Today, in a not very serious post, we will talk about the main thing - about myths that often spoil the relationship between the hoster and the client. Jamie wants a big boom.
Shared hosting is not secure!
Shared hosting security (VPS and VDS) is one of the most discussed and problematic issues. There are no legends here: hoster employees read and steal company data, hackers maintain a stable channel for monitoring hosting, server rooms of data centers can be visited by anyone, especially people with automatic devices. These bikes rarely have any adequate foundation.
Any serious hosting provider delivers highly secure corporate-level VPS: the servers are monitored by a trained staff of qualified employees, any data centerautomated and equipped with monitoring and backup power systems, all intrusions are detected and stopped. With regard to physical security, data centers are protected in the same way as special facilities: security guards, video surveillance systems and access control systems, fireproof and vandal-resistant buildings. To get into modern data centers and harm them, you need to be at least well-armed and a fairly large group of well-trained IT specialists and engineers. And they are clearly not up to it.
Free hosting rules - why pay?
Free domain, free hosting - what could be better? The proceeds can be invested in the promotion and attraction of users. However, attracted users can become sad, because they simply will not get to your site. The fact is that free hosting hides many "secrets" behind itself, namely, restrictions: on the connection speed, on the number of concurrent visitors, on the number of users of one public server (and these are also dependencies - relatively speaking, if you are with you on one server will turn out to be a hacker or drug dealer and the authorities "banned" him, then your site will be blocked).
In addition, free hosting generally has low security guarantees, low SLA, and either paid or extremely limited and unhurried technical support. Simply put, free hosting is more of a bunch of problems than a way to successfully save money. Moreover, free hosting can turn out to be a marketing solution that is designed to lure you into an expensive plan or just one day impose a fee for any service or technical support.
And yes, it is very expensive to maintain a data center with good equipment, all Russian and international licenses and certificates, some of these funds are included in the cost of the tariff (that's why it is the VPS rental). If the contract with the provider does not include the name Robin Hood, the words “charity” and “everything for you, dear ones,” then think about it - why is it so cheap or free? How did they save and how will these risks be shared with me?
Uptime 99.9% - false
Low uptime adherents argue that 99% is an unattainable marketing level and any hoster provides frequent downtime better than its services. Well, maybe this is a fair statement for free and "junk" hosting - they simply do not have the engineering and human resources to ensure stable operation. However, large providers keep their promise: the uptime is even more than 99%, and any problems are solved literally with lightning speed, largely due to automatic switching to backup systems, quick incident detection and response.
Therefore, such uptime values are not a myth, but a real meaning.
Who Said Geeks Have No Nightlife? (They keep uptime!)
Hosting reviews and ratings - bullshit
The emergence of this myth is not surprising: many business services come up with ratings for themselves and to collect money for participating or removing reviews, pay for reviews or generate them from abandoned social media accounts. However, this story will not go away with hosting: they have so many customers that it simply won't be possible to keep track of everyone, and fake reviews will quickly drown in the mass of real ones. Therefore, you can trust the hosting ratings and reviews on them on large trust sites - this is the opinion of real users (albeit with an inaccuracy for those who did not cope with the work and are angry with themselves). By the way, the absence of negative reviews, in turn, should alert you: either you got on the "biased" rating, or the provider is not very popular, so he has enough reviews written by his own employees.There is no hosting with absolutely no problems - which means that there should not be reviews without negative reviews.
But the reviews can just be fake or bought, so choose not mono-reviews, but reviews