The CIHost Saga Continues 160
kiltboy writes "CIhosting had a major failure effectively eliminating 48,000 e-commerce sites. They claim it was a DNS failure but customers are complaining of old data being restored and some pages just being gone. MSNBC has picked up the story here along with some human interest stories. " I've talked personally with several people who've been dealing with this, and as people know, we've had hosting issues before. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of working on the Internet, but can anything be done about it? What do you think?
well... (Score:2)
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:2)
Not to mention that they tend to tell you they'll call you right back, and then don't; they'll tell you something has been fixed, but they haven't tested it (and of course it's not fixed); and so forth. I would avoid Digex at all costs if I were you.
--- Dirtside | "Spirituality" is the irrational belief in the supernatural
Restoring DNS Tables (Score:2)
According to the story, the recorded message on C|Host's customer service line said something about entering domain names and IP addresses into the DNS server by hand.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
--
What a company is obligated to do. (Score:3)
Alternatives ecommerce providers? (Score:1)
I am thinking more along lines of someone local so you can stop by their office if something goes wrong.
Re:Restoring DNS Tables (Score:3)
This actually sounds like a Microsoft solution when something goes wrong. Since usually most items are dependant on preconfigured settings and gui administration most of the really interesting automation usually cannot happen natively. Batch files after all can only do so much and WSH is only so effective at some of the more independent abilities of shell and perl.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
I agree. Most of the settings for various system files that I have seen have been in hiden and system directories that are not usually thought as part of the normal file system (Netware) and such. When people do backups its not totally intuitive for the average person to get something of that nature done easily or properly without the necessary training. An MCSE will not usually cut it because little is done to teach out of contingency management.
Doing something about it (Score:4)
Web hosting is big business, and to make the price competitive, corners get cut. The problem is when failures occur, you see the underbelly of your cost savings. It costs money to hire good staff. It costs money to make (frequent) backups. It costs money to provide redundant equipment.
Now, an out of the box solution may run great for a while, giving all involved a sense of security. A smoothly running computer needs little more than a baby-sitter in terms of administration and tech support. It's when all hell breaks loose that you find out where your money has been going. A trained staff costs more, but will get you back up and will keep you there. The cheap and untrained baby-sitter will, at best, be on-hold with someone elses tech support.
The mettle of your staff and contracted hosting company is tested and proven during a crisis. How they handle that crisis is what you pay for. Their response to this matter tells much of their commitment to their customers.
Use Advanced Internet Technologies (Score:2)
http://www.aitcom.net
So who is a good host? (Score:3)
This may be off-topic, but....
Which virtual hosting services have people had success with? Which ones should be avoided like the plague? I'm sure there's enough experience here to answer this question.
Personally, I just signed up with a new, inexpensive service, and have gotten the impression that they are completely incompetant, and I may be looking to switch. Any advice?
Re:Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:1)
While down at their facility doing some consulting work the power company had a failure. The digex people worked very to make sure that it did not affect any of the client systems at that facility. The new facility they have built since then is rather impressive.
Just what I saw in the maryland offices.
-sirket
Re:Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:2)
Is this company or personal? I would surely hope that your company wouldn't bet its' break and butter stuff to these bozos. As an interesting aside I have noticed that when transmitting large volumes of data that network preformance (with almost any line but usually public ones) goes down in a linear or logarathmic fashion is there some phenomeon that causes this to happen (besides increased network trafic?)
Not to mention that they tend to tell you they'll call you right back, and then don't; they'll tell you something has been fixed, but they haven't tested it (and of course it's not fixed); and so forth. I would avoid Digex at all costs if I were you.
How do these guys avoid getting sued in the first place? Assuming you are loosing data in great quantities and you are experiencing undue levels of incompetence you are able to sue them for this.
Re:Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:1)
--- Dirtside | "Spirituality" is the irrational belief in the supernatural
What do you have... (Score:2)
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:2)
-mike kania
Re:Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:1)
This can happen if there's some kind of progressive bug in the transmission hardware/software. I remember in the early 90's that some modems (specifically, US Robotics) would enter something called a Death Spiral when you transferred any sizable amount of data. But that was really a hardware problem. I haven't really seen that kind of thing happen in a while, not over modern Ethernet networks/the internet. Hell, yesterday I uploaded 8 gigs of MP3s to my machine at home, and there wasn't one second of slowdown.
