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Reflections on six years of low budget shared hosting

Although I have been an Internet user since the late 90’s, I only really got serious about online activities in 2001. It was more a matter of logistics than anything else. At that time I was living in Tokyo and I was fortunate to have an ultra fast cable connection at home. That was the year I bought my first domain name: writerspace.net (now with new owner). I setup a small writer’s community, powered it with Drupal CMS, and together with a group of 4 writers we experimented with the writing of two collaborative plays. The project was a success and it inspired me to take on more ambitious projects in subsequent years, one of which was London Theatre Blog.

2001 was also the year that I invested in my first shared hosting account. This allowed me to host several domains, set up new projects, including a blog and a portfolio site. Prior to that, I had been using blogger and free hosting (complete with flashing ad banners!) to run my sites. Entering the paid hosting world was quite a big step, not so much in a financial sense, but in terms of starting out at the foot of a new learning curve. Like most new experiences in life, there is only so much you can do to anticipate pitfalls. Most of the learning is done through trial and error, pattern recognition, that’s what we’re best at.

Choosing my first hosting package was in many ways like my first date: it was awkward and shrouded in myth. Of course, I did my fair share of research prior to purchase. I visited web hosting forums, I looked for the least partisan of host review sites, which I must say is nigh on impossible (any takers to start an unbiased hosting review site out there??), and entertained the views of TopHosts and host review, but I was still left with a surfeit of unanswered questions, most of which could only be solved by taking that first step.

With these questions in mind, what I’ll do next is cover some of the pitfalls I’ve encountered with hosting services over the past six years so that readers who are about to ‘take the plunge’ might benefit from the experience. But rather than develop this into an essay of sorts, I’ll present it in FAQ form. I’ve made a list of all the questions I could think of and I’ll attempt to answer them here as candidly as possible, without scaremongering or hype.

» What is shared hosting?

Shared web hosting refers to the service provided by web server owners, or web server resellers (companies selling web space on behalf of server owners) whereby a predetermined number of websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site “sits” on its own partition, or section of the server to keep it separate from other sites. As a general rule, more sites hosted on a single server = lower cost of the overall server maintenance. Hosting too many sites on one server however can sometimes lead to server overload and this results in the infamous ‘down time’ (when a server is ‘down’ your site is essentially offline).

» What is budget hosting?

In my experience there are three levels to the shared hosting spectrum: budget, medium and high end hosting. I would say that ‘budget hosting’ refers to packages that cost no more than $200 (100) per year, but the notion of ‘budget’ or ‘cheap’ is different for everyone according to his/her means. Beyond the cost factor though, it is also important to point out that the budget end of the hosting market is the most saturated. This means that the competition amongst companies (mostly resellers) is fierce, so as customers, we need to be aware of not falling into alluring sales traps. This is particularly the case when you find one company offering exceptionally generous hosting features against an exceptionally low price.

» How can you tell if a host will have down time?

You’ll often find hosting companies talking about a percentage of ‘up time’, usually 99%. Some companies even have up time ‘guarantees’, though it’s difficult to say exactly how binding those guarantees are. But to determine from the outset how much down time you will have with such and such a hosting company is not possible. Down time can occur for a number of reasons, one of which I have already mentioned: server overload. Sometimes hardware can break down in the server centre, or a particular site on the shared server may receive a sudden ’spike’ of traffic forcing the server to a standstill. In short, most servers will be subject to some period of down time but any half decent hosting service should compensate for your loss, either by refunding you for exceptionally long periods of down time or sometimes moving your site to a different server.

» What can you expect in terms of customer service on a budget plan?

Whatever level of hosting you have paid for, it goes without saying that you are entitled to good customer service for the simple fact that you are paying for someone else’s services. As soon as a company breached good customer service practice, I am usually inclined to ask for a refund and leave. The general standard that you can expect is: a) courteous and timely communication, if you submit a support email you should expect to receive a response within an hour, b) and one that addresses your question personally, as opposed to generic response that has been cut and pasted into the email; c) you should also expect your host to be flexible, to accommodate your requests to the best of their ability, d) to show initiative in offering alternatives where a particular demand may not be possible; e) but overall you should expect a relationship with your hosting company that is trustworthy and honest. Anything less than this and it might be time to look elsewhere.

N.b. More Q & A’s will follow. If you have any suggestions of your own to add to this ‘guide’ then please email them to me here. Thanks alot.

Why doesn’t Digg have a category for the Arts?

Digg is probably the Internet’s most influential community-based popularity site, it has the ability to drive thousands of readers to a news event within minutes. It is often used as a method of inducing quick traffic streams to websites, particularly blogs. But with all this traffic and web energy digg is surprisingly insular in the areas it covers.

The two main fields are science and technology. See here for the complete list of digg fields. My question to the people in charge of digg, if ever they caught wind of this post, would be quite simply: what happened to the fields of art and culture? And don’t tell me you’ve got them covered under ‘movies’ and ‘music’ because we know that boils down to Hollywood and MTV. I’m talking about the rich and diverse artistic and cultural websites that are in abundance on the web. Surely it’s worth opening digg up to a wider audience, after all on your ‘about’ page you talk about ‘collective community’:

‘By looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg, you’ll always find something interesting and unique.’ (source)

So what happened? Was it something that merely passed you by or was it more of a burden to your financial plans? Maybe you figured that if you kept quiet about it nobody would notice? Well I noticed and I’m sure thousands of others did too. Isn’t it time for change?

Update: Based on responses from comments on Digg there seems to be a general view that a) art-oriented submissions would not be popular enough. b) if there were arts categories then they’d be plagued by poor quality submissions and c) perhaps other sites such as Stumble Upon and DeviantArt offer a better housing for artistic areas. I’m still not entirely convinced and I would like to hear the ‘official’ reason from the Digg founders themselves. They must have had so many demands of this sort by now, what position do they take? Please feel free to comment here or on the Digg section if you word for Digg. Thanks.