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When selecting a hosting provider, what factors are most important to you?
With our experience spanning over a decade in the industry, we know how important it is to stay up-to-date with what our clients need.
So, we're reaching out to both web hosting clients and providers, hoping to get some honest answers. Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and we appreciate you taking the time to help us out. Let's make our services even better together!
Comments
Would it cost me more than double, like $50 if I make changes to the promotional plan?
stable network most important for me!
Many... Mostly pricing, reputation, network, support and hardware.
Hi,
Can you explain what you mean exactly?
Reliability and uptime
Better hardware and fast network
Scalability and flexible plan such as CPU, RAM, and storage
Instant customer support
Competitive Pricing
Buy for $10, renew for $20.
Well said, and for me, depending on the project, it's very important to know philosophical position on freedom of speech, and their track record on freedom of speech.
“If you sell small pizza at $1 as a special promo, can I be an entitled prick and demand half slice of a large pizza to be sold at $1.5? If you don’t agree I’ll make post on LowEndPizza forum and defame you and your company”
I exactly mean this ^ Thanks for answering @jmaxwell![:smiley: :smiley:](https://lowendtalk.com/resources/emoji/smiley.png)
IPv6 support and stable pricing.
what everyone on let im preety sure want to here is if they buy at say 10 for the year , they dont want it to come 20 or 30 on renewal , they want to be sure price remains same and stability and support is there.
Stable Network - is a must![:smiley: :smiley:](https://lowendtalk.com/resources/emoji/smiley.png)
Support - is a must
IPV6- some want but not all "we offer anyway"
DDOS Protection - Individual basis we include
Backups / DR - Nightly backups are a must
Uptime - no down for hours on end unless maintenance, 99.9% uptime as a standard (were at 99.973%)
@Babak your username looks familiar. Are you mod from 'dominant blue colors' forum?
Haha yes understood.
Thank you for explaining. yes that make sense sometimes there is no logic behind the expectations.
The following are in order of importance
1. online time of product service
2.Price
3.Location
4.Response time in case of failure
Honestly, my preferance (and it's sad) is getting more and more oriented towards ease of use and ease of mind from a corporate perspective.
I want to:
1. Know that my account is safe and protected
2. Know that my data won't be gone with a "sorry you got 5 bucks of credit" if I pay for a redundant solution
3. Know that they're around tomorrow
I was doing my regular 2-3 months worth of book keeping.
These months I've paid a lot of providers.
I love how Hetzner group basically everything into one invoice and just trust me to pay it, makes book keeping a lot easier.
I love that OVH has a very easy way of sorting through a big list of invoices, that I can "select all" according to my filter, and select "download selected invoices" and I get an email with a link to a zip with all of my selected invoices, either as PDF or CSV.
Not quite as fun as scouting for 3 usd / yr deals, but there's just a long list of small things that make some providers a lot easier to use for professional use.
Constant availability is another one of those things I just can't be without - why I basically slowly have replaced BuyVM and other LET providers with OVH & Hetzner.
Developing I can't "wait for stock". I want to deploy, remove, deploy again, scale up, scale down etc.
Also I feel like such an annoyance when I for the third time in like 2 months asked BuyVM to unlock SMTP.
With Hetzner I got auto unblocked account-wide with a button, with OVH I don't think I've ever been blocked.
anything for 7$
Yes Totally agree, simple but important!
The billings are getting more and more complicated and a lot of hidden fees.
transparent and simple billing is an important factor we always try to keep it simple with billings and invoices with various payment possibilities.
Is a back solution essential for VPS services? If yes, what kind of backup solutions do you usually use?
What is important to me depends on what I'm looking for.
If I'm looking for a place to just test something or just playing around with something, then naturally price is important.
If I'm looking to host something business related, then stability becomes more important.
If it is something really important then redundancy, geographic location, financial stability and things like that becomes important.
Price is of course always an issue, but the more important and critical the project becomes, the less important price becomes.
I do have some things that are dealbreakers in any scenario.
Nice yes, essential no.
I would not trust my backups to the same provider that hosts the server anyway. If they fuck up my server they will probably fuck up the backup too. Or, as seen so many times here on let, they deadpool and both server and backup are gone.
