Hosting in 2019?

Have used TSO for years, but lately, the system is slow with email problems and tonight we cannot send/receive emails.

I need a better business host solution for my company.

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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.
 
Your site look fine from here (200Mb Virgin)

jmillbank.png
 
Russinating said:
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.
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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.
 
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 :D, but alas it is not to be....

I'm sure there would be a few on here that would happily support a new venture if it was like the good old days of Vidahost... if I recall correctly I would have been using your services from around 2009, maybe even a little earlier.

I'm slowly moving around 10 client sites away from TSO host right now - have bought a reseller package from Krystal... With the few support tickets I've raised in the last couple of weeks,
their support response is as impressive as yours used to be...literally get a response within minutes, certainly better than any other webhost I've had to deal with in recent times..(I'm looking at you so called Ionos 1&1!!!.. you wouldn't believe what a new client of mine had to go through recently when dealing with these jokers!).

The two webhosts you mention look rather interesting indeed - will have to look into those a bit further before I fully commit to Krystal!
 
meth said:
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 :D, but alas it is not to be....
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EyeDot said:
Erm,

He has set one up??
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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 said:
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!
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Interesting pricing. :)
 
kindai said:
Christ, £66 a month for a 2gb DO droplet?! I nearly fell off my chair.
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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 :(
 
kindai said:
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!
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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 :eek:

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 said:
~$25-35 to cPanel/Cloudlinux,
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I avoid panels unless the customer explicitly needs them, but usually if theyre paying for the "managed" part they dont so can shave that off.

Beansprout said:
Softaculous
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As above.

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

Beansprout said:
mail filtering
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Now I actually hand all this off to office365 or gmail depending on the customers requirements.

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