Also, we're not "losing data" as it were, it's just that a lot of times I'll have to reconnect to the FTP server or the SSH server, because it will spontaneously disconnect, or freeze up. We're still in the development phase, so it's not like we're losing customers... yet. :)
--- Dirtside | "Spirituality" is the irrational belief in the supernatural
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Backups (Score:3)
"Never trust a backup that isn't in your hands."
What, do these people just schlop their pages on the server and not keep a frequently-updated copy of everything on their own media? That's just stupid, plain and simple.
Now you see it, now you don't (Score:1)
Don't YELL at tech support! (Score:3)
Re:Doing something about it (Score:2)
Maybe I'm crazy, but do people put 100% faith in these mass web hosting places? I know I've got a copy of my puny web site that comes with my ISP dialup account on my home machine. If they lose a hard drive, go under, whatever it's not like I can't take it elsewhere. One time (out of two) I was able to change the name servers for a domain on NSI's web page immediately. So, voila, it was changed to a new provider. The other time, it took about two weeks for their email bots to accept the forms. But, well, now we can pick other registrars, so hopefully they will be better about this.
Anyway, the point was just move to a new provider and move on. Minimize, as much as possible, your downtime but you're never completely SOL. As many complaints as people have on here with these sort of mass hosting places, I probably won't ever use one.
Summary. (Score:2)
I don't know about you, but that sounds like acceptable losses to me. You know the old saying, if you're gonna make an omlette, you've gotta break a couple tennis balls.
Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com]
You're right, HE.net is excellent! (Score:1)
Crashes WILL happen - are you ready? (Score:3)
Unfortunately, most people want to be lied to. Despite the fact that it's an OBVIOUS lie, that anyone with an ounce of common sense would disbeliev, they want to hear "Our systems never crash." If they don't hear that, they keep on looking until they find someone who will promise that. Of course, there's never anything like that actually in the contract...
Moral of the Story (Score:1)
Not everyone can have a T3 coming into their office, plus the boxes and someone to maintain them in their office, so hosting services will probably always be needed.
Hopefully these sites are able to be restored, but it seems unlikely. Too bad.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
Backups are fundamental Sys Administration (Score:3)
Businesses will always try to cut corners, unfortunately backups and high availability, which should be the cornerstone of this kind of "operation" are often overlooked.
Just today in fact I came into work and had a disk crashed on a Jamaica JBOD attached to a Hewlett-Packard K370. True, since it's not an array it took a while to recover everything, but being as it was a development database, I managed to restore it back to the state it was at 2am last night.
Without those backups I'm be typing my resume now instead of posting to Slashdot
But there's no excuse for a company like this to backup their customers' data, the technology is out there--StorageTek, ATL, they all have scalable solutions to back up terrabytes worth of data, but that costs money and apparently they didn't think providing a decent service to their paying customers was worth it.
If I had an account there, I'd most likely find another provider that knew about system backups and high availability, it is *your* business.
Do it yourself solution (some day) (Score:1)
Some day, a wire to get my linux and bsd boxes connected to the internet would be cheap, and my ecommerce site will be up as long as I pay a sub 30$ bill to a fair company that will give me a quality service.
Until that, I fell that we well see MANY more hosting providers messing our lives.
There's a still a long way to go, I know...
ISP reliability & Common carrier status (Score:1)
Does anyone think we're going to get dial-tone-level reliability without imposing something like common-carrier status on ISPs and hosting providers? Of course, this particular path opens up Costco-size cans of worms in other arenas; spam leaps to mind as one, and the sheer cost of maintaining 99%+ uptime is another. But I have a sneaking feeling that sooner or later, we're heading down that road...
Not to be critical, but . . . (Score:2)
I know that keeping web servers up isn't the easiest thing in the world, from my past experience. It's not rocket science, but sometimes hardware failures happen. Sometimes you lost power, and not everbody can afford a backup generator to run their web server on.
However, I've never dealt with a hosting company with as many problems as CIHost.In the past two months or so, our web site has been offline at least 8 times for no apparent reason. For about two weeks, their bandwidth was almost completely saturated. And now, we've got this issue.
When we first heard about CIHost, we checked into them, and they were rated highly on at least two sites we checked. With this kind of service they sure won't keep a rating like that for long.
An interesting problem (Score:5)
A web-hosting service can cut corners on software, by using Open Source products such as Apache (optionally with IBM's GUI, SGI's patches, and/or one of the acceperators such as Squid), OpenSSL, Perl, [PHP | Zope], Minivend, [Sendmail | Postfix | Qmail | Cyrus IMAP], Cyrus LDAP, [SSH | OpenSSH], [Linux | FreeBSD | OpenBSD | NetBSD], Heartbeat (for High Availability), etc.
