Hosting in 2019?

[Beansprout]

14 years ago I started a little company in my bedroom because I was annoyed with the bad service and complexity of the established larger providers. Many people back then thought I was mad as they barely knew what broadband or email were, let alone things like web hosting and Linux!

I (we) sold it in 2015 for reasons best known to me, but after a little time out, I can't help keeping an eye on the state of things.

These days almost everyone uses the internet in one form or another.

But often buying web hosting is still confusing and expensive, with the same old tricks like prices that used to include VAT but now don't, free first years made up for by tacking on a second year at full price, extreme price increases announced seemingly at random, products of dubious technical performance, bundles of dubious value, washing of hands for simple technical issues and so on.

For example a simple .com domain, which I know we used to sell for less than a quid over our cost price, is now commonly sold for around £11 +VAT, in some cases £16 upwards. The cost price being under £7!

I used to sell a .uk domain for £2.99/year. The Nominet cost price has increased from £2.50 to £3.75 but even allowing for that I'm hard-pressed finding a company selling a .uk for under £8, let alone under £5!

Getting through a checkout process is in some cases as bad as buying a low-cost flight. Many providers use the old 'trick' of automatically selecting lengthy billing cycles, and another preselects an expensive addon by default, hidden costs to obtain a backup (yes really, I had the unfortunate pleasure of using a hosting company who charged me 5 quid for a cPanel backup!!), and so on.

I checked out a few cheap hosting 'offers' and the cart price shown to me was 58x the big offer on the homepage. I've no idea how I could have obtained the offer price. I think the 'offer' was a one month discount but I had to pay for 11, 599, or a whole menagerie's worth of extra months at full price.

Another one worked out to 57x the advertised price!

These are crazy margins and practices from a complacent industry. If I was making 30-50%+ on a domain alone then I would never have bothered with hosting or running my own servers or handling support at 2am, and I'd presumably be on a beach somewhere!

Meanwhile the industry for cloud services has moved on hugely. Things like AWS, Azure, Linode....all offer cheap and easy utility computing, presumably because their target marget is tech-savvy and the competition is vast. I admit I'm not a huge fan of AWS but I use Google Compute extensively for a couple of other projects and rate it highly.

SO just some questions for you guys, since this forum essentially helped me start my first company...

- If you're happy with your hosting company, what's the main reason?
- If you're UNhappy, why haven't you changed provider yet?
- What would make your life easier in 2019?

Not that I'm planning on going back into this crazy industry, of course.....

 

[Beansprout]

Thanks everyone, very useful to see what's going on

Those prices are excluding VAT, a bugbear of mine!
....
What would make my life easier? Include VAT, this is a personal domain so I don't care about prices excluding VAT - we're not in America where everything is 'plus tax'. And maybe reduce the cost, I don't think I need to be paying £30 a year for 2gb of storage and a tenner for a .com domain too.

Vida never charged VAT originally then we hit the threshold and I figured it looked more professional to put "+VAT" - and we couldn't afford to take a 17% revenue hit! So sorry, that's my fault! Tso was always VAT included tho :/

As for the cost, I think 30/year is reasonable - but certainly I think these days disk limits should be higher. Reliable disk costs just tens of pennies per Gb at scale. But bear in mind that included backups cost too.

I do however hate the word 'unlimited' because I'm a sysadmin and I don't have any unlimited disks!

Domain prices are my current hate. They're so expensive almost everywhere and for no reason - simplest thing to automate and sell!

The biggest thing I ask of a host is the ability to read and understand a technical support ticket.

Absolutely, it's obviously hard to expect a first-line person to know everything about hosting (bear in mind most of first-line is extremely simple stuff) but they should be able to quickly get the right assistance. We were lucky in that the 4 of us were hyper technical and always ready to help anyone in the company. Almost always anyway.

now they throw so many extra items at you the price on the homepage rarely is the price you'll pay at the end.

My pet hate. Some things are genuinely useful but shouldn't be 'pre-ticked' and basic modern functionality should be standard and all included.

Hosting should be simple and easy, 30 seconds to order, a few more seconds to login and upload!

Watch this space

 

[Beansprout]

What I've seen is that there are a huge number of hosts I've never even heard of, using archaic systems and so on. I'm working with www.fixed.net and every day we seem to be dealing with a new strange situation! Though, yes, lots of good hosts and solid platforms too.

With Cloudlinux, or heck just some time developing custom modules, there's no reason to have resource issues on shared hosting these days. DDoS issues are still a pain but can be partially or fully mitigated with the likes of Cloudflare.

 

[Beansprout]

Thanks for pointing that out @dmsims. They should all be ~500kb but sometimes I forget to throw them through Photoshop when dev'ing locally! As you'll have seen that's a few pages deep as well, and by slowdown I mean the whole front page struggles to load for a good 30s. Bearing in mind we're on a gigabit line at this end too.

The whole "a big image slows your site down" thing is crazy to me. Even a well-known expensive managed WordPress hosting company told my client the same thing recently.

