hosting models are steadily approaching the brink of experiencing natural selection first hand.

I don't use providers HQ in the USA

[Taco Cowboy]

The absence of competition in this area drives many to Google, making data siphoning easy for the NSA.

For me, I do not use any provider that has their HQ inside the United States of America.

And ... in order to retard NSA's snooping in my traffic, I deploy SSL forward secrecy on my sites.

Anyone who wants to know about forward secrecy please visit https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2013/06/25/ssl-labs-deploying-forward-secrecy to get more info

Re:I don't use providers HQ in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, I do not use any provider that has their HQ inside the United States of America.

And ... in order to retard NSA's snooping in my traffic, I deploy SSL forward secrecy on my sites.

Ditto. We are not a shop with ultra-high security requirements (in that case we would roll own our servers), but in current world situation, it is too high risk for us to host anything in USA. We have pulled out our data infrastructure from there.

Re:I don't use providers HQ in the USA

[loxfinger]

Right, because the reach of US surveillance stops dead at the border.

Re:I don't use providers HQ in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

The US surveillance still drops tremendously at the border.

Re:I don't use providers HQ in the USA

[ducomputergeek]

The one thing the NSA has that other countries largely don't: a fleet of submarines with cable tapping abilities and a bunch of com intercept sats in orbit. So if your traffic crosses an ocean at any point chances are it's tapped.

This ain't new shit either. The US was doing this to the soviet union back in the cold war 30 years ago. Blind Man's Bluff...good book if you want to read about it.

Re:the cloud killed hosting providers

[Squash]

Almost didn't reply to this, as it is feeding the trolls. However, I'd just like to say that rumors of the hosting business' death have been exaggerated.