They can also cut corners -to some degree- on hardware. eg: You don't -need- to buy hardware RAID solutions, as you can do that in software. You don't -need- to buy watchdog cards, as you can do that in software, too. If you use ReiserFS, you can use the increase in performance to go for disks that aren't necessarily as fast.
How often you make backups depends on the volatility of your data, NOT on how much you want to spend. If your data can be expected to change daily, then backup daily. If it's likely to be stable for a few weeks, backup weekly. If it's continuously on the move, then backup hourly.
How to make backups - buy tapes. They're cheap, they're reliable, and they store a lot. Tape drives are also a lot cheaper than R/W CD-ROM drives. If you've got the cash, get twice the number of tape drives you normally would, then Cron the jobs to run in the background. Stripe your data across half your tape drives. Use the remaining drives for the next backup cycle. That way, you give yourself more time to swap in fresh tapes, and if you forget before the next backup, you're OK.
How long to keep tape backups: Forever, if you can afford it. As long as your budget can possibly allow, otherwise. It's vitally important to be able to backtrack as far as possible.
All in all, there's never any excuse for mishandling data, on account of expense. You CAN make things as cheap as you like, WITHOUT compromising the integrity of the system or your ability to recover from a catastrophic failure.
As for DNS', routers, etc: ALWAYS have TWO of everything. That doesn't mean you have to splash out on a vast number of machines. You can always use your fileserver as your secondary DNS, and a software router can always sit on a web server (though that's not really good practice, for security reasons). And ALWAYS have High Availability wherever applicable. DNS doesn't really need this, as most OS' can search multiple DNS servers.
Again, there's no excuse for not having backup systems. Once you've got the basic machines, you can have them multitask as much as you like, so they can always act as backups for something else.
It's negligence that leads to disasters like this. And I include the times that my own failure to backup has led to significant loss of data. It's a lesson I learned well. If others haven't, well, don't hire them to host your web services until they have.
I think the worst example of negligence like this that I've personally seen was at NASA Langley. The admins backed up -officially- daily. In practice, it was whenever they felt like it. One visitor to the center picked up a hard disk (in use at the time), shook it, and asked what it was. The disk, needless to say, crashed. It turned out that there was a vast amount of critical research data on it and the admins hadn't backed it up in 3 months.
Make your own backups (Score:2)
Ideally, you should do your development on your own machine and only upload 'production' code to the machine that hosts your domain and has all the bandwidth and then run a cron job each day or so to dump your database, tar and gzip it all, and ftp it someplace else.
Also, a cron job that runs a little script to inform you of the state of things and emails it to you every few hours is a good idea if your site is not a full time gig.
Of course, since you're paying somebody to do all this for you you really shouldn't have to worry about it but that's life.
Re:[Digex || Hoover] (Score:1)
I like Pair (Score:2)
Mind you, I only use server space there -- I haven't tried to colocate whole machines -- but they recently moved their entire NOC and they did a pretty damn fine job of it.
As a result, I trust them even more.
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Re:Doing something about it (Score:1)
*sigh* You don't always get what you pay for, but *never* do you get more than you pay for.
Boy, are you wrong... (Score:2)
The reason why backups are fundamental to sys administration is because the sysadmin is responsible for the data - like you said, lose the data, lose your job.
Re:What a company is obligated to do. (Score:1)
If I ran a web-based business, I'd give a site about 24 hours to be back up and running perfectly. Much beyond that, I'd figure they were incompetent (no redundancy, backups, whatever), and start looking elsewhere. Most importantly, I wouldn't store my one and only copy of a web site on their server(s). Change the NS records for the domain, and set up shop elsewhere.
Back on suing, you could probably only sue for some refund of the hosting fees, and maybe your average daily revenue for the amount of downtime. If you make enough on a web site in a day or two to cover lawyer costs for a long drawn out affair, I'd suggest investing in real servers and colocate somewhere reputable. If you're selling 3 bird feeders a day and a dedicated servers isn't reasonable, you aren't out much money, so suing is pointless.
check out www.cihostsucks.org -its hilarious (Score:3)
Re:Restoring DNS Tables (Score:1)
The many problems with hosting servers/sites. (Score:2)
It's not that the hosting company is negligent, but that the users assume certain things about the hosting company without getting it in writing.
ie: Did the hosting company specify that they had daily backups? Weekly? Did they state that they had a disaster recovery plan? Did you ask? Did you state *your* needs as the customer, or did you just assume, as many people do, 'They are a web hosting company, so they'll have daily backups, a super-fast disaster recovery plan, fault tolerant systems, and enough staff/resources to deal with problems efficiently.).
