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Comments
@Cam In a nutshell. Pretty sure everyone here can recommend him. Including Me.
This is LET. One-man operations are common. The operations with several people are just as (or perhaps more) likely to suddenly disappear when there are short-term cash-flow problems due to more debt.
I wouldn't go for it with a major e-commerce website, but then I wouldn't go for most of the providers advertising on LET for something like that, either. For lesser sites, go with whatever is most cost-effective, and make sure you've got a working contingency plan in place.
I can check the authenticity and proceed. Hire a consultant and do a background check. Not all troublemakers are still down with losses. They might have improved their strategy.
Bottom line for me: ASN
No independent ASN, no buying.
I do not see any issue being with a smaller operation as long as they can deliver what they promise.
Honesty is a bonus. You won't find many honest people in the hosting industry. They need to be appreciated as much as we can.
I don't care how many staff they have, as long as the company exists more than two years or the boss sells perfume.
Although one-man-show is not a red flag, I would prefer provider to have a bit more skin in the game (own hardware).
as long as the service is satisfied why not ?
Hosting companies run by one person wouldn't be a problem for me as long as it's for a personal website or a not-for-profit project. I think the biggest risk with hosting companies that are run by one person is downtime.
When a server goes belly up and your hosting guy is sleeping/on holiday/ill (or even worse) you're probably looking at some downtime. Then again, I've run websites on a fair share of hosting companies run by one or two persons (as far back as 1999) and never had such a situation.
Of course it's all based on reputation. You should answer support tickets on time, keep your servers online. Starting a webhoster is a wee bit more than just buying/renting a server and paying for the colocation.
Hmm I might be wrong but ramhost might be a one man or small company but their services have been nothing but stellar.
I mean you're basically talking about frantech and he's essentially a LET meme at this point with a ton of users.
One man isn't a problem if you can establish reliable cheap service. Labor is always the most expensive part of low end hosting. You cant expect multiple member teams and spendwhat we do on hosting.
Hostigation started as a one man OP and ran for many years with great service.
@Mic-hael with smallweb is a one man OP and has great service.
@Cam and @mikho both one man OP and great service.
The amount of employees means jack when the OP is dedicated to providing the service they promise.
I dont even read their about pages. Only their TOS and reviews on third party websites. I rarely require hoster to support me as I know how to manage my server. If I didn't, I would register with someone who provides managed servers, and this is normally not provided by 1 man teams.
Exactly.
I don't care if it is one man or hundred man operation as long as I get:
for my idle VPS
Honesty is the best! Good luck, man!
And for your question - if the user base is small, you really don't need too much people working here. Also, as you said, you will be renting the servers. So just select a good company to rent from and give good examples, your customers' good experience in your website "about" page. It should help you out.
203661 - proves what now? This runs on me personally, everyone can get one ultimately...
People like me provide ASNs for under 100 GBP a year (sometimes much cheaper) and the process requires nothing but ID verification - as William said, anyone can get one very easily.
Sure, why not? I'd rather have an honest provider who's straightforward about their caveats and limitations (so that I can plan for them), than a provider who's trying to "fake it till they make it" and setting impossible expectations in the process.
Let's be realistic, most of the providers in this pricing bracket are one-man shows - just some admit it to your face, and others don't.
In principle I absolutely would. Whether or not you actually get me on board depends on other factors, but I'm in no way opposed to the concept.
It's quite clear that the number of employees has no statistical correlation to uptime or service quality. One could even make a convincing argument that more employees strongly correlates to less uptime and lower quality, due to the thin margins in so much of the industry. At least in the market sector you see represented here.
I think it's a good idea to engineer your own redundancy across multiple providers anyway - be they large or small, lowend or premium.
In the larger context, VC-funded startups and even big companies can get bought out or whatever (thinking about DEC, SUN, and SGI for example), product lines get eol'd, and any number of downtime-producing scenarios can come up along the way.
And all the while many a one-man-band might just keep marching along, doing what they do best.
EDIT2:
And - supposed "economies of scale" notwithstanding - maybe I'd prefer to see whatever well-earned profit margin going towards some individual's retirement fund (or whatever, excluding Steam game purchases) rather than to mollify some VC's pursuit of a unicorn, etc ... (Thinking about CPanel now.)
it can prove your business size, I guess?