Obviously the whole is the sum of its parts, but while assets on a page might cause slow performance in extreme cases - I had a client with six *hundred* images on their page recently - mostly a site feels slow to users if the page HTML isn't send back within say 500ms - 1.5 seconds - the time when a screen is white before content loads. Presumably that's what you see @Russinating? The cause will be either the site rebuilding its cache or being inefficient sometimes, or not caching at all, and/or the server being too busy to be timely. Probably the last one on shared hosting.

Another large, well-known, specialist UK 'managed hosting' company refused to make a two-minute Apache change to help secure a client's server because quote "they generally don't support the application level", but they could sell me a security product if I was worried about things, and a backup product too.

Another company (um one that is quite well known here) sends generic "upgrade to a VPS" recommendations to clients complaining about pervasive slow performance.

And this is only the highlights of what I've had to deal with in the past few months.

So frustrating!

Shout out to some good folks I've dealt with though, 20i.com's support I've found knowledgeable and timely, and Brixly.uk run decent systems and care about performance.

 

[Beansprout]

Hey Beansprout... only just seen this thread! I was hoping to read that you were setting up a new hosting company... I had already half filled a briefcase with used tenners ready to throw at you , but alas it is not to be....

Erm,

He has set one up??

Strangely back in Jan I wasn't doing hosting nor did I really intend to, but over the past few months we've all been almost inundated with hosting requests from old friends/customers, and my work at Fixed.net showed me the kind of issues that people were dealing with.

One client was really stuck because their host suspended their site, simply stating "we found malware, but we don't have tools to tell you what it is, you need to go to Sucuri". Madness! (Site wasn't actually hacked, it was all a giant mixup...)

At the same time I was talking to another old friend, an ex-Krystal.co.uk techie who setup his own thing and needed some help.

So, Stablepoint.com has been born

I've never been one to bend forum rules too much though so I guess I'll leave it at that!

 

[Beansprout]

Interesting pricing.

Early days, see how it goes I guess

 

[Beansprout]

Christ, £66 a month for a 2gb DO droplet?! I nearly fell off my chair.

Don't forget the ~$40/month of software, backups, management, monitoring, VAT....I think somewhere on the site we say that we don't do unmanaged stuff so better to go directly to a provider for that

Tsohost charge £82.8/m for a smaller server and Krystal charge £141.59/m for more or less the same spec (10G less space) so I don't think it's too bad

The Tsohost VPS specs haven't changed since the 4 of us ran the company originally years ago and a friend's server was running a 2 year old kernel so WTF is happening over there under the new new owners I don't know

 

[Beansprout]

Your mobile site is broken, fyi. It's too wide so the menu button is off the right hand side of the screen.

Ahh interesting will get Chris to look, thanks!

 

[Beansprout]

Depends on the level of management I guess, but even still, makes me think im missing a trick here as I manage a few dozen servers for my existing clients anyways!

Full management just like I always did back at Vida, and you're not really missing much but it depends what you do and how much you charge!

Yes a 4x markup on a DO AOI call would indeed be OTT - but if you're doing systems management you can charge a decent amount per month because it does take time to do properly. I know some AWS consultants who charge 1k/day+ so maybe we're all doing something wrong

Of the above 54.99/month +VAT $20 goes to DO, ~$25-35 to cPanel/Cloudlinux, then there's Softaculous, backup software, backup space, mail filtering, etc.

"Fully managed" can be a con too - one very well-known UK managed hosting company flat out refused to make a simple Apache change for my client recently and instead tried to sell a security product. Mad.

 

[Beansprout]

Whats your preference on this? I have always found R1 to be reliable (if expensive on small scale)

R1soft works well, at Paragon we used it for all our Windows systems and obscure stuff. On shared cPanel servers it caused huge disk i/o issues in earlier versions.

For cPanel stuff, JetBackup seems to be the software de jour. It works well and has all the cPanel/WHM user/reseller integration, logging, feature backups as well as files/databases, etc.

At Paragon we wrote our own cPanel backup system which last I checked is still running, it was pretty efficient but also took a lot of management time especially as cPanel is not entirely, er, consistent with their backend data storage.

Now I actually hand all this off to office365 or gmail depending on the customers requirements.

Darn you Not everyone can afford it unfortunately, certainly in the mass side of the market people don't want to pay extra unless they also need other features of Gsuite/O365.

That said again these days it's reasonably straightforward to do in-house, just the occasional Teamviewer session to fix a mail client!

Handling mail (exchange or otherwise) hosting was just a constant pain in the arse, so despite it being a big earner for me, took the hit and passed them to other services, which is just so much easier personally and im much happier without the stress.

Our Exchange boxes were always er fun. Nice when it works but horrible when it went wrong.

Even cPanel has (limited) shared calendar/contacts support too now....

 

[Beansprout]

Thats my issue. I'm not even remotely competent...lol

Ok maybe thats a little harsh on myself. Krystal said it was straightforward.

Do I move my domain from TSO to Krystal first then the email or create a mailbox with Krystal then move the domain?

No downtime needed - copy your site data over to the Krystal account then setup the mailboxes you need, then update your domain's nameservers to Krystal's, job done. Nothing goes offline, just starts arriving at the new system over the next few hours

There's a great online tool to move mailbox contents between servers too:

https://i005.lamiral.info/X/

I'm sure Krystal will help with anything above too if you get stuck!