This is not the case in a great many companies.
As for backups, you should have your own off-site backups, and if it's e-commerce related, you should damn well have your OWN disaster recovery plan. Your own backups. Your own copy of the records, either that, or contractual obligations that your provider will supply those services.
More fsck-ups (Score:1)
Re:Not to be critical, but . . . (Score:1)
I hate to preach, but in critical situations there are essentials like automated backups, virus checkings, and stable®ulated power. If you have not enough money to have a T1 but more money than $20/month for hosting, consider colocation. This is a safer alternative because you can inspect the facilities in person before you sign up or get into contracts. Buyer beware
Re:Crashes WILL happen - Fixes should happen too! (Score:1)
I'm one of the suckers (Score:2)
Even before they crashed I was getting pissed at CiHost. PHP / MySQL web pages that should have worked fine, and did work fine at home, simply hung on their machines. They talked about all these wonderful things they could do (e-commerce etc) but never gave the details. Now this.
So, where do I go? Any recommendations for a *good* provider with decent backups, uptime, big pipes, available tech support, reasonable prices and (most importantly) MySQL and PHP support?
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
what to do (Score:1)
Two Points (Score:4)
The second point, one that I think everyone is saying but skirting around, is that there's no good, reliable information on web hosts. Lists make money off of a) advertising from the very people they're rating, or, sometimes b) money to rate other people higher. No one has an objective list which rates the customer service, the time up and down, the overall service, that I know of - and it's almost impossible to make one, because the good ones can so rapidly become bad ones. Information about these things is so subjective as well - several people have already complained of having "bad service" while not detailing what happened.
The first problem is CIHost's fault. They can (but most likely won't) change. The second problem, maybe we can work on - compiling a list of decent web hosts, and keeping track of problems and sucesses. Any thoughts?
Re:Crashes WILL happen - are you ready? (Score:3)
Any professional in the IT industry should know that computers are not 100% reliable
That's the crux of the issue, most customers of hosting companies are NOT IT professionals. They are business people who understand that the web and e-commerce are "where it's at", and they want to be there. They hire a web designer, and they contract a hosting company (sometimes the web design and hosting are a package deal). They have no way to evaluate the professionalism of the company because they hav no idea what's involved. In many cases, they don't even know their own passwords (the web designer handles the 'technical' stuff).
The above situation SHOULD be just fine! It's the hosting company's job to know that backups are critical, and that it's best to have two or more, and that redundant connections and a failover plan are essential for when (not if) a server goes down in flames. That's what they were hired for!
Most hosting customers ARE quite familiar with BSOD and GPF. They just assume that it's because they did something wrong (otherwise, MS would be out of business). They also figure that professionals either don't have those problems or that they can deal with them. That SHOULD be the case.
The customer doesn't want to be lied to, and the lie isn't obvious to them. The customer's mistake is in failing to realise how profoundly unprofessional some 'professional' hosting companies really are.
if it's too good to be true... (Score:2)
I wouldn't trust a web provider who had that kind of promotion of being very reliable or competent. Maybe I'm just cynical like that. Of course, my current provider is cut-rate, but doesn't offer huge promos either. They have basic service for basic prices and I've been happy thus far.
CIHOST remove cancellation page (Score:1)
Re:I'm one of the suckers (Score:1)
Host site ratings are often meaningless (Score:1)
It's pretty tough to get an objective appraisal of where to spend your hosting cash. Especially if you aren't technical enough to tell when people are bullshitting you...
Re:Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:1)
I also had an episode where a new customer of ours moved their website to our facility and their ex-ISP was DOS'ing us in a lame attempt to show that we had poor connectivity. Digex got right on it and we caught them red handed.
My favorite thing about Digex is that their backbone speed/peering rocks! I'm in the NoVA area. I've also had very good luck with VERIO.
Small ISP's (Score:3)
If you are a small company chances are your webpage is not going to garner gobs of bandwidth at one time... even the little ISP with a 128K ISDN connection can easily serve up your pages to people in a reasonable amount of time. Ie. At home I have a 56K modem... at work I have a T1. Slashdot loads at the same speed for both. I get 6k per second on my home machine... and I get 80-100 on my work machine at peak so its not my server because they are both using the same pipe.
