Forum Moderators: phranque
Which disabled my site's function, as well as many of the sites that were on the device.
On the biggest shopping day of the year. The problem has persisted throughout the weekend.
There are no words to describe how p***ed I am over this. So, all whining aside, I'm putting together a questionaire for a long list of potentials I'm looking at, As you know companies offering site site hosting are a dime a dozen, and a lot of them are automated hosting farms, you think you're dealing with a local company and the box is in Singapore or something.
So here's my beginning list of questions to ask, this would be a good place to build a list for others looking for hosting. Any additions?
You can see I've left off price, I did this because that is as academic as asking "do you host websites?" :-) I also have no need for CMS or ecommerce software packages. Many of the questions are specific to my needs - so feel free to add anything that might be of use to someone in a list of questions to ask a potential hosting provider.
Questions to Ask When Seeking a New Host
Where are your servers actually located (are they within the building at your publicly posted company location)?
Who is your backbone bandwidth provider?
What server hardware and software platforms do you support?
Is billing and management of domains you host a managed service by human administrators, or is it automated?
If it is automated, what program/service do you use?
Do you offer a 24/7 support line, and is it based in my country?
Does your system perform daily backups, and are they off-site/off-server?
Does your system support the following services?
- mysql
- perl
- php
- command line mail (sendail, mail, etc.)
What systems do you use to create and edit mysql databases for my domains?
If you offer mysql servers as above, are they separate from the web servers or hosted on the same box?
Does your server software support curl, and what version?
Does your system use domain containment software of any kind for executables, such as CGI Wrapper?
Does your system support the following perl modules, or can they easily be installed without additional charges?
- ImageMagick/PerlMagick
- Mime::Lite
- DBI.pm
- CGI.pm
- XML::Simple
- POSIX
- Apache mod_rewrite
Do you charge extra for multiple domains aliasing to a single domain?
It is assumed I can access my domain via FTP, is this included in your bandwidth calculations for billing?
Will I have the ability to access, create, and modify .htaccess files?
Will I have the ability to access, create, and modify crontabs or cron jobs?
Will you be able to generate and provide a private key so that I may access my domain via command line through SSH?
Will I also be able to access the mysql server via SSH (if it is a separate box)?
Do you allow telnet to your servers? (Answer should be NO!)
When your server reaches critical disk space usage, or my domains approach quota, what mechanisms do you have in place to avert disaster?
What stats programs do you provide?
Will I have access to raw server access and error logs for my domain?
Do you support any kind of web interface for domain mail, such as iMail, for the purpose of configuring mailboxes and setting processing rules?
What kind of email spam filtering do you offer?
to the server on which we share hosting
That's the root of all your problems right there. You can't run a serious website on shared hosting.
Get yourself a decent dedicated box with management (or even a VPS) and you'll have a whole heap more flexibility.
All we're after is reliability.
You can't get reliability on a shared host. You are at the mercy of every other user on the shared host.
Even with a VPS, be careful what kind of VPS you are getting. Make sure you are getting a guaranteed percentage of CPU resources. As an example, a Xen VPS will give you this. Some other kinds of VPSs will not.
Sure, somebody's pager should have gone off when the disk filled up, and the situation should have been fixed within a reasonable amount of time. But what is "reasonable"? You have to EXPECT this sort of thing will happen when you use shared hosting. Selecting a "better" host will just minimize the response time to problems that should be expected.
Not only do our demands not require it, our budget doesn't support it yet.
Last time I checked, a VPS could be had for <$20/month. I'm paying $40. Of course, bandwidth/traffic can run this up, but that is irrespective of the type of hosting you have. Anybody who is offering "free, unlimited" bandwidth/traffic is either lying or will be shortly out of business.
How much did this outage cost you?
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OK, end of lecture...
Your list looks good. Don't expect many hosts to answer the questions. But it's a good starting point for checking out their marketing material, and then ask them any questions that are not answered.
Change backbone provider to backbone providers. Singular should be an automatic disqualification. Ask if you can see their actual bandwidth stats. Like resumes, backbone provider lists are often padded. Make sure they are actually USING the providers they list on a day-to-day basis - not just used as backup.
I worked at an ISP for 6 years. I know what's behind the scenes. I also know what can be done to unsure reliability even on shared hosting.
I suppose I should define "acceptable reliability." We can afford to have a server go down for periods of 3-5 minutes as much as two or three times a week. This would not hurt our online position at all. It's also very reasonable to ask of shared hosting.
But if a server dissappears off the 'net for periods of several hours at a clip - this is not acceptable. I also know that there are many ways to insure this doesn't happen, or can at least be minimized to the acceptable "few minutes."
I agree that a dedicated collo is the way to go. But I still haven't found one we can afford. The demands of this site are just far too low to justify an entire box at this point, as well as the cost of dedicated bandwidth. If you've got a reliable dedicated solution that will cost us $25 or under a month for the bandwidth, you have my sticky. :-)
This site is not part of the "elite" yet. It's slowly growing, and doing well, but it hasn't grown enough to pay for a dedicated server.
