Host with the Most II: The Reckoning

“Yahoo?! Don’t get me started on Yahoo” Whit says with a roll of his eyes.

We’re discussing hosting providers again, and this one’s obviously wronged him in the past. I comment that Yahoo’s page always looks kind of crappy too, and Whit agrees, noting that it’s probably a result of their addiction to adding features. “When you keep adding features like that, you’re likely to become spread too thin” he says, and I concur. We both nod grimly at this major company’s crappiness. On to the next one. 

Go Daddy meets with similar dismissal, but with a saving grace. In Whit’s words, “They’re a great domain registrar. I use them myself. But they over-reached when they decided to become a hosting provider”. I, too, have registered domain names with that infamous parent of titles, Go Daddy, but have been warned off of them as a hosting provider for similar reasons in the past. Another grim nod. That’s two for two on the “lame hosting providers” list. There must be better options out there… Onwards!

“Now Dreamhost is lacking on customer service, but try to make up for it by offering you tons of storage and bandwidth” Whit observes. That sounds great! I love being bribed! But at what cost? As mentioned in the previous blog entry on hosting providers, customer service is going to come up, and is it really worth it to have all of that storage and bandwidth if the site crashes and there’s nobody you can contact about it? I’m thinking no.

On the other hand, “CharlottezWeb is extremely good at customer service” Whit affirms. “They are there for you when you need them, and they’re an excellent choice for smaller projects.”  I have actually had first hand experience with this. In the process of updating the Wordpress version for the blog of a client of ours (who will remain nameless for now), I had to call upon CharlottezWeb to change the client’s forgotten password. These things happen. I have forgotten a password or two in my day. But getting the service provider to change the password for you can be about as pleasant an experience as a long tour of the lower rungs of Dante’s inferno. For the less literarily inclined, that’s Hell. It can be freakin’ slow-cooked hell.

The response I received from Jason at CharlottezWeb, however, was swift, friendly, and conscientious. Not only was Jason prompt with his response, but he made sure the client remained in the loop for the entire process, so I didn’t have to make sure to keep updating them. Now that’s some dandy customer service! I like these guys. They’ve been good to me. However, because I’m a stinker, I immediately had to ask Whit what’s wrong with CharlottezWeb for larger projects. I noticed his distinction that they were excellent for smaller projects, but what gives regarding their capacity for handling the larger ones?

“It’s not that they would be bad for a larger project. Far from it. It’s just that they are not as scalable as, say, Media Temple.”

Ah. Now we’ve gotten to the crux of the matter. I must learn more about this mysterious Temple of which you speak…

“Media Temple is pretty much the gold standard” Whit continues. “They’re very stable due to their extremely robust grid-based architecture.”

Yes, yes, what you said, I think to myself while nodding in a “surely I understand what you just said” kind of way. But I do kind of get it. We use a RAID system here at Mightybytes to keep our invaluable “Projects” folder redundant and safe. I’m guessing grid-based architecture is similar.

“Not exactly” Whit says.
Oh. “I see, I see” I say, nodding knowingly. Then I frown. “Wait, what do I see?”

After a short discussion on the topic, I begin to understand that it’s more like a colony of digital ants. If a gigantic magnifying glass wipes out part of the colony, other ants step in to complete the tasks their slain brothers had been assigned. The net result is an extraordinarily stable and robust system made up of many many smaller contributing parts. Sounds great! What’s the catch?

“Well,” Whit says, “because it’s more robust it requires a fair amount more configuration.”

Gotcha. I knew it had to be something. And by “configuration” I know that in many cases he’s referring to “stuff you don’t know how to do.” Well, that makes sense. It took me a couple of minutes of explanation to even understand what it is in the first place. Still, it seems like Media Temple gets the biggest kudos in this round of critiques. Go digital ants!