People need to get out of this frame of mind that bigger is better. It isn't... with bigger you have red tape. You have cutbacks where they have 3 guys tech supporting 10,000 users. Sure with the smaller ISP you may not get 24/7 tech service.. or you may even pay a little bit more for one specific thing but in a lot of cases cheaper isn't better. If your business hosting needs are dependent on 24/7 support then you need a Network Service Provider. If your business was so dependent on uptime that it would kill your profit margin by being down for 8 hours because your ISP staff is asleep then you need the bigger guy... even then you can find medium sized companies that have higher levels of tech support options available. I would be willing to bet that some of the best webhosting companies out there are small timers who will stay small because they won't sacrifice quantity for quality.
Just my 2 cents... keep them in mind when you need a business (or even personal) internet solution.
- Xabbu
CI Host seems to be up, but no apology (Score:1)
Re:blah (Score:2)
i just got myself a T1, sure its expensive but the only downtime is self-incurred.
Don't count on that! You'll need a backup from another provider at least. The big frame relay meltdown last year nailed a lot of people who believed the same thing you do.
Re:CI Host seems to be up, but no apology (Score:1)
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Re:CI Host seems to be up, but no apology (Score:1)
9NetAvenue (Score:1)
Last year about this time, my host, 9NetAve had an 'incident',which was described as a hard drive crash during the backup procedure. My site was lost completely. Apparently they only ever had one set of tapes, and it was lost. Just because your host is a large one, doesnt mean they know what the fsck they are doing.
-=Bob
It's not the down time, it's the service. (Score:1)
The sites were down for a day, and the first "responce" I recieved concerning it was not from ciHost, but from another hosting company. They evidently sent email to everyone who used ciHost's nameserver. Perhaps not the most ethical course of action, but certainly a timely one.
It was a full day before I heard anything official fro ciHost, and --although one of my sites was (and has remains to this time) down-- Their rosey press-release email told the story of the problem you're now familiar with and that they said was solved.
Prompt, honest answers would have kept me as client.
Lloyd Sommerer
More CIHost (ShitCo) Horror (Score:1)
I see they finally changed their little y2k problem... but if someone didn't get to see it, you can check the screenshot on my site at:
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~ejs211
BTW- I also have a description of my nightmare with cihost on the rantings section... Well I guess we'll have to sit here and wait till these jerks put the phone back on the hook so I can tell them to kill my account. Oh yeah... and yesterday (get this) they -=BILLED=- my account for another 27 bucks... I called American Express and told them the story, forwarded them the article on cnet, and pointed them to slashdot to verify the problem. Even American Express told me that they'd kill the bill since even -=THEY=- could not contact Cihost.
As I've stated in my other posts, if someone files a class action suit, please email me. If the suit has a lot of power, I may contribute one or two thousand dollars to help legal fees.
I'm just fuming at these jerks, and they deserve what's coming to them.
-Eddie
Re:Boy, are you wrong... (Score:2)
If you're a system administrator and say that all of the companies you've worked for practiced good disaster recovery, then I'd say you've worked for a lot of good companies.
I've worked for companies where I took over production machines which were backed up with (non-GNU) tar, which might be fine for simple restores, but not a very good option if you have to perform a complete restore. A lot of these machines were being backed by by the cron, where a help-desk person would drop a tape in the drive, and pull it out the following morning.
No log checking, no verification, no nothing. Most of the backups were failures due to bad tape, tape capacity not sufficient, etc, but as long as there's not a major disaster, they could skim by.
Media (especially DLT) is expensive, and most companies reuse it to the point of it being worthless in the event of a failure, I've seen DLT drives not cleaned for years, and while I personally would never practice such shitty administration myself, I see it happen on other machines with other administrators and on machines which I assume responsibility for.
Which is probably the case of CIHost, they probably gave their admins such lousey hardware (Here's a DAT drive, do your backups) with little or no software, and expected them to backup terrabytes worth of data.
Good businesses will practice decent disaster recovery, but the majority of them won't, I guess what I meant to say that it *is* fundamental, but the majority of companies don't practice it.
CI Host Billing Warning! (Score:1)
However, this morning I checked my credit card balance only to discover that CI Host today charged me for another 3 months ofservice, even though I was paid through (around) January 15th. I would know the exact date if I could actually view my invoice online, but as with cisupport.com [cisupport.com], this part of CI Host is still not operational. However, I signed up on October 15th and paid for three months in advance.
Needless to say, I was pissed and immediately called my credit card company to dispute the charge. I am also attempting to call CI Host, but I'm only getting busy signals when I dial their 1-888-868-9931 number. I highly suggest that anyone who cancelled accounts with CI Host to make sure they didn't charge you for another billing period.
