How to Survive a Bad Hosting Provider and Preserve Your Sanity
How to Survive a Bad Hosting Provider and Preserve Your Sanity
Version: 0.02 - DRAFT
Introduction
This document was prompted by the events surrounding the implosion of the hosting provider FeaturePrice and is intended as an informal guide for web hosting customers to the pitfalls and common sense practices of web hosting.
The fundamental premise of this guide is that even good hosts can go bad very quickly and thus the emphasis is on mitigating the impact of that eventuality.
Picking a Hosting Provider
Before even starting to research hosts, every customer should have a clear understanding of their specific requirements and their relative importance. The individual requirements will differ significantly and every customer has to decide how much weight desired technical features, price, and support carry.
In general, there may not be a host that can match the specific requirements of a given customer and it should be understood in advance which trade-offs are acceptable and which are not.
Once the research begins, it will be readily apparent that there are many hosting providers to chose from and that there is a distinct lack of transparency to the business. Information regarding location, staffing, financial health, and the physical infrastructure may not be easy to come by. The situation is further complicated by multiple tiers of resellers. As to the latter, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with resellers - provided they disclose their background to allow the customer to make an informed choice based on the specific advantages and disadvantages of a particular reseller.
The issue one must be aware of regarding resellers is that they may not have access to the physical hardware. A direct consequence of this is that they must rely on their source to troubleshoot and fix certain types of problems, which will likely increase the time frame in which these problems can be resolved.
When researching hosts, here is a non-exhaustive list of issues to consider.
If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
This point can’t be emphasized enough. When comparing hosting plans offered by a number of providers, it will be readily apparent that a certain set of features falls into a relatively narrow price range. Be wary of plans that are offered at a much lower rate than average.
There is no such thing as “unlimited”
No provider can offer unlimited bandwidth or disk space. Those that do invariably qualify the offer of an unlimited commodity in their Terms of Service and any customer taking the offer literally will sooner or later see his contract cancelled.
There are other technical features - like the number of mailboxes - that carry little incremental cost to the provider and may be offered as unlimited, but even in these cases there are pragmatic and technical limits. It’s likely that a hosting provider would take issue with a customer creating 1,000,000,000 mailboxes, or at least trying to.
Location, staffing, financial background
There are doubtless small hosting providers and many resellers that do not volunteer their physical location, the owner’s name, the staffing level, the provider’s financial state, and the location and connectivity of the data centers.
While funding and financial issues are rather unlikely to be disclosed at all or in more than vague terms, it is not advisable to do business with a company that doesn’t disclose the other items upon request.
Particularly with small providers, it’s reasonable to confirm that a stated address is valid.
Consumer Organizations
Do not neglect to search for information on a business with the Better Business Bureau and similar consumer organizations. An established business should have a file with the BBB, although the reports should be interpreted with caution. However, do not under any circumstances subscribe to a provider with a “pattern of complaints” or “billing issues” - you have been warned.
Web Research
An essential part of the customer’s due dilligence is to search the Internet for feedback and background information on the provider.
It is not comforting if a search comes up virtually blank, unless it is a very young business. On the other hand, some negative feedback should be expected - a hosting provider of a sufficient size is likely to have at least a few dissatisfied customers for some reason or other.
Positive and negative feedback alike must be taken with a grain of salt, however, because it could be submitted by the provider or their competitors. A large number of complaints from a multiple independent sources is a danger sign, billing issues being of particular concern.
Web Review Sites
Not all website review sites are what they purport to be - an independent resource. It’s not unheard of that hosting providers maintain review sites that rate themselves highest, but fail to disclose their true status of an unlabelled advertisement.
To be credible, a review site should have an active user forum where complaints are raised even against the top-ranked hosts. Be aware, however, that while some hosts maintain advertisements masked as an independent review site, other hosts may engage in “bad-mouthing” on review sites that support reader feedback.
The Small Print
In this time and age, it is advisable to read any legal agreements very, very carefully. Even if the legal language may be hard to follow, it is important to understand the Terms of Service.
Issues to look for include, but are not limited to:
- the services rendered
- qualifications to the service guarantees
- support policies
- restrictions on usage
- refund policies
- cancellation policies
If possible, have a legal advisor review these documents - particularly if your website is used for business purposes. Generally, you want to be aware whether the contractual terms are fair and balanced, or even worse, if there are any unenforceable provisions (like waiving the right for credit card chargebacks) or the language is intentionally shrouded to hide the disadvantage on the side of the customer.
Be sure to save a dated copy of the Terms of Service and other legal agreements in effect at the time of subscription. Also save copies of the hosts’s whois domain record or anything else that provides contact or other pertinent information. If there are disputes later on, having these documents readily available can be invaluable.
Payment Options and Refunds
Many hosting providers will try to lock customers into a long-term relationship by offering discounts if the customer prepays service for a number of months. These discounts must be weighed carefully against the provisions of the refund policy. If you pay in advance for a year’s worth of service, but refunds are issued within the first month only, there is an obvious risk if problems surface subsequent to the first month of service.
A host that offers a monthly payment option and/or prorated refunds is clearly preferable to a host that only accepts yearly prepaid service and no refunds after an initial trial phase.
A credit card generally offers the best protection to customers and should be used in preference to debit cards, checks, money orders, or other forms of payment. Even with a credit card, it’s a good idea to inquire about the way disputed charges are handled before that eventuality arises, if ever.
