Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:55:55AM -0500, Sarah Kahn wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good web hosting service for a small business? I've
> been mooching off of ibiblio forever (love you guys!) so I don't have a
> relationship with any particular host at the moment.

I don't have anyone in particular to recommend, as that's really not
enough to go on - "web hosting service for a small business"? What's
your budget? What platform? Is the site static, or chock full o' Web
apps and CGI scripts and forms and other interactive features? How much
is it worth to you and your business that the site be up constantly? Is
your reputation important to you (and by association, is it important
that your Web site and email *not* be lumped together with others of a
poor reputation)? What would it cost you to have your site cracked, or
be the source of abusive or fraudulent email?

We used to be in the hosting business, and I can say that with the few
exceptions mentioned here (Dreamhost, Pair, among others) the whole
industry as a class is doomed. It's a race to the bottom as long as
there are places like Dailyrazor who help promote the idea that reliable
Web hosting service can be had for $2/month. It can't. Something gives,
whether it's service, support, reliability, security, or ethics. In many
cases, all of those are compromises with very bad results for all of us,
not just for their clients.

I've seen former clients change hosting without any due diligence, to
"save money", and immediately incur hours' worth of support charges
because they didn't realize that their Web app which runs just fine on
Apache/Unix platforms oddly enough doesn't run at all on Windows/IIS.
Saving $50/month on Web hosting fees doesn't help when you spend a few
hundred porting the actual apps. False economy abounds. Oopsy.

I'm of the belief that if it were illegal to host "snowshoe" spammers
(spammers with large numbers of static IPs, using various tactics to
obfuscate and hide their identities to avoid blacklists) the entire
reseller-based webhost/colo industry would simply collapse. And good
riddance. Almost all of the phishing scams we see here come from el
cheapo Web hosting resellers who haven't patched their systems (PHP,
usually, but various other security flaws as well). And it's getting
much, much worse.

 http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Glossary#233

And bear in mind that common defacement of a site is becoming much less
popular than silent compromise, now that there's a market for the
latter. Some kid in Bulgaria who cracks a thousand PHP sites can sell
access to them to phishing scammers, so it's not in either of their
interest to draw attention to the fact that they - not you - are in
control of the server. I had a colleague of mine whose server had been
compromised and he was unaware of it for fifteen months. The Web
Standards Project site (hosted by Wordpress) is regularly (and silently)
cracked via huge security flaws in Wordpress that are exploited by
PageRank parasites. 

So, maybe some more detail here would be good. Are you willing to pay
for good, secure, service? What's your skill level when it comes to the
basics necessary to maintain and secure a domain and a Web site? What
are your actual needs WRT platform, scripting support, application
frameworks, blogging or microcontent management, and the like? Do you
need email and DNS as well as Web service? Secure HTTP? Catalog/merchant
services? Does your site use a lot of bandwidth, and if it suddenly
becomes popular, can you afford the extra bandwidth charges? How about
backups and - much more importantly - restores? 

Without knowing any of this, it's impossible to make a meaningful
recommendation beyond saying "I've used X and they didn't suck too badly
for my needs and budget, which don't have anything to do with yours"...

HTH,
Steve

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