i recently reviewed a new paysite owned by a fairly inexperienced webmaster. his site only allowed a single download at a time, which meant you not only couldn’t download 2 videos simultaneously but you couldn’t surf his site while you downloaded a video. when he saw the review, he emailed me with a couple questions, then emailed his host. turned out his host set this up, apparently without asking him, but possibly he just didn’t understand what his host was offering. the bottom line is his members were restricted in a way that would certainly impact his retention, and he had no idea.
but there are other things people often don’t know about their hosting. for example, does everyone here know which version of php they have in their server? my email comes to my own domain, but the mail server isn’t actually mine - it’s my host’s mail server, and i hadn’t known that. how about you?
after talking to some friends, i suspect there’s a lot that most of us don’t know about our hosting. and luke, this doesn’t apply to you lol
Patti raises a really good point. There are sooooo many variables in hosting. Things that people often don’t think about
– Not only the version of PHP, but what options and plugins are turned on, and the version of MySQL as well.
– What services are installed and working. Some hosts want you to use their own mail servers, and that can have downsides when they have mail filtering rules or spam protection that filters out valid mail (happened to us)
– the speed of the port connection to the server. If you have a smaller site and are stuck with a 10Mbit ethernet connection, your members are going to experience periods where the site is really slow. (If you have a bigger site, you already know about this and have either clustering, load balancing, or a kickass server)
– What kind of bandwidth your ISP is giving you. Better hosts give you blended bandwidth from top-tier providers; cheaper hosts use “second tier” providers like Cogent that typically are slower, and a few hosts use “bottom feeder” bandwidth who buy excess capacity on the spot market dirt cheap; these providers typically have a lot of intermittent downtime.
– How security updates are handled. You should always be notified if your ISP is doing updates, because once in a while, an update will break a script or service that’s running, and you might not notice unless you know to check things after an update.
I’m one of those folks who asks a ton of questions whenever I subscribe with a host. I mean LOTS of questions. So they either tell me to go somewhere else because I’m driving them insane, or they give me what I want. LOL!! I usually get what I want.
Great thread and some great points Basschick. That guy has a scary host indeed!
