Background info - was Hosting again

[the hatter]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Ovid wrote:

> I can't even begin to tell you how many times customers have complained
> that they're losing "thousands of pounds a day" when they shell out for
> the cheapest hosting package they can find and then get upset when they
> find out *why* it's the cheapest hosting package.  These customers get
> exactly what they've paid for.

Having worked for the same company, only for many years previous, I'm all
too familiar with this phenomenon.  If it's costing you thousands of
pounds a day because your shared hosting is down, you should probably take
a 1-day hit and use that money to buy colo for a year, if it's costing
you thousands an hour because of the time to restore backups to your colo,
maybe you should have bought that mirrored server.  If our (non-trivial,
multiple redundent, etc, etc) network being down for 5 minutes costs you
thousands, you should probably have multiple providers.  But if you've got
no experience in running a server, a group of boxen or a data centre,
although you could instead do it yourself, it's at best optimistic and at
worst negligent and self-defeating to jump headlong into doing it yourself
instead of letting someone else do it.

For what it's worth, our mutual employer was more the latter, and we
learnt a lot of lessons the hard way making the company what it was.  As
did a lot of our customers.  Most of who came to us because we were
remarkably good value compared to the competition.  We were successful,
despite.  I have many friends and peers who tried similar, and weren't so
lucky, some who gained substance issues, some of who found bankrupcy, some
who just plain burned out, often after putting all their life into it and
being successful for years before something happened.  Anyone involved
learns that if you're doing it again, you find experts, delegate, spend
money, all which means less money in your pocket at the end of today, and
more time this evening to spend it, weekends where you can at least expect
to enjoy yourself.


the hatter