Is it really worth it? 1 year hosting for a Cup of Cofee

Got it now. :slight_smile:

I guess that some people can consider me a “difficult” client, but well… I’m also a loyal one. I understand that everyone messes up sometimes, I don’t expect anyone never to fail, I just like for people to be straightforward and own it.

A simple "hey, we’re sorry but we messed up and… " goes a long way with me.

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Sounds like top notch providers.
I also like the companies I currently work with.

…all besides MXroute off course. :triumph:

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I don’t remember ever making any statement like that.

I’ve never been a fan of loss leaders or “barely getting by” type marketing.

Its been many many years since I’ve done this as a hobby (read: when I was < 18) so since then its always been a thing I’ve done to make a living.

While other providers are going to have a hard time turning a profit on a $15/year service, we’re perfectly OK on it. The main thing is that we rent as little as possible from places. Minus our datacenter fees (colocation, bandwidth) we own our network, IP addresses, hardware, and most of our software (stallion is owned, cpanel/litespeed/etc is leased).

Its been worth it though. We do well, we have a warchest when we need it, we don’t have to worry about costs when buying things. That doesn’t mean we spend carelessly, I’ll still spend days haggling deals.

Francisco

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Well… I’m not getting younger :wink:
My memory was definitely better a few beer parties back.

I don’t wanna bust your balls (but this is hostballs so… :sunglasses:), but weren’t people complaining about the service not too long ago?
Even suggestions for you to charge a bit more to condense less people in your servers. (LET)

I get it that profit != quality.

Owning the assets is definitely gonna go down better. Having that control and ability to add value is great.

On? Shared? We removed the problematic users and put in new policies to stop them from coming back. We also gave a heads up to everyone in the LET provider pool about said users looking for new homes. A few providers even have my audit scripts in place now since they were having similar problems.

Francisco

Yeah, I think it was about the shared services.
I remember your mentioned that you had some users with over 1000 domains (is my memory failing again?.. hope not)

You no longer have those issues you mentioned you were experiencing? how your uptime looking lately?

1000 was on the ‘low side’ for some of them. Once I fixed my audit scripts (it was missing the majority of the users entries) we found multiple people with 6000~8000 domains on a single ~$4/month reseller. Anyway, we packed all of their backups and sent them off. We limited our shared plans but cPanel doesn’t have a way to lock down resellers so all we can do is to check our audit logs every so often.

Uptime has been solid and loads have fallen on most nodes by huge amounts. Still get a Litespeed reboot every once in a while that takes a little longer but it’s quite rare.

We’re still working on the hardware upgrades but have been really slowed down :frowning: Suffered a lot of delays because of the snow storms back east that happened last month.

Francisco
Francisco

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Do you mean that they actually had 6000-8000 accounts within the reseller plan, as opposed to adding 6000~8000 domains to one cpanel? (I’m assuming it matters to the server load, resources consumption like HD for creating the files skeleton all those times, cpu/ram for keeping all those accounts “dormant”, which wouldn’t happen by adding the domains to the same cpanel account, on the other hand, my assumption could be utterly stupid).

How the… …someone thinks that’s ok? I’m actually curious to know what kind of replied you got from them when you asked them to look elsewhere. Care to share?

Is this something other hosts are experiencing? Maybe some good will among hosting companies could help here. I’m asking because at my current host, I think it never happened.

Does the host offer unlimited domains?

Yep.

No.

Each sub user they made had 200~500 addon domains or so.

It’s purely amazon affiliate spam sites. Sometimes they use pure static sites so they don’t put a CPU load on there (minus the restarts) but usually it’s Wordpress so it can completely mow through CPU.

It happens to apache too, it just sometimes crashes. cPanel keeps a log of when it has to force restart Apache/Litespeed, so it isn’t a case of ‘just us’.

Francisco

Just so I’m clear, I didn’t meant it like “you suck, go ask someone that doesn’t to fix it for ya”.
I meant it like, common issue that some seem to not experience it, so in good spirit could brainstorm together to see why not. Maybe that would lead to the solution, or the conclusion that there is none atm.

Edit: You for instance, seem like you don’t mind helping our other companies that are your competitors, but I’m not sure there are many in that market with that mindset.
I can say that in the company I work at, we couldn’t even manage to have cooperation with competitors to flag clients that don’t pay they invoices and scam one after the other. We tried, more than once, always failed.

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Slightly offtopic, but I was wondering how bad the Apache tons-of-domains situation is.

Tested with Apache/2.4.6 (CentOS) on my laptop, i5-8250U and NVMe storage:


Apache without vhosts:

$ time httpd
|real|0m0.049s|
|user|0m0.026s|
|sys|0m0.021s|

Idle memory: 6MB
Idle CPU: 0%


Apache with 10000 vhosts:

$ time httpd
|real|0m3.532s|
|user|0m2.875s|
|sys|0m0.594s|

Idle memory: 378MB
Idle CPU: 0%


Apache with 100000 vhosts:

$ time httpd
|real|12m56.222s|
|user|11m26.911s|
|sys|0m28.292s|

Idle memory: 3387MB
Idle CPU: 99%


Each vhost in its own file containing:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/www/:domain"
    ServerName www.:domain.com
    ErrorLog "/www/:domain/error_log"

    <Directory "/www/:domain/data">
        Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Seems like 10 000 is quite reasonable, but 100 000 is just too much.

cPanel’s vhost entry is like 50+ lines per domain or something, then there’s going to be an entry for SSL too.

Francisco

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That’s certainly true - and I’m sure you’ve got a lot more in depth experience with tens of thousands of domains on a single server than me.
This was also a stock Apache installation without PHP. Nevertheless, I think it demonstrates the concept quite well.

Uncomfortable fact: it’s more profitable and will reduce presales questions to pick #2:

  1. Limit domains.
  2. Have unlimited domains and terminate two customers every year or two for insanity.

Even among the crowd who would call you dishonest for doing it that way, they’re still more likely to buy from you if you do the second one. Because what people say and what they do are two different things, and no one likes stated limits.

I think that only the people that believe that unlimited is a thing, don’t like imposed limits.
On the other hand, people that like to play safe, like stated limits as that allows them to plan ahead.

I don’t want a provider to tell me “hey, ya need to go because XYZ”, I prefer to plan my way in and my way out by looking at what resources I’m using, from a set pool of resources.

If anything, I complain about the resources limitation not being crystal clear. Actually we’ve chatted about this before, and at that time you though I had ulterior motives lol :wink:

I find that odd, because if you’re clear about a subject, then what is there to ask?

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Unlimited is a thing, infinite is not. But watch closer, the ones most obsessed with repeating “unlimited does not exist” (dumb because literally not placing a limit = not limited = unlimited, but you can’t get them to understand that they mean to say infinite) are the ones continually seeking out unlimited, obsessing over it, buying it, and then complaining later that it wasn’t infinite.

You’ll see it over and over again now that I pointed that out lol. Watch LET specifically, there’s a big culture of it. The most logical explanation is that they want to be proven wrong, they want an unlimited that speaks to their needs, which is huge data storage (tbh, their music/tv/movie collection).

If you put limits they’ll just say “Good for you, you did the right thing” and move on along. You’re not interesting to them. But they paid the invoice for the unlimited host, whether it was “to prove them wrong” or not. They vote with their wallets quite consistently.

Go ask on LET how many people are using unlimited Google Apps storage for fun. Wait a month and make a thread asking who thinks unlimited is a marketing scam. Watch for the same people.

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Reminds me of this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/

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