This may sound more like ranting than an article, but honestly it’s the truth, and as a website owner you deserve to know “Why webhosting sucks”.

Time and time again I see issues that are tracked down to being a server issue. And most of the time it’s the same “big” hosts that causes these issues. Just because a host is big and has made a name for themselves doesn’t mean they are a good host.

Many hosts have very stong security to prevent things like scripts abusing their servers. Unfortunately this security is usually poorly implimented and causes issues with scripts or functions. Some hosts make you log into a control panel to enable features that should simply work without having to do anything.

And lets not get started on “unlimited”. There is no such thing. Any host trying to sell you unlimited is simply lying to you and should never be trusted. If “unlimited” was real then why do you not have unlimited hard drive space on your own computer? It’s crap. The fact is, they say they have no limit but read the fine print, there is a definite limit to what you can do with that account. Most of them limit the CPU usage, many of them limit the type of files you can upload, and all of them just want your money.

What happens when you go over the limit on unlimited? You get cancelled immediately, no refund, no backup data, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

How do you know which host is going to be good? Unfortunately you can’t know that before hand unless you have an endoresement. There are only two compaines that I would endorese for hosting IndexU. One would be Frank (c-4.us) and the other would be mine. The trick here, is that I don’t want just any customer that can find my URL and sign up.

There are a few types of webhosting clients
1) Users who know nothing
2) Users who know a lot but admit when they are stuck
3) Users who think they know everything

And number three is why I dislike the hosting business. There are far too many people out there that think they can do anything because they saw it somewhere else or they read about it on some website. And I’m here to tell them that they are wrong. Most of them don’t listen, but I can’t control that.

Thankfully these users don’t often sign up with companies like mine. They go sign up with the big hosts and get their accounts terminated rather quickly. Then they go on webhosting forums and bash the companies they abused.

Which customers do I like the best? Actually I like the ones who know nothing the most. They are most often teachable and willing to learn. Sure group two is willing to learn as well, but they are not usually teachable and they learn by mistake. Well a mistake on a server can mean a serious problem.

Lets take a look back a few fears ago when I hired a “programmer”. You’ll see why I put programmer in quotes in a minute. I asked for a simple script that would connect to usenet, retrieve data, store the data in a temporary database, sort the data, then place it in a final database table. It turns out this programmer couldn’t get php/mysql/apache running on his computer (no idea why, I didn’t even bother to ask) so I set up a login for him to work on a live domain on one of my servers.

A few days later I suddenly get a barrage of emails telling me that usage is sky high and services are failing. I login via SSH and run TOP only to see a script in this “programmers” directory has spiked CPU usage so high that it took me 3 minutes to log in via SSH.

I terminated the process and then terminated the programmer. It’s a good thing I was at my computer when I got the emails as this wasn’t a development server, this was a production server with 80+ domains on it. If I was out or away I may not have seen it for hours which means that customer sites and my own sites would have been down.

Now you can see why VPS hosting is so popular now, in a VPS the above would never have happened.

Like I said, it’s going to sound more like a rant than an article. But your website deserves a solid, stable host that supports everything that IndexU or any other Nicecoder product requires. It’s your business that is on the line, so act like it really matters and investigate your host as much as possible.