How do you vet a new hosting provider before committing?
ReliableSiteHosting
Hosting Provider
in General
How do you vet a new hosting provider before committing?
Get dedicated servers deployed in minutes here. Miami, Los Angeles, NYC area and Amsterdam. Unmetered bandwidth. 24/7 data center support. Providing hosting since 2006.
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That's interesting question @ReliableSiteHosting / @mrradic.
The easiest part is looking at how long they have been around. Then, you start deep diving the comments and the subsequent claims made by customers on different threads. That's enough bias to develop opinion.
If the provider is active on forum, make interaction with them to understand their infrastructure, values, pain points, etc which cannot be obtained without reading more than 10% of their posts
@forest @AlteredParadox
I just don't even look at most lowend anymore. It costs too much time. I'm not footing the bill directly, so I'd rather have something known, trusted, and not EIG or anything on CC bandwidth.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Control Panel UX and commitments to technical details
Not only this, but I also look at benchmarks from users (if any). And a personal criteria of mine is that you should have a nice looking site with as much information as you can put. I don't want to, nor should I have to, at least in my opinion, contact sales to know if what data centers you're located in, if you own your hardware or rent it out, if you have test IPs or test files, etc., and a lot of the time what hardware you're running.
And then I'll checkout peering partners/upstreams/routes depending of if the work is latency sensitive or not. Although I check these anyways cuz it's fun.
Recommended Providers: AdvinServers (aff) | TierHive (aff)
Check other's experiences and reviews.
Check inbound/outbound routing/mtr. Hopefully they have a looking glass.
Check connectivity with bgp.tools.
Run a ping check script for at least 24 hours, preferably longer, to check for latency and packet loss.
Great discussion! I'll keep this in mind for my project.
As Hosting Provider ourselves, we would suggest few tips for users;
Check reviews/ratings from multiple platforms (not just one platform).
Review uptime/status page
Looking Glass / test IP to verify latency and routing from your location.
Check pre-sales support responsiveness before you become a customer.
Company history (how long they've been operating).
Whether pricing and policies are clear (renewal pricing, bandwidth, backups, etc.)
and
Try a monthly plan first before committing long-term.
I contacted them for a pre-sales technical question.
If they do not respond within 1 working day, I can't take them seriously.
TierHive - Hourly VPS - NAT Native - /24 per customer - DE, UK, SG, CA, USA x3, FR, AU, PL, NL
FREE tokens on sign up, try before you buy. | Static Hosting Free for life: https://tierhive.com/static-hosting/
I used to do this, but it's sadly not often representative of actual support - either they focus on that as a sales technique, or pre-sales questions get sidelined because they'd rather focus on paying customers.
Honestly, reviews (from reliable sources) and ideally personal recommendations are a good start but nothing comes close to actually using the service. There's always a smaller sacrificial project I can use to test a new provider :-)
Fair enough, my opinion is if I have taken the time to sign up for an account, tell them which service I want, and I just want to verify xyz ok ok or supported or available (which if they had up to date info I would not need to ask) and they dont have the capacity to respond to that within 1 full working day or close to, then they are not doing this as a primary or serious business, it is a sideline.
I am a bit old school about this because I am old, I guess, but TeirHive is hobby/none enterprise grade and I do it part time with a part time collegue (I do 90% of the tickets opened in English) and they are responded to within 1 working day and its very low effort to do that, other hosts i worked for and with the target was 1 working hour or as soon as possible, that was also trivial to achieve, in my last full tech support job outside of hosting, a team of around 8 of us handled around 300,000 devices with over a million potential users, with a prioirty 2 hour SLA or standard 12 hour SLA and if we failed even once it had an actual cost in the region of $4000 per hour, so maybe I have just been well conditioned or traumatised, depending on how you look at it.
Currently, I have been waiting for a working week for one host to respond to me about capabilities to launch a new TierHive location, and honestly, at this stage, it's probably just not going to happen as a result, and in my humble opinion TierHive is a great customer, regular money, no help needed once up and running, downtime is acceptable and not complained about (within reason), and once we are in you can count on that money for many years and we are not asking for discounts.
Bad support is a HUGE irritation of mine so I am maybe a bit unfair, OVH for example, recently delivered a server with the wrong uplink speed, I opened a ticket, during the opening of the ticket they make you select the impacted service, which I did, 3 working days later I get a reply asking which service I am reffering too, its just dog shit, and it is so simple to fix.
Edit: Sorry, I responded like a crazy person and wrote a book, I just hate bad support
TierHive - Hourly VPS - NAT Native - /24 per customer - DE, UK, SG, CA, USA x3, FR, AU, PL, NL
FREE tokens on sign up, try before you buy. | Static Hosting Free for life: https://tierhive.com/static-hosting/
Oh I agree; support is the most important thing - it's a lot easier to handle problems with a service if you can actually talk to someone and get it fixed. It's just I've been bitten by the "good at pre-sales, crap at technical support" gambit before, and I'm very aware that one of my go-to providers explicitly refuses to get involved in pre-sales questions at all