Reliable NZ-server hosting?

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Pornolio

20 posts

Geek

#2238325 15-May-2019 12:56

It's very important to have realistic expectations. If you are paying for the cheapest possible hosting on a shared hosting platform, you are sharing resources with other people on the same Plesk / cPanel instance. The risks you sit with, is if one site gets attacked / hacked there will be an impact to your resources. There are mechanisms in place to reduce the blast radius like utilizing things like Cloud Linux with resource fencing, but its not a full proof guarantee.

The only way to guarantee that your site / services run independently on its own, is to get your own private VPS, but then it also means paying more. You get what you pay for. Last thing to mention, the outage you referred to was not planned maintenance that was done in the middle of the day, it was emergency actions performed as there was something wrong on the server that was affected.

I come from a hosting background, and I can tell you people have the most unrealistic expectations with hosting providers sometime. They pay the absolute minimum, but require EXTENSIVE support. From helping customers to setup their email on their phones, tablets, workstations, right through to navigating their way through the Plesk / cPanel dashboard. The amount of times I have had to deal with customers having code issues on their websites, blaming the hosting provider... its incredibly frustrating to explain to a customer that he is paying $10 per month, and that doesn't include having a 24/7 engineer on call to debug his website code because he doesn't have a developer managing it.

Hosting providers will ensure their servers / services are backed up, and outages WILL happen... there are so many moving components behind the control panel you don't see. There are Plesk / cPanel updates, there are customers with bogus code running open relay mail forms, causing entire servers to be blacklisted, and you can only put so many protective measures in place that will do tarpitting, throttling etc. If you absolutely have to have 24/7 high availability, there are products for that at a higher cost.

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fatjoez

153 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#2238940 16-May-2019 11:07

@Pornolio thanks for your feedback.

Per your detailed insights I **assume** you may be affiliated with Openhost or similar and your input is welcomed.

Please note though:
This is not a review thread or disgruntled complaint of Openhost.
It is about seeking suggestions for alternatives with a minor background about the reasons why to allow more helpful responses.

I agree with you that expectations need to be balanced against price paid.
I am a software developer by trade so am not among those who call tech support for hours to debug code, but I agree with you also that there probably are people who do and understand your frustration.

However: In 2019 I believe hosting technology&methodology is at a point where you can expect some redundancy in standard shared hosting and that it's not necessary for a customer to have their email & hosting limited to one server + storage device such that if that server goes down they are down until the server comes back up.

I also don't agree that getting a VPS is a full solution to downtime.
I agree it should protect issues related to another shared storage customer having dodgy code exploited etc.
But there are other causes for downtime which can affect VPS too.

Point being there is no simple solution and every customer has different needs.
For us we are not an I.T business so it is most suitable to use a shared/similar package to let the experts manage the servers & architecture and us to focus on our business.

Thanks again for your input

Pornolio

20 posts

Geek

#2239356 16-May-2019 16:51

Heya, sorry if my response came forward as a bit abrupt, was not my intention. Also yes I have quite a bit of insight into the company so I can ask the right people to get the correct answers.

Some of your comments are valid, but it still boils down to price / features ...

Eg. If you spend a bit more, investigate options like FreeParking, where with their shared hosting platform, the email is split completely off the cPanel infrastructure... that way, in the event of an outage due to a DDOS / malicious code from a dodgy website, the mail still operates. Not that you would have lost your email, as there would be retries and spooling done on the sending MTA side. Only if the server is down for a long extended period of time, would mail be impacted. On the Openhost side..If memory serves me right, I am pretty sure only the databases are split from the shared hosting environment to run separately.

And yes I agree with you its 2019, lots of changed in the hosting landscape, as you now have the option of relying on containers in clouds, but even that still boils to more money because they work on a consumption basis where uptime / cpu cycles and other things get charged for. Trust me its going to be a lot more than $10 per month.

All hosting providers provide some fault tolerance and redundancy like eg. building VM's on storage RAID 10 volumes, with backups, DDOS protection from upstream network providers, utilizing Cloud linux with resource fencing, tarpitting floods... there are countless measures implemented. However that is not full proof. If you want proper full HA, thats when costs go up quite a bit, as you have to rely on clustering.

Shared hosting is really suited for people that just want online presence, and its not a 100% mission critical website. :-)

fatjoez

153 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#2239865 17-May-2019 11:40

@Pornolio great information and insights thanks.
Downtime experience definitely highlights the advantage of separation.

Our actual hosting requirements in terms of data is quite low. Maybe 2-3GB in terms of actual hostage requirements.
Main requirement really is email which between all our inboxes is 10GB (if we leave mail on server which we tend to do for a few months then download it all and clear off server)

Will investigate this and start looking into separate email service and see what options are out there in this regard also.

fatjoez

153 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#2239866 17-May-2019 11:42

@Pornolio et all.

One general question is there much benefit now days to focus on NZ only data centres as I feel we're at a point now where it's not as much a critical factor in terms of performance at least?

irpegg

140 posts

Master Geek

#2239870 17-May-2019 11:57

fatjoez: @Pornolio et all.

One general question is there much benefit now days to focus on NZ only data centres as I feel we're at a point now where it's not as much a critical factor in terms of performance at least?

Excluding Sydney. But if you're hosted internationally the throughput travel time all factors into the load time further and that extra 200ms can tip people over the edge to give up on your website. Regardless if you're on UFB or not that travel time around the world still ticks along.

It's actually quite prevalent these days because people are blowing up their websites with so much bloat and crap plugins that they need to be hosted local to their market to load at reasonable speed.

fatjoez

153 posts

Master Geek

Trusted

#2239874 17-May-2019 12:01

I see. Our business website presence is quite minimal and is mainly a reference point (not content / plugin / media heavy etc).
So in that sense I guess we could live with a slight increase in response time.

In terms of emails though it seems the more advanced / redundancy architecture email systems are the cloud offerings some have mentioned earlier like google mail etc?

Also you mentioned Sydney but I didn't quite understand what you meant.
Did you mean Sydney is OK on latency?

K8Toledo

1014 posts

Uber Geek

#2244583 24-May-2019 13:49

timbee:

fatjoez: @Pornolio et all.

One general question is there much benefit now days to focus on NZ only data centres as I feel we're at a point now where it's not as much a critical factor in terms of performance at least?

Excluding Sydney. But if you're hosted internationally the throughput travel time all factors into the load time further and that extra 200ms can tip people over the edge to give up on your website. Regardless if you're on UFB or not that travel time around the world still ticks along.

It's actually quite prevalent these days because people are blowing up their websites with so much bloat and crap plugins that they need to be hosted local to their market to load at reasonable speed.

So true... A retail store I look after had (at one stage) a very cheap cloud based POS software implemented - which was hosted in the USA. Round trip from store to server & back was around 300ms for every transaction...a long time when it's a busy day and 5-6 customers are waiting in line at the counter....

On the handful of occasions I've called Free Parking (on client's behalf) I've found the support to be very good.

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