Re: Not to be critical, but . . . (Score:1)
Re:Crashes WILL happen - are you ready? (Score:1)
As for me, I like my year and a half uptimes under anything but NT.
--Ed
Re:I like Pair (Score:2)
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Did you say backup? (Score:1)
From the O'Reilly book Practical Unix Security:
When was the last time you backed up your computer?
a. today
b. this week
c. this month
d. this year
e. never
f. My computer is already against the wall and can not be backed up any further.
If your answer is a or b, good for you. If your answer is c, d or e, put the book down and back up your computer. If your answer is f, keep reading; everything is just fine.
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
After using them for awhile, I don't know if I would recommend them. In the past two months I have seen them suffer from DNS troubles. Telnet is down right now as far as I can tell, and has been down for awhile. Sometimes it is grindingly slow. Security seems to be another issue. The motd described some problems with DOS attacks. If you want a cheap place to stick your personal/hobby site it might be an economical choice. I would stay away from them for buisness hosting. I am thinking of leaving sometime in the next few months.
So has anyone used Datarealm (www.serve.com) or Web2010? They seem to be fairly large and offer PHP and mysql for around 25 bucks a month.
Even better, does anyone know of a web host that offers the following features:
I would like to pay $25 bucks a month or less...
I guess I can scratch c|host off of the list.
-BW
Re:Crashes WILL happen - Fixes should happen too! (Score:2)
Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?. If it is in your contract, then they took your money and lied about what you'd get - time to sue sue sue.
Re:An interesting problem (Score:3)
If you've got an fancy, high-transaction ecom. site, you don't want that to go down, so you have a hot spare that will automagically fail over to, as well as redundant data lines and a backup "solution" of some kind. Computer hardware is (in my opinion) cheap, if you're not buying SGI, backup "solutions" are worth every penny. But things like data lines will be a large recurring cost. In PDX the going rate for a frame relay T1 (last time I looked into it, and if you have a fancy site, who knows, a fatter pipe might be needed) was around $1k-$1.5k a month. So, it may be more economical to colocate your boxes at a service provider that has fatter, redundant pipes, that'll cost you alot less - if it's an unattended colocation facility, alot more if it's an attended one.
So your box crashes, automagic fail over occurs, customers don't see a thing, but you gotta fix the crashed/incapacitated server. If the server is in your office, and it's working hours, fine, but if it's at an unattended co-location facility, you gotta drive out to the co-loc. If it's 2 in the morning, somebody has to get out of bed and do it. If you're out to dinner with your SO, you gotta leave and do it - a pain in the ass. To be more reliable, you start a rotating duty shift for your people, which will cost you more in labor. Backup tape changes are not a problem if the server is located in your office, you can do that all during normal busness hours, but if it's at an unattended co-loc facility you'll have to schlepp down there to swap tapes periodically.
To me, it's now looking like the $7k a month hosting fees at some fancy attended co-loc aren't so bad. Their onsite staff is typically well trained (in my experience), and they'll do everything you ask them to, you'll never have to touch your boxes again, be able to do all your work at sane hours, and have something that may resemble a life outside of work.
-Brent
Sue! (Score:4)
Check out Kimmel and Silverman, the Computer Lemon Law Attorneys. [computerlemonlaw.com]. They advertise: Simply call Kimmel & Silverman, The Lemon Law Attorneys at 1-800-LEMON-LAW (800-536-6652). You can also fill out our form and submit by e-mail. We'll do the rest, quickly and efficiently to get you a NEW COMPUTER or FULL REFUND at absolutely no charge to you. That's right, Kimmel & Silverman's service is FREE, win or lose!!
I have no connection with them, but I called them, and they say they handle this sort of thing.
Award Winning? (Score:1)
Here's the blurb for the motivationally-challenged:
Award Winning Service
C I Host leads the web hosting industry by providing and upholding true commitment to customer care. The belief that customer satisfaction and trust are the key factors to our success makes C I Host the premier choice for consumers and businesses in over 128 countries worldwide. C I Host is also consistently rated in the Top 3 of 15,000+ hosting companies by HostIndex and The Ultimate Web Host List. Speed, reliability, affordable pricing and superior customer service are the hallmark of success at C I Host
--
On small ISP's (Score:4)
GOES is a local ISP in Hackettstown, NJ (where M&M's come from
Norm's a BSD guy, but he's got at least one member of his tech support staff that's a Linux nut. They're very knowledgable, know me by name, and eager to help. In fact, they seem genuinely interested in what we're doing.
