Shared Hosting Stinks
Mention “shared web hosting” and I get quite negative thoughts flying through my head.
It has been a while since I’ve been using Slicehost for my personal sites and projects. It has been an awesome experience. I have one slice running with a common LAMP stack that is running like a horse for over a year now. Comparing to traditional VPS hosting or shared hosts, this is just perfect. The problem is that this setup works for me or anyone who is willing to setup everything on their own. Not so much for regular folks.
So far I have been trying to setup my clients on popular shared web hosts such as this one. The reason for that is my unwillingness to be a sysadmin on a 24×7 duty. If their website goes down at 2am, let someone else worry about it. Lately I am getting really aggravated with majority of companies that I am dealing with.
Poor Customer Service
Every company loves to brag how their customer service is great. Big headlines with flashy text screaming “24×7 best support”. Yeah right, lie! The reps that you get on the phone are mostly clueless and it takes ages to get someone who actually knows their shit and cares about your problem in the first place. Is it so hard to find people who are interested in web hosting to work for you? I always have a feeling that I am talking to a car mechanic. There is plenty of geeks out there who love this job, you know.
Slow Slow Slow
Find me a company that is not overselling and is still in business. Please, if you stick 1200 customers on a single server, shit will be slow! Few lemmings will execute their lame php nuke site that will make hell for everyone else. And when that happens, go look up above paragraph, as it will take you ages to prove that it is not your imagination that things are slow.
cPanel Baby!
Yep, everyone knows that one. The ugliest and most bloated piece of software on this planet. This applies to WHM as well. We are in 2010, hosting industry has been around forever. Why is it so hard to make a decent control panel? Occasionally a host or two will have a custom solution that doesn’t stink just as bad. Take a look at panel from Slicehost. Minimalist, fast, to the point. If I need an escort service, I will not look for it on my web hosting control panel.
What Can Be Done
There needs to be a “Slicehost” for shared web hosting. Top notch customer service that knows their shit, quick and easy way to sign up (please don’t make me fill out four pages of shit to get $10 account). Give me an ability to move to a different server if I wan to. Give me a full control over DNS. Give me a nice and fast control panel so I can make quick changes for my clients. Be honest! If there are problems with the server, don’t make up lame excuses. Having a pretty website and a good marketing team is not enough.
Another problem is finding a decent host with so many of them out there. Popular hosting review websites are biased and dirty. No trust there. Reading for hours through WHT forums is really not that great. People complain about bad and good companies. Filtering all that noise can be time consuming.
Jan 29, 2010 - comments