The Wholesale Forums

[greedyboy]

With hosting you get what you pay for. No disrespect to Pete or anyone selling hosting but I personally would only host with a reputable and well established hosting company.

It's nice having cheap hosting but what happens when the one man band gets hit by a bus, is in hospital for 2 weeks, misses a payment and your site goes down. You are now losing 50 orders a day while it's being sorted out.

Sounds extreme but always prepare for the worst. For the sake of a few quid a month I'd rather my hosting handled by a leading hosting company.

Once again, this is not an attack on anyone here, just my opinion.

[JGClifton]

It depends on who the host is and how they're run. In the event of me being ill or on holiday the people who I rent my server from take my support calls as part of our agreement so with that you're pretty safe.

You're only going to guarantee total safety with a company like rackspace but then you pay a huge price.

[Saajan]

Originally Posted by greedyboy

With hosting you get what you pay for. No disrespect to Pete or anyone selling hosting but I personally would only host with a reputable and well established hosting company.

It's nice having cheap hosting but what happens when the one man band gets hit by a bus, is in hospital for 2 weeks, misses a payment and your site goes down. You are now losing 50 orders a day while it's being sorted out.

Sounds extreme but always prepare for the worst. For the sake of a few quid a month I'd rather my hosting handled by a leading hosting company.

Once again, this is not an attack on anyone here, just my opinion.

That's why I have fully automated systems in place which can arrange payments and automatically create accounts. And have a dedicated support team which I pay for, plus my server is with a reliable host

[Beneddie1112]

Everybody has their off days though, no server can stay online 24/7/365.

[greedyboy]

I am not talking about uptime. I'm more concerned I am dealing with a reputable company and not a guy trying to make a few quid.

[JGClifton]

Who do you host with out of interest? I'll have a guess at 1&1 - now they're reputable but I had an absolute nightmare with them when I first bought hosting...

[Beneddie1112]

www.OpenMindHosting.co.uk I've heard are very good. They host another business forum and even have their own pre-built E-commerce software.

Cheers,
Ben

[greedyboy]

I host with 1&1 and webfusion. Had my fair share of problems too. But I feel confident that they won't dissapear of the face of the earth and pay their bills.

[Pete]

Actually, I was a reseller for a guy who did get into a major accident and could not keep up with his business in several casts from a hospital bed. I went through the same kind of horror Anthony has recently been through, but in my case it was other people's sites.

I made up my mind then that I would not subject my clients to the same situation, so I have complete plans in place, should I be incapacitated. Several members of my immediate family are also involved as far as receiving and making payments so that the actual owners of the servers do not shut anything down, which was the case with the other guy.

They are fully capable of continuing to run the business well into the middle of the century.

Also, the server people could even now if I wanted handle all support requests directly. They will even reply in my company name, should I desire. I don't take them up on that offer, but with an email or phone call it could be implemented.

All of the money comes into and is deducted from PayPal on subscriptions, so the flow is automatic. As long as the payments come in there is some for the server folks and that's the only payable, except a few domain names, which are also on auto pay routines. Other than new accounts, which I choose not to automate, but prefer to do on a one-on-one basis, everything can run on it's own.

The servers themselves are state of the art, located in a Tier IV datacenter facility located inside the well known INFOMART telecom hotel near downtown Dallas. Specializing in datacenter and hosting facilities, INFOMART is home to multiple datacenters including MCI, Level 3, Equinix, Verio, Switch & Data, Verizon, DataSides, and more.

The building sits atop three redundant electrical grids from TXU delivering diverse power to each quadrant of the building. HVAC needs are supplied via five one hundred ton onsite water chillers to deliver N+1 cooling requirements. Home to over twelve switch sites and thirty-five different carriers, INFOMART houses technology and telecom related businesses in a complex communications ecosystem.

There is another similar complex in the Seattle area, providing redundancy, should the need arise.

I spent 5 years as a user before venturing into the hosting business and feel like I have put the needs of my clients above profits. But far and away what I have to offer, and I'm sure some of the others I mentioned have to offer is the hands-on help when first starting.

greedyboy, it's fine for someone in your position, with your own IT department, to suggest large corporate hosts. But I've dealt with them and know the support you get. Ask them about a CubeCart or OSC problem. All you get is "we don't support applications, we just support our servers." That's not what I do, that is not what I want to become.

I come to this forum not for income, I was here for years before I became a seller. I come here to help those first getting started and suggesting that those people are better off with a corporate host could not be further from the truth. I can't speak for others, but their as safe with me as they are anyone and they'll get much more personal attention.

My average client from this forum has at least a dozen communications with me before ever paying a penny to me. I've got strings of PM's and emails 25 or 30 deep with them just getting comfortable with the move to their own shop. Are they going to get that from a corporate hosting company. Is someone going to point them to demos of shopping carts and explain the difference? Not hardly.

greedyboy, I agree with most of what you have to say, but in this case your own size of scale is out of touch with the newbies who are coming here looking for help. They don't need large hosts, they need someone who cares.

And if they do their backups as anyone should, if I went out of business tomorrow they should be able to move to another server within hours. It won't happen, but I do live within the ground zero range of the world's largest naval base, the only shipyard building nuclear carriers, a major air base and a nuclear power station. Not looking for anything, but you never know.......

[jazzman]

Can I conclude from the discussion so far that a customised site is always better if you can afford it?

(And your not in a desperate rush!)