I’m Going to Tell You About Web Hosting When you’re behind the scenes running servers that host millions of websites, you gain a lot of insight on the perception of the customer vs. reality. WHT and /r/webhosting are flooded with obviously clueless users whining about their most recent hosting misfortunes, blaming the hosting provider for everything that has gone wrong in their lives. While certainly some have merit and there there are hosts that shouldn’t be in this business, most don’t say what they really want to when responding to ridiculousness spread over social media because apparently publicly slapping customers with any sort of clue stick isn’t very good customer service. So I’m going to tell you here what us sysadmins really want to say to you when you go on with your nonsense. Sorry you had to hear it from me. General (but required) disclaimer: The information and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily supported by or reflective of those of my employers. Unlimited doesn’t mean what you think it does This is the most discussed topic in the industry right now and is commonly referred to as a scam because people don’t understand basic English. Allow me to help: unlimited adjective un·lim·it·ed \-ˈli-mə-təd\ : without any limits or restrictions : not limited in number or amount Unlimited does not mean infinite. Disk space in particular is a physical resource and you can’t have infinite physical resources. We’re not stupid. The concept of unlimited hosting is 100% driven by the market because of people that think they need terabytes of disk space for the basic WordPress site. Of course this is overselling, and anyone that understands the dynamics of hosting knows that it’s not that big of a deal. Resources balance out and we make it work because we know how to run our shit. Stop telling us that we don’t understand the capacity needs of our own servers when you don’t even know how to use a dictionary. Naturally, since servers are limited in physical resources, we have to do something to make the service usable by everyone while still be profitable as a business. Surprise! A hosting company is a business. And businesses want to make money. Congrats on learning something new about entrepreneurship. ‘Murica. We want to tell you: Even though your bandwidth is not capped, your consumption rate (ie, traffic in Mb/s) is almost always limited in some fashion. Most all bandwidth peers bill by how much traffic is passing through the network at any given point in time. Having one server pumping 10% of the network’s capacity due to someone streaming Bollywood films to half of India is expensive and the hosting plan costing you less than a cup of coffee isn’t worth the thousands of dollars in burst fees. If you have unlimited disk space, your host is certainly going to put restrictions on what you can do to keep that one person from uploading 100GB of shopping cart pics. Most commonly they’ll restrict inode usage (number of files) and/or prohibit you from storing backups or non-website-related files on their servers. And we have every right to decide what you’re allow to have on our servers. No, you can’t host the next Facebook on your $5/mo shared hosting plan First of all, good luck on your insightful business venture. The world needs yet more places for people to bitch and moan about irrelevant topics. Secondly, let’s say things did work out and you made the next Facebook: you’re not putting it on a $5/mo. shared hosting plan – or any shared hosting plan for that matter. Hosting providers have a certain target of how many customers a typical server should be able to accommodate, and that group of customers has to share resources in a fashion to where all sites are able to function normally, most if not all of the time. These servers are expensive, and there’s no way you’re getting a whole server to yourself when your hosting fees don’t even cover the cost of my weekend alcohol abuse. When your host tells you you’re being a resource hog, they aren’t trying to trick you into upgrading, they are trying to keep other customers from canceling because of the problems you are causing, and also trying to get you to pay for what you are using. It’s fair. Stop being a dick about it. By the way, you do share a server with other customers Unless you are on a dedicated server, you’re sharing physical hardware with other customers. Shared hosting is like stuffing a bunch of people into an elevator and hoping no one ate anything spicy for lunch. The person that did gets kicked off to their own elevator to avoid plaguing the rest of the population with their torrid flatulence. When you hog resources you cause downtime for yourself and other customers, and we’re simply not going to let you get away with it — because you’re costing us business and making people think we suck. And you’re also usually the first one to complain about the downtime you’re causing, demanding that we get rid of the culprit. Then comes the denial, followed by either acceptance or a social media outburst. Vicious cycle, it is. Your website got hacked because you didn’t update it Servers get pwned all the time, that’s for sure. Just because your site got hacked though doesn’t mean we got hacked or our servers are insecure. You probably got hacked because you installed Joomla on your site 4 years ago and haven’t bothered updating it since. You can’t buy a car and expect it to run flawlessly for while avoiding any sort of maintenance. We’re not the content police, and unless you’re specifically paying for a managed service (meaning, your host explicitly tells you they are responsible for updating and maintaining your website’s shitty software), you’re responsible for what you host on your site and keeping it secure. And again, unless we say otherwise, we’re not monitoring your site among the millions of others we host to be able to tell you when it gets hacked. That’s why these people exist. If one of your accounts gets popped, you were probably using the same crappy password you’ve been using since 1997 and didn’t learn your lesson the last five times you had this happen. We Google, you can Google too Got an error on your website? Want to know how to do something? Fucking Google it. You broke your website, not us Your website was working, you made a change, now it’s not working. Better call your host and complain