Here are a few of mine:
Define limits clearly in a fair use policy, and be careful saying "unlimited" or "unmetered". If you say unlimited/unmetered transfer on a typical 1gbps port, would you really tolerate running up several hundred TB in a month on that $10 vps? Most likely no, but many providers will still advertise this lie and mislead inexperienced or naive customers. Don't be afraid to give an exact number.
Communicate downtime and/or incidents responsibly. If there is planned maintenance or downtime, communicate this to any customers that may be affected in advance. If there was an unscheduled incident, communicate to affected customers and if possible produce a post-mortem of what the issue was and the steps you will take to prevent a recurrence of this issue in the future.
When an abuse report is received about something hosted by one of your customers, unless there is egregious or repeated violation of your terms of use or obvious violation of laws, forward the report to the customer and give them the opportunity to remedy the problem. Here is an excerpt from OVH's abuse report email response which is a good example:
OVHcloud conducts its activities in compliance with applicable laws and we prohibit the use of our services for purposes contrary to our general terms and conditions.
It is important to note that most of our services are rented "unmanaged" to our customers. This means that we only have access to the power supply of the server. We can only maintain the hardware of the infrastructure and we are prevented from being able to access to its content (no root, administrator, or user access).
Please note that we cannot guarantee that your request will achieve the desired outcome. We are subject to the policies of ICANN of the respective registries and, where applicable, local and international laws.
We are also bound by the contracts with our customers. As we do not manage the server, we are technically not able to modify or delete any content, or to prevent any abusive behavior by intervening directly on the server.
We are able to block a domain only in the case of clear and obvious violations of the law. Before practicing any blocking of a domain, we usually try to contact the domain owner to give him the opportunity to solve the problem before taking any action on our side.
Furthermore, we are not allowed to disclose the customer information to third parties. Therefore, before reporting us any abuse, we can only advise you to check if it is not better to fill a complaint or to contact directly the domain holder to achieve the desired outcome.
This! Every provider should read and understand this!
I can accept almost any downtime if there is a valid reason for it. If the provider just tells me "hey, we fucked up, this happened and it will take this long to fix" I will most likely not even be annoyed.
If there is downtime and I am not informed, or the provider tries to come with some made up excuse instead of just owning the problem, I'm moving.
It may sound a bit crazy, but I have more trust in a provider that comes out and say "sorry, we stumbled on the powercord and it took down a rack" than a provider that covers behind some "infrastructure problems out of our control" or similar empty marketing approved bullshit.
While selecting web hosting you have to check some factors - Scalability, Reliability, Free Domain, 24/4 Human Support.
Ticket support. im not a hosting guy. im just web ui designer. i dont know much about hosting. this is why im only looking for reliability support. i have no clue at all when my client asks me about hosting technical issue.
to talk about reliability , i would like to give a credit to @dustinc and his support team. their team helps to resolve a lot of issue of mine. well done.
with the affordable price i surprised excellent support from Racknerd. im writing this because i have some my country local hosting provider which far more expensive but not good in support.
disclaim, im not affiliate from Racknerd.
Sometimes I like to think in "patterns". This is a brilliant summary of a very common thread pattern here.
You are free to reject and move somewhere else, you just have too much salt in your system to be doing this.
Good network
DDoS protection
Excellent uptime.
I don’t use new companies, usually. I have been with BuyVM since like 2015.
It’s not the highest quality provider here, but it’s hosted my personal site that I sell services through and it’s gotten the job done with minimal complaints.
That’s my criteria. Don’t give me things to complain about and work when you need to work at a respectable price.
Also, I do want to clarify that a respectable price isn’t the lowest price but where value meets an exchange of currency.
For example, I would never use a company like HostHatch or VirMach that doesn’t add something like customer service into the pricing equation of a product.
With BuyVM I feel content with the price I pay and the full experience, including the support/team.
OVH and MXroute are the only other two providers I use here (production MXroute/BuyVM, seed box at OVH).
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/186670/if-your-vps-provider-is-cheating-you-what-will-you-do/p1
Enjoy!