And Feek...well....since it's you I'll match anything - I remember setting up your account! Don't tell anyone else though

 

[Beansprout]

Does Stablepoint offer DNS hosting without having to use CPANEL similar to Krystal, can't find any mention on the website.

I think you'd be the first or second to use it, but yes. Not part of the main anycast cluster that the cPanel systems have access to though, but uses resolvers in the UK and EU so some diversity.

 

[Beansprout]

Sent you a trust.

Thanks for the testing help

Had excellent servcei from Beansprout when he ran Vidahost and had some personal dealings as well (300D and Wimbledon )

On this basis I should be giving you free hosting! I knew I recognised you

Happy to see if I can help as always.

I still have the 300D although I upgraded to a 7D on my 21st a few years back which takes main duties....

I still also mainly stick with my trusty £40 50mm f/1.8 that I've used since I got the 300D! Never could stomach the cost of most L lenses, maybe if I sell a bit more hosting....

 

[Beansprout]

Can anyone recommend hosting where I can play with different languages?

Catalyst2 have some good Windows options - https://www.catalyst2.com/hosting/windows/

Nice guys too.

 

[Beansprout]

Beansprout is back to hosting? Woo this is a good day.

Aww thanks. I guess I'm addicted, but honestly it just seems to be what I'm useful at. We did all need some time out though. I tried sitting on a beach for a bit, didn't work. Tried cars, crashed them.

I'd been with Vidahost since 2007/8 so I guess one of the first. Was gutted when they were sold to Tshost, (iirc tsohost was started by a user on this forum too?).

Daz, the original Tsohost founder, is a forum member (actually how we met) and is involved in the new project as well

When my hosting package with tsohost is nearing an end i'll definetly be checking out stablepoint.

I'll match your expiry date!

I have been with TSO for years, but in the last year or two, we have had constant email issues.
Clients receiving our mail as SPAM, not being able to send/receive mail and out dynamic IP address needing to be constantly whitelisted with them.
Rather than leave them I changed our package from cloud to a cPanel in the hope these issues would be resolved.
Still no joy, so reluctantly my company will have to move.

Spam issues are a pain unfortunately, it was almost my full time job at Paragon. A small bit of spam and Hotmail would block a range of IPs. OK, maybe not just a small bit sometimes, but even so - we always dealt with RBL/spam problems quickly but with tools which were still evolving to spot malware and so on. Very annoying but it's 99% a solved problem in 2019.

These days I use Mailchannels and Spamexperts who filter spam and deliver the good stuff from known good IPs to Hotmail etc, and things just work. Whether they have 'deals' with Microsoft or just have really good systems I don't know!

 

[Beansprout]

Thanks for the insight. Will definitely checkout stablepoint.

Seems I jinxed it, earlier today the Mailchannels spam system started flagging mail to .uk domains as spam for about 20 minutes.

Never a dull day!

 

[Beansprout]

If you chose a developer SKU (something like B2) it would pretty much be free. Cost comes when you want to use a custom domain etc, but even that's not expensive

Do you run any Linux stuff on Azure?

We use it for their breadth of obscure locations and their processes for things like disks seem a bit convoluted compared to say Google.

But then everything is convoluted compared to GCP / DO - spoilt I think.

 

[Beansprout]

This is fantastic news. Was with Vidahost for years and I don't think perfection is an understatement.

Good to hear, thanks. And sorry.

I was even blamed today for LetsEncrypt not renewing and that it might not be possible to renew as they don't always allow it.

Crazy.

Now I only run a club website and a enthusiast website but still.

Small sites are the key part of any hosting business. It's also what certain hosting companies focus on in their advertising. But when a company *makes* you feel small....

I think I talked to you on chat earlier. I can't really talk publicly about the company at present but with stories like yours, I don't think I need to quite frankly.

I think for them to notice would be tricky as there will be thousands each day to look at, however it sounds like a known issue, meaning they presumably are aware and should approach the issue with humility :/

When we hired staff the one thing we rejected was anyone arrogant or had an outsize ego around their tech abilities. We taught everyone to act like a normal human. Seems simple right? Some of our best staff were actually people with no previous tech experience.

Sithlord...yes this is one issue so far, at Vida there were resource limits but more generous site limits, whereas these days people want things to be unlimited so to KISS we setup packages based on number of sites as that's easier to understand.

I've thought about editing though - maybe we fix the disk allowances and make site numbers higher? Happy to figure something out of course

 

[Beansprout]

Just to add to my comments, have now moved over from TSO to Stablepoint and the service received today via chat has been nothing short of fantastic. Very highly recommended.

Thanks

Also...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/18/tsohost_weeklong_outage/



I've barely slept the last 2 days helping out an old friend - and infact ex-Paragon colleague - get his site back up and running.

He had looked at Rackspace but they quoted him a 10 day lead time. Ten days for a handful of servers!!

 

[Beansprout]

All those things sound like suitably enterprisey responses. I wonder if any of them were proven to stop this Exim issue.

Do keep us updated on what they say. All I've seen is the Tsohost status page, the register article and these updates.