Hosting Plans
Comparing hosting plans can be a frustrating experience. While there are relatively few parameters that will differ between plans, none of the plans may be a close match to any individual requirements. The situation is further complicated by custom plans offered by some providers. Even if custom plans aren’t advertised, a provider may offer one upon request.
In the long term, it is probably less problematic to chose a pre-packaged hosting plan rather than a custom plan, but this must be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Nickels and Dimes
This topic is related to hosting plans and billing issues. The fundamental question is how a hosting provider proceeds when a customer exceeds any resource limits, like disk space or bandwidth.
Sometimes resource limits are simply enforced; e.g. there are hard disk quotas or a site will be suspended when it exceeds its bandwidth limit.
Other times a host will levy over-use fees; a customer should ascertain in advance that these fees are not punitive.
Overselling Capacity
Relatively few customers use their disk space and bandwidth allotment to capacity. As a consequence, many hosting providers will oversell these resources, i.e. they scale the resources they provide for hosting purposes based on average usage rather than the sum of the capacity sold to customers.
Hosting providers that oversell have a slight competitive edge against that those that do not, as they can either lower prices or reduce their overhead costs. However, quality of service can deteriorate very quickly if they attract customers that use the resources they pay for in full.
Reference Sites
If possible, review reference sites to get an empirical measure on the infrastructure’s performance level.
Best Practices
As mentioned earlier, the advice is geared towards ease of switching hosting providers. No matter how well a provider is researched, there is always the possibility for problems later on. With the exception of the control over the domain name and backups, these practices may be more appropriate for corporate sites rather than personal blogs.
Domain Name
*Always retain exclusive control over your domain name.* Do not, under any circumstances, let a hosting provider register your domain name. Do not transfer your domain to a hosting provider. Do register your domain name with the registrar of your choice and modify the name servers as required by the hosting provider.
Some hosting plans include a “free” domain name registration and it is tempting - particularly for budget plans - to save the domain registration fees. The problem with this practice is that some dishonest hosts will register the domain in their name, rather than the customer’s. This not only bars the customer from easily switching providers, it essentially means that the host holds the domain hostage.
Domains can be registered for a yearly renewal fee of less than $10. This money is more than well spent compared to the risk of a domain held hostage, as any number of customers who’ve been in that situation can tell you.
Backups, Record-Keeping, and Change Management
Backups are your responsibility. Do not trust a host to perform backups for you. Make regular backups of files, databases, and configuration data and keep them in a safe place. Particularly if you use a site for business purposes, you should always be able to recreate the site on short notice - with the same provider or another.
A hosting provider may not perform any backups at all and if a server suffers an unrecoverable failure, all customer data may be lost. Other hosting providers will back up servers, but only for the purpose of recovering a failed server and not for individual file recovery.
Change Management is your friend. In particular, be sure to keep accurate records of any customizations made to your site. Between regular backups and accurate customization logs, you will have a near-complete revision history of your site, which can be invaluable if you have to move the site to a different hosting environment.
Keep records. Be sure to save copies of Terms of Service and any other applicable legal agreements in effect when you subscribe. Likewise, save whois records of the host. Should the host unilaterally change the Terms of Service, it can be beneficial to preserve this change history. On the other hand, you might as well change hosts if one changes the Terms of Service without notification to the customer.
Email is very important to most customers, but it seems that email stored on a server is more frequently lost than any other data. If you use a webmail interface or the IMAP protocol to access your email, do not neglect local backups of server-stored email.
Another frequent problem with email is that many hosting providers will not configure backup mail-exchange (MX) hosts for your domain, or if they do, the backup MX hosts are located in the same network. This may result in non-delivered email, with potentially serious ramifications for a business or even an individual.
Evacuation Drill
Backups are not backups unless you can restore them. A web hosting customer may be forced to change hosting providers on short notice for any number of reasons. If at all possible, run an “evacuation drill” with a dummy site (using a throw-away domain name, but live data and software). Note the range of problems caused by different hosting providers and the lag periods for DNS changes to propagate.
Suspicious Minds
Software packages like phpSysInfo will confirm whether the server hardware matches the host’s claims.
(MORE)
Appendix
Domain Name System
Domain Expiration and Deletion
For the purposes of a domain name registrar, the ower of a domain is the registrant. The registrant can request immediate cancellation, i.e. deletion, of a domain.
If a domain is not renewed on time, what follows is a rough outline of the procedures that lead up the eventual deletion of a domain.
Phase 1: If no renewal fee is paid prior to the domain’s expiration date, the registrar will keep the domain active in its expired state for a grace period of no more than 30 days. During that time, the normal renewal procedures apply.
Phase 2: If the domain is not renewed during the grace period, it will enter a redemption period of no more than 30 days. During that time, the DNS zone will be deleted, but the whois record will remain online (possibly replaced with a redemption template). A domain in this state cannot be renewed, but must be redeemed for a $150 fee. Only the registrant can redeem a domain. Since a domain may expire due to an dispute between the registrar and the registrant, a domain can be redeemed using a different registrar.
Phase 3: If the domain is not redeemed, the registry itself will hold the domain for an additional grace period of no more than 30 days. During that time, the whois record will not be available.
Domain Transfers
(MORE)
References
- YHS
- WHT
Copyright © 2003 by Markus Weber. All Rights Reserved. Redistribution with prior consent strictly prohibited.