about the server being broken! We may not be able to bluntly tell you this when you call in acting all innocent like we don’t have logs exposing your stupidity, but we know when you broke something and are too embarrassed or proud to admit it. You can save everyone a lot of time if you just tell us what you did so we can help fix it, then laugh at you. Twitter isn’t a fucking support desk Unless your host literally has no legitimate means for you to contact them and/or doesn’t respond in an appropriate time frame, stop using Facebook and Twitter to ask for support. Call, chat, or open a ticket to give the company a fair chance to resolve your issue. Responding to the company’s every Facebook status post with the life story of your hosting woes is the equivalent of jumping up and down with your hand raised in the back row of a classroom full of apes. We get it, you want everyone to know how mad you are that you were inconvenienced by something, and our entire company should cease operations until your problem is fixed. The person responding to you probably isn’t a techie and now has to play middle man between you and tech support because you’re too lazy to pick up the phone. Hosting isn’t a right, it’s a privilege We don’t have to host your site if we don’t want to. Of course we want customers, but not the kind of customers that cost us money, reputation, time, and sanity. If you do any of the following things, you are considered a less-desirable customer and we probably don’t want to host you: Calling our help desk 40 times a day. We’re not here to tutor you, we’re here to help with legitimate, specific problems. Read some support docs and learn, or hire an IT person. Look, I respect your efforts in trying to learn about all this web hosting stuff, but I don’t need you keeping me on the phone for an hour while you ask me a string of questions that I have to explain the answer to 50 times because “sorry I’m not an IP person” doesn’t understand what I’m saying. Learn this shit on your own time or hire someone that can help you. It’s not my job to teach you how to do yours. Being the cause of any problem, ever. If you’re the guy that causes the servers to crash, attracts DDoS attacks, or uses up 1TB of disk space hosting every image you’ve ever taken from your duck hunting trips, you’re a pain my ass. Being a dick. We’re not allowed to be dicks. The company expects us to be cordial and inviting regardless of how you talk to us. If you’re going to call in acting like an asshole, by the end of the call the entire shift will know who you are and will draw straws at answering the phone. And if we did a good job? Have some manners and say thank you, write a nice note to the manager, or take the time to give the rep 5 stars. Motivated support reps perform better, stay longer, and decrease the number of newbies we have to hire to give you bad advice before they are fulling trained. 99.99% Uptime isn’t 100% It really isn’t. Sometimes shit just happens, and sometimes we need to make it happen to prevent worse things from happening. Want a stable and redundant network? We have to build it, and it’s going to probably cause some downtime. Want security? Sometimes we have to do upgrades, restart services, and remove or disable things you might be using. Hopefully your host tells you in advance and keeps you updated if this was something that was planned. If they don’t? Run away. If they do, check their status pages for information before calling in and getting the same answer. And don’t demand to talk to an engineer or whoever is working on the problem. We are busy trying to fix things and don’t need you distracting us. You’re not going to understand any technical explanation we give you anyway. We can’t support everything on the Internet The Internet scope has gotten to a point where you have a wheel that is being reinvented every. single. day. There are dozens of programming languages, thousands of applications and scripts, not to mention stuff that is custom-written, tweaked, and modified. There is virtually no way that any hosting provider can support everything that you can possibly install on your website. Just because you decided to put it there doesn’t mean we have to support it. We may be able to help you troubleshoot, and many hosts have staff trained on the most common software like WordPress and Joomla. Other than that, you should only expect your host to troubleshoot issues where there is a reasonable assumption that the server could be to blame, or whatever they have agreed to support as per your service agreement. Anything else, expect to be charged extra or directed to the person or company you got the software from. Backups lol. You really need to understand your host’s backup policy. Really. Most hosts are only thinking about themselves when they plan their backup infrastructure – and by that I mean, they are thinking about the possibility that your server could throw a few disks and lose all its data, requiring a backup restoration. Don’t assume that your host has the exact type of backup you need, that they can magically “un-delete” or revert something you just did, or that they somehow have found the space to store a copy of your website every day for the last 100 days. You, and only you, are responsible for making sure you have a backup of your own site, and that you make a backup before doing something potentially destructive. You’re not a customer if you’re not paying Having acquired a company earlier this year that has free hosting clients among paying ones, I finally realized the odd sense of entitlement this industry entertains. Hosting companies cost money – we have to pay for the servers, support, software licenses, bandwidth, marketing, etc – not to mention our own time and sanity. You are not entitled to anything when you’re getting it for free. I see so many consumers complaining about the reliability and support of free hosting providers when in reality, you are not actually a customer to them because you don’t pay them. These customers will always put paying customers first, and usually only provide a level of service that would entice you to eventually become a paying customer/ While some free hosts are very well run, if you want more guarantees of reliability and uptime, spend a few bucks and become an actual customer. Free hosting is not for mission-critical sites.