Web Hosting Thoughts
I’ve had a bit of experience with a plethora of web hosting companies over the years and thought I’d post some of my thoughts. These are ideas posted in forum discussions, letters, etc.
Speaking of “a plethora of web hosting companies” here are the ones I’ve dealt with over the years (that I can remember) in order of when I had my very first family website with e-access.net:
e-access.net - had our family website here for about 3 years starting around 1998. Their site hasn’t changed since.
tripod.com
geocities.com
hostonce.com - BAD COMPANY. Lots of downtime, terrible support.
freeservers.com
netfirms.com
cfm-resources.com - a bit of downtime
ehostingbiz.com - pretty good product and support
worldwebhosters.com - bad support and product
host4students.com - very short stay
prowebspace.com - started off really well, but couldn’t handle growth and had lots of unexplained downtime and data loss
dathorn.com - Very happy with them, but outgrew their services after a bit over a year
I’ve now moved to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that provides me with way more resources, features, and access than I’ve ever had before.
Regarding Host Downtime and the delivery of an ETR (estimate time of recovery.. sometime mislabeled ETA)
In Business Ethics courses they teach you that a business’s first responsibility is to Make Money, guess what, obeying the law and being ethical are secondary. This really surprised me the first few times I heard professors preaching this message, but it began to made sense once they explained that if a company isn’t making money they won’t exist to break the law or to be unethical.
Regarding business administration and strategic business decisions, let’s play with the scenarios and some hypothetical numbers from a web host’s downtime and look at this from a pure business perspective.
A Hosting Company does some investigating and determines that the downtime from a cut fiber line could be:
Average: 10 hours
Max: 24 hours
Min: 3 hours
They send out a mass email to their customers saying the ETA is:
24 hours: 40% of their customers start looking at possible hosting alternatives, 25% consider moving, 10% move.
10 hours: 25% of their customers start looking at possible hosting alternatives, 15% consider moving, 3% move.
3 hours: 10% of their customers start looking at possible hosting alternatives, 5% consider moving, 1% move.
or, they say nothing and just work the problem:
After 30 minutes: 2% start looking at alternatives, 0.5% consider moving, 0.1% move.
After 3 hours: another 5% start looking at alternatives, 1% consider moving, 0.5% move.
After 6 hours, all fixed: Most users are happy that their sites are back up, but another 4% start looking at alternatives, 1.5% consider moving, 0.3% move.
A few other ideas:
What if they say 24 hours and it is 3 hours. They’ll lose a ton of customers from the beginning, but those who stuck it out will be super happy they stuck around.
What if they say 3 hours and it is 24 hours. Many will stick around for the three hours, but the customer losses will be exponential as you approach 24 hours.
Anyway, you get the idea.
There are variables to consider of course , but from a PURE BUSINESS perspective it financially makes more sense for them to not say anything… even if they really knew the min, max, and average times.
Now, is it ethical for them to say or not say if they know these numbers? Personally, I’m more concerned about them making money and providing excellent support. If they make ETA statements to make a small percentage of the customers more comfortable it could be at the expense of losing customers which are the life blood of any company.
Well, even if the business owner was to make the decision to post these possible ETA numbers, any other company that has a competent marketing department and finance department will NOT allow their support staff to post these numbers, especially if all the marketing / finance people have been to business school.
Regarding Host Downtime and the delivery of a “Downtime Announcement”
A question I’ve thought about at every host I’ve been that has a forum….
How does a company find the line that lies between too little and too much information?
For example, we all know about “too little” information, but what if a hosting company sent out notifications (via email and on a forum) every singe time there was downtime?
I would think they might start loosing customers like crazy. I bet there are way more issues and periods of downtime that I ever know about, or even want to know about. I’d probably think they had a shoddy product with all the downtime announcements I’d see posted.
Also, should they send the announcement after 5 mins, 10 mins, 30 mins, or an hour of downtime?
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