A Host of Questions Has Hosts Talking

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A Host of Questions Has Hosts Talking
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by Jay Lyman
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July 6, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
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REVIEW) — There are a lot of questions in the hosting industry – some
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more easily answered than others. Whether it’s what outsourced services
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Web hosts use, getting high or even unlimited bandwidth from a host,
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dealing with sites being down without going crazy, or worse, a
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girlfriend who has run off with your servers, Web hosts and their
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significant others were asking and answering a number of critical
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questions in industry forums during the last few weeks.
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One of the basic questions posed to hosts on the WebHostingTalk (webhostingtalk.com) forums concerned the outsourced services they use
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in running a hosting business. Web hosts responded that, for server and
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system monitoring, they use mostly Alertra with some mention of
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WebSitePulse.com; for Flash tutorials, DemoDemo won praise; billing and
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merchant services mentioned included WHM AutoPilot, Modern Bill,
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ClientExec, Authorize.net, 2 Checkout and Paypal; for live chat and
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support hosts looked to Kayako and PHP Live. Respondents also reported
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a good deal of custom work, adding that monitoring, support and even
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tutorials and ad writing was all done in-house. The other point made
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here dealt with value. “If you’re going to run a hosting company and
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want to be successful,” said one host, “you’d better be prepared to
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spend some cash.”
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Customers who spend their cash on Web
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hosting are often unsure how much bandwidth they will actually need,
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leading to another key question posed to WebHosting Talk in the latest
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round of discussion. The question in this case
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was whether there were “any good high bandwidth hosts out there?” The
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inquiring customer said he would like unlimited bandwidth, and earned
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some jeers with the idea of a terabyte per month, but was basically
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trying to avoid overage charges while Web-casting video for a gaming
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fan site. The consensus among Web hosts was that there is no real
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unlimited bandwidth offered because it simply is not feasible. “If any
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host claims to offer you that, you can expect them to shut down your
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site the moment it pushes 20GB of transfer or sooner for ‘overusing CPU
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resources’ or some other nonsense,” said one response. The customer was
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also advised that if bandwidth was a concern and budget was realistic,
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a dedicated server was in order.
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Recent posts to an older SitePoint (sitepoint.com) thread regarding CSS and whether it is a cleaner language and layout than older methods – the consensus was that it is – resulted in a discussion
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of the change to newer technology. One poster, who called use of GIFs
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as spacers a fourth generation browser-class move, said the abandonment
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of TABLEs and its exclusion from the W3C spec, not even proposed but
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possible, will make sites “look utterly crap overnight.” However,
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another respondent argued that sites would not actually change at all
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even if the W3C was to change its spec, which is unlikely because the
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table construct is quite valid for tabular data. “[Sites] won’t
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actually change at all,” said the poster. “Because even if a new spec
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comes out, it’ll take years before all browsers in the wild will
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support it, and it’s likely that general browsers will still have
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backwards-compatible modes that enable them to render at least XHTML
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1.0 strict [if not even HTML 4.01] for quite a while.”
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Another discussion, this one on HostHideout (hosthideout.com) centered on the question of how to keep from going crazy
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in the face of servers offline for four days. “We’ve lost our mind.
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What do I have to do?” said a frustrated poster who referred to
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repetitive emails, short messages and phone calls that went unanswered.
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Hosts chiming in on the discussion advised the questioner to seek a
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refund, find a new host and look into the provider more thoroughly next
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time around.
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That advice might also apply to another distressed hosting poster
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who complained, “My girlfriend ran off with my server, help! Please
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help. I don’t know what to do.” The questioner explained that after he
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and his girlfriend had garnered 56 clients to host on two servers
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running in their home, the scamp left him in the night and took the
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servers with her. With sites down along with the poster’s love life,
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hosts offered their usual words of comfort. “Report it as theft, that’s
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all you can do, and choose your girlfriend a bit more wisely next
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time.”
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