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How do you vet a new hosting provider before committing?
ReliableSiteHosting
Member, Patron Provider
in General
How do you vet a new hosting provider before committing?
Comments
That's classified information.
See reviews
By making sure they have a commitment to not raise prices for existing customers later on
Usually i check their name and if they have stuff like "fastest" in the name I know they are not fast, or if they have "reliable" in name I would also question the reliability
That's interesting question @ReliableSiteHosting/ @MrRadic
The easiest part is looking at how long they have been around. Then, you start deep diving the comments and the subsequent claims made by customers on different threads. That's enough bias to develop opinion.
If the provider is active on forum, make interaction with them to understand their infrastructure, values, pain points, etc which cannot be obtained without reading more than 10% of their posts
@forest @AlteredParadox
No, 99% of let crowd.
Gamble 7$
My steps:
But even then, I'll never commit to a large amount of money. I may jump into a long-term prepaid plan, but not if the annual cost is even near $100. For that, I'd need more assurance.
personally myself i check if they're doing some shit like trying to sell an Atom D525 made in 2010 as a dedi for $33 a month
that usually tells me all i need to know
B-But KS-A?
Carefully. More or less..
My funnel looks like this:
1) Read trustpilot reviews, especially the one star ones. A couple isolated incidents is not necessarily a problem, but if there are people discussing KYC I'm out instantly. After I read the one stars, I'll read the others, with usually the best information in the 3/4 star reviews. I don't worry too much about the overall average unless it's very low -- perfect five stars is not expected. Seeing a review about a terminated account isn't itself a dealbreaker, but if they seem to consistently prevent customers from getting their data out then that is worrisome to me.
2) Read TOS/AUP, especially regarding (legal) adult content. If they don't allow adult, I'm out. If there is other contract weirdness, like wanting to own/resell all customer content, etc, then I'm out. If the privacy policy sounds like they sell data, I'm out.
3) Check the looking glass IP with worldping to see how the ping is from various locations. Also try running an extended ping locally to see if there are an unusual amount of network hiccups to the looking glass.
4) Finally, I buy one vm/server first (month-to-month) and then run a benchmark on it to ascertain initial performance. Keep it running afterwards and not doing much other than ensure it is receiving auto-updates and put an uptime monitor on it.
5) After some months of good uptime, can use it for production and potentially buy more VMs with provider.
gut feeling & LET memes (80% of decision)
whether they provide looking glass or not
price must be visible in a page without me creating an account first. no price shown publicly = no buy.
check post history. ayyeee slop = to the trash
get monthly first for toy project. see how their mailing and billing system works. failure sending mail as a provider is easy skip on me
see if their vps control panel makes sense or not (petty things like reboot, reinstall, rescue mode should be self-service, no need to open tickets)
see if they have something against VPN (wireguard/openvpn) or distributed file sharing (syncthing, resilio-sync, ipfs).
not being honest about downtime until ping.pe screenshot is shown = trash. i don't need the 99.8% uptime or telling you to fix it asap. if you got network issues, acknowledge it. not doing autistic mental gymnastic and gaslighting me instead.
additional criteria to become "premium" provider in my eyes:
1000% this. Even if they throttle everything to 56 kbps, that's still enough to SSH in. It makes no sense to prevent you from using the processor or storage when the only thing you ran out of was bandwidth.
Your reviews were concerning as an example. But your community generosity was also kind.
The reviews undermine a lot.
Experience lurking stalking around LET
Mine:
Buy a VPS, let it run for 6-12 months, test it, yabs the fuck out of it, if everything stays the same (performance), test some applications on it, before finally deciding if its worth getting this machine production ready. Its a tedious process, but so far the only one that gets you the information you need.
It is probably pointless to reply to this thread. Looking at OP's previous threads, they often start similar discussions but then they don't take part in the conversation afterward
Hello Valued Customer,
We are writing to inform you of an upcoming price adjustment regarding your dedicated server.
Within the next 12 hours, the monthly rate for your legacy Intel Atom D525 server will increase from $33.00/month to $59.95/month.
easy, I check sp500.