Rage Against The Status Quo

Picking a web host is a bit like finding the perfect woman. It is a dream, a fantasy, a hill too far. The perfect web host does not exist. Frankly, they all suck. No one can do a better job than you in managing a server, handing software upgrades, handling power failures, network outages, and ensuring 24/7 up time. Right?

Wrong. Yes, it’s true, most web hosting providers don’t do a good job at a lot of things. But you’re not going to have an easy time keeping a server running in your home office or at a co-lo facility. There is a lot of infrastructure that goes in to keeping a server running. There are also a hundred other things that can go wrong. And that’s where you have to think twice about how much your time is worth.

A good web host has the infrastructure to support 24/7 uptime, while making it easy to run your software and manage resources. A lot of folks start off hosting on a desktop over their DSL or Cable connection. Invariably, someone kicks out the cord on the home computer, and then you’re down. I had this experience with a Subversion server I had running on a DSL line. I kept experiencing outages when connecting remotely, and my collaborators couldn’t connect when they needed to. I finally discovered the source of the problem after half a year of irritating outages. My buddy was disconnecting the ethernet cable on the subversion host when he wanted to get his laptop online. Nice. No one was using the desktop computer, right?

Lesson learned. I immediately turned to a web hosting company. A lot of people think GoDaddy or 1&1 $4 special hosting. I say to you, good luck. This isn’t the answer. These guys offer a lot, a lot of “freebies”, worthless features you don’t need. The $4/month isn’t really $4/month, because you have to commit to the hold deal up front. Many of these cheapies charge a setup free. So you order this thing, and are then underwhelmed by what it can’t do. You don’t get root access, you are sharing a server, you can only host one domain, your support is very very limited, and there are very low limits on resource consumption.

Enter the VPS. A VPS solution gives you virtualized access to a dedicated server. For all intents and purposes, your server is your own. You have root access, you have full control over the resources usage, you can host multiple domains, and you get some decent support. You are guaranteed the minimum amount of resources required to complete a task, but generally, this is enough.

I started on a VPS provider at http://hostmysite.com. They were fine for starters. They offered Plesk, which is a really nice admin portal for managing a server’s resources, an is a great tool for hosting resellers. I have since also tried http://rimuhosting.com, http://mediatemple.com, and http://joyent.com. All these guys offer similar capability, and in fact, the Rimu and Hostmysite Plesk server solution is nearly identical. Plesk is wonderful for those who are reselling. What I’ve since discovered about Plesk is the resources used by Plesk itself take most of the available ram on your VPS server. This isn’t great for Java developers, and leaves very little room left to actually run an app server. The configurations offered by the hosting company are usually fixed and it isn’t a simple thing to go and add more ram or a new disk.

The two offerings that diverge greatly from the Plesk approach are Joyent and Media Temple. Media Temple relies on a container model, and for $20/month, you can host up to 1000 domains. The Joyent approach is nice because it runs on OpenSolaris rather than Linux. Joyent can host only 20 domains, but makes up for it in completeness of control over each domain.

Support is the other factor you need to consider. Is there a person you can pick up the phone and call? If not, does someone answer your emails? Do they remember you in between customer service calls. Do they track you and create case numbers? If you can’t at least reach someone by email within a few hours, keep looking. I gave up on companies that clearly don’t price service into anything they do. If it is cheap and sounds to good to be true, it probably is. You’ll figure this out after your first customer service call.

So I’m on Media Temple and Joyent now. I ran out of space on my Plesk server, and they wouldn’t upgrade my disk capacity. I had to switch. Media Temple and Joynet both have their major advantages, but I think the question comes down to whether you need dedicated more control over your domains. I’ll keep you posted on any new developments with the new hosting.

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