Point: I understand that a small ISP may not suit everyone, and not all local ISP's are alike. However, it's certainly worth considering because there are benefits to dealing with someone who will actually know who you are once you start with them. And, if they're local, you can always harass them in person if something goes wrong
Anyway, I moved ~1000 miles south as the car [sic] flies since the time I started doing business there. I'm using Linux so it's not as if I ever need to visit the box anyway.
Oh, another bit...I did have a problem with the server not rebooting once. It refused to detect the SCSI adapter all of a sudden and I figured the adapter was dead. Norm called the owner of the computer store [jlmcomputers.com] located in the same building. He came up and fixed it--then wouldn't even let me pay him for his time because all he had to do was re-seat the SCSI card. You don't get that kind of support when you're dealing with a big companies...
numb
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Local backups? Yeah, right. (Score:1)
Impossible to cancel account now (Score:1)
The problems never end...
www.cscweb.net (Score:1)
Mindspring sucks (Score:1)
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Re:Don't YELL at tech support! (Score:1)
Re:Impossible to cancel account now (Score:1)
Re:Crashes WILL happen - are you ready? (Score:2)
Right, but I'm sure that most customers of hosting companies HAVE used Windows, and seen first-hand the potential problems computers can have. You suggest that these people discount their personal experience. That's definitely a personal problem.
It's the hosting company's job to know that backups are critical
But is it their job to provide it, especially when the customer didn't ask for it and wasn't promised it? Suppose El Cheapo hosting's "hook" is "the cheapest hosting around." Their contract specifies exactly what you get - file space, a domain, some logins, and a net connection. The customers sign on the dotted line. Why should El Cheapo take it upon themselves to do ANYTHING that the customer didn't pay for? More on this point later...(*)
Most hosting customers ARE quite familiar with BSOD and GPF. They just assume that it's because they did something wrong
I would disagree with your assertion. Most of the businesspeople I have worked with blame themselves last, regardless of the situation: their computers crash, they don't make their computer crash. Regardless, I don't think it's the problem of the web hosting company if a customer discounts their own experience.
The customer doesn't want to be lied to
Have you EVER had to deal with the public in the capacity of telling them when something would be fixed, whether it was lawnmowers, TVs, or computers? People DO NOT want to hear "Oh, we've got quite a backlog, we can't get to this until next week" - they get really ticked really fast. On the other hand, they are really happy if you say "Yeah, we'll get to this and have it done by tomorrow afternoon." If you ask them, they won't say "yes, we want to be lied to," but their behavior says otherwise - they prefer to hear lies to truth. Oh, and when they call back tomorrow afternoon
The customer's mistake is in failing to realise how profoundly unprofessional some 'professional' hosting companies really are
Quite the contrary; the customer's mistake is in failing to understand what they need, and failing to specify those needs in the contract. Is it the customer's fault that they didn't look out for their own best interests when those interests may have collided with the interests of the vendor? ABSOLUTELY! It is always in a seller's best interest to minimize what they deliver. This interest generall conflicts with the buyer's interest in getting the most for their money. Any buyer who doesn't realize this needs to exit the business world FAST.
There have been many firms who have made millions by offering good-enough product for less money than their competition; naturally, they had to cut costs somewhere in order to afford lower costs, and quality control is an easy place to do that. (OB MS slam: Microsoft is a prime example) "You get what you pay for" is common knowledge, though not always accurate. In this case I would say that it was definitely true.
Though it certainly sounds like it, I'm not trying to justify scurrilous business practices. I'm merely pointing out that they exist, and that people are STUPID to ignore the fact. People are also STUPID to make business decisions when they haven't the slightest idea what they are doing. At the very least, this has been an educational experience for some people; next time, maybe they'll know to drive a harder bargain. or maybe not; maybe they figure that they'll take the cheapest web hosting they can get, and they'll take their chances, too.
I wonder... (Score:1)
www.strade.com [strade.com]
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
$24.95 hosting like setting up shop in a ghetto (Score:1)
Okay, I feel sorry for all the businesses out there that got hosed for thousands of dollars in this.
But seriously, who would stake thousands of dollars in inventory, advertising, time, labor, etc., on a damn cut-rate host company?
If your business is worth anything to you, you should have at least one dedicated server for it, with someone who knows how to administer it available to fix it. Rent for storefronts costs thousands of dollars a month, $500 for a high-quality basic Linux server is a bargain by comparison.
Setting up a real business with one of these places is the Internet's equivalent of setting a store up in a ghetto. So these people didn't know that? Then they have no business in e-commerce. They bet their future on something they don't really comprehend, and that's just plain foolish.
-cwk.
Re:Mindspring sucks (Score:1)
www.hostpro.net
Concentric
www.concentric.com
and they are not bad - been reliable - but for added features, like cron jobs, PostgreSQL++ we're going to check out Digital Daze
http://servers.digitaldaze.com/
If you're a open-source developer you should also check out this one from VA-Linux
http://sourceforge.net/
I can not recommend the two last ones - but they seem very promising - and we intend to try them out both - you may mail me later to get my impression.
Re:Two Points (Score:1)
I definitely agree with you. It's really tough to pick a provider for web hosting.
I'm currently using pair [pair.com], and I've been pretty happy with them. That said, they're not perfect, though they seem to be honest. They recently moved into a new facility, which involved some downtime for their entire network. While I would have liked to have seen the move made at an off-peak time (they started it early on a business morning), they did a very good job of keeping information about the status of their network available. They set up and externally hosted site specifically for this purpose and they posted to it regularly until they were back online. While the move didn't go as smoothly as they had hoped, they didn't try to keep their customers in the dark.
Back to your point, a completely unbiased site that rated service providers would be a great resource.
joe
Vote at http://hostindex.com (Score:1)
I've been entering a "poor" vote for C I Host daily for the past week or so.
They went from #3 in December to #6 in January. So, VOTE!
Re:I like Pair (Score:2)
Re:CI Host Billing Warning! (Score:1)
My site isn't live yet, so I wasn't greatly affected, mostly just a hassle because I couldn't send/receive email through my domain.
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
HTH,
Andrew
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, something can be done about it... (Score:1)
I think that in general people put up with waay to much from web service providers, 'just because it's the internet.' If a car dealership told you that a certain car would work 99% of the time guaranteed, would you buy it?
--begin plug--
Where I work, (sevenelements.com [sevenelements.com]) we're offering a one month free w/ 6months prepaid thing for anyone switching from a different host (geared toward CIHOST people)
--end plug--
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
I have been on deals where we slam and it is great. we did the right stuff and we had a happy customer. we have also had the ones where Legato decided to puke that day and isn't restoring correctly and VP is screaming at you.
I have worked and been involved in HUNDREDS of really big web hosting deals from the trenches to sales and i can tell you that running many scalable huge web sites is an art not a science. There are sooo many variables that you just have to cover as many bases as you can and rely on your staff and dare i say it god for the rest.
And for those who do want to host the big sites make sure you find a web hosting company that does the base things like OS, backups, hardware and monitoring really well. If they say "Oh yeah bring over that custom strange ass software you wrote or software X some start up company wrote, we will manage everything for you, no problem" then be really careful. They may say they can do it, but can they really? ask lots of questions!!!! and DO NOT expect to pay nothing for these services, they are expensive to provide. your mom and pop web hosting guys can't do a barnesandnobles.com an ebay or a ford motor company web site or something of that scale. heck they can't even provide the network infrastructure the big boys can. so don't go to an IBM or UUNET and expect to pay the same as your mom and pop. Also, they may not fit your solution. they may only be able to take on what they can manage. i know that sounds simple but we have customers all the time asking for wild ass stuff and we can't scale it. it is truly about scaling it so we can do 50 of these dealas as easily as 10,000 of them. the big guys do have thier limitations.
Re:The many problems with hosting servers/sites. (Score:1)
While I agree with what you are saying, unfortunately it doesn't work that way at some low budget hosts. Many don't allow shell access, or the ability to run even a simple cron job to tar the site. The best many can do is to ftp the complete site every time there is a change, or data is added.
Data from customer databases is another issue. With most of these CSP type e commerce accounts, you have no access to the data, except via the browser front end. That means no backups, no queries other than the ones built into the app.
You get what you pay for, and anyone that is trying to run even a small business on a 20 dollar a month e commerce account has to realize that there may be some problems. We started co locating a year ago after our host was purchased by Verio, who then went on to destroy the level of service to which we had become accustomed. My only question now is, why didn't I start hosting my own servers, sooner.
Dave
Re:So who is a good host? (Score:1)
One of the best features I offer is the ability to stick domain names on subdirectories for $3/month so that web designers can host their clients' sites and charge them whatever they want.
I do automated backups of all the config files, but I don't back up users' sites. If they go down, you'll know about it and you'll have to re-upload your content. I haven't had a disaster yet, and do have excellent uptime.
Whoever you choose, good luck!
can't get through!!! (Score:1)