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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?"
The submitter implied Google was not suitable with the remark "making data siphoning easy for the NSA".
How is FireHost significantly less vulnerable to the NSA when "The Letter" arrives? From what I see FireHost has significant infrastructure in USA, a CEO with US ties, many employees living in the USA.
If the NSA is not a worry to the asker, then there are many solutions, FireHost possibly being one of them. If the NSA is an issue then it becomes trickier...
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.
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
Neither of which you'd necessarily be informed of. There's two ways to approach security; tamper-evident, and tamper-resistant. Everyone is focusing on tamper-resistant right now to deal with the NSA; "How do we stop them?" ... Have you noticed nobody is asking the question; How do we detect them? Sneakernet also had the benefit of being tamper-evident... if they broke down your door, you'd come home to a broken door. It'd be pretty obvious that something was up. Legal or illegal, when you physically search a property, you leave evidence behind that you did so. However, much of the technology the NSA is using doesn't leave any proverbial fingerprints behind.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What actually is a complete hosting provider?
I don't get the question in the summary. It sounds like the guy is asking for a host he can pay that will automatically set up some arbitrary services that he's decided constitute "complete hosting"?
I don't really see how an ISP can cater to such an arbitrary definition when there's literally millions of different services an ISP could be expected to provide.
Isn't the solution just to get your own VPS or dedicated server and just install everything you want on it or am I missing something here?
Is there some defintion of "Complete Hosting Provider" whereby said provider to conform must provide the services the summary is asking for even though it's a rather obscure combination of things to provide on one host?
From what I can fathom the answer to the question is: "You are not the only person on the internet, different people have different use cases, no ISP could possibly cater to ever combination people may want, nor would they probably want to because it would require having experts in each of those millions of technologies to manage them all hence why they stick to their areas of expertise or provide you a blank server you can install whatever the hell you want to on". Unless there is some definition of "Complete Hosting" that encompasses only a fringe handful of available services then I can't see this changing.
You don't need to stop them, you just need to make their life too difficult for it to be worth chasing you when you've got nothing worth chasing for.
The more people that do this the more it eats into NSA resources, if you force a real person into the loop to decide if you're worth chasing then you really cause a massively disproportionate impact on the NSA's resources compared to if you just let them farm your data automatically from unencrypted services they have a tap on like Google.
Then eventually when things like the Boston bombings keep happening despite the NSA has a mass of financing from the US government behind it and taps on most the world someone in congress is finally going to have to ask "What the fuck is the point in all this expenditure?" and the plug is going to get pulled.
If the NSA ends up chasing, expensively, because of the cost of intervention of human resources, people who are entirely irrelevant and innocent of everything, then eventually they're going to have to change tact. Eventually they're going to have to realise that universal snooping is ineffective and just makes it even harder to tell who really is and isn't a threat. They'll have to go back to what they should be doing in the first place - focusing on the hard work of identifying real actual threats rather than hoping a mass computer network will somehow figure that out for them, something the Boston case showed it absolutely can't.
As the owner of a hosting company, that's the same impression that i got. He's asking for a grouping of products that don't naturally group together. When people think of hosting, they think of web, mail, and dns. They generally don't think of VoIP, VPN, or XMPP, or whatever the submitter expects to receive when he asks for "public key" service. It's nonsense.
Squash
But what happens when a client wants half those services plus some others that aren't supported?
What services exactly do you deem to fulfil the criteria of being complete? What if someone wants an IRC server instead of XMPP?
If you really mean what you say then you can pay for it, if you don't want to set it up yourself you can hire someone to do all that for you and provide the arbitrary set of services and develop the bespoke software you need to integrate it all.
But what you're really saying in essence is "I want a bespoke easily managed server setup with integrated login, but I don't want to set it up myself and I don't want to pay enough for someone else to do it, I want it to be free like Google, or cheap". This isn't practical, Google can only offer what it does because it has a massive data mining operation and ad farm sat behind that to monetise it.
Contrary to your assertion otherwise, there is competition too, there's Microsoft with it's Office 365, Outlook.com and Skype offering but again they can only offer it because they have a massive amount of resources to do so and can monetise it through ads and data mining and tie in to their other offerings and it's not entirely free anyway - IIRC Office 365 is subscription based.
So again what exactly are you looking for? Seemingly you want to move away from Google because you don't like the NSA revelations, the data mining, or whatever else. You wont want Microsoft for the same reasons then I would guess given that it's at least as supportive. There's no business in anyone else doing it without that data mining operation behind it because no one will pay what it would cost then, most are happy to put up with the mining and ads if they get their stuff cheap or free. So the only option is for you to offer bespoke to your clients, but bespoke costs, and you don't want to set it all up yourself so you need to up the costs by hiring someone else but I'd wager you don't want this either?
What exactly is your position? it doesn't seem to make any sense. It sounds like you want to offer all in one services to people (clients?) but you don't want to actually do any work to earn your money from them. It sounds like you want to get a client and give them some turnkey bespoke solution, but a bespoke solution that you neither want to spend the effort to create, or presumably pay someone else to create. Are you asking to just make money as a middleman without putting the slightest bit of effort in to adding value to that position? That's what it sounds like.
If you are willing to pay someone else to do it then ask any number of bespoke software development houses. It's not going to be cheap though which again is going to return you to the question of whether there's even a business model in it, and if you return there you'll probably have your reason as to why no one else is doing it because you're again going to be outcompeted by Google's ad supported model.
I suspect this isn't the answer you wanted, but does it give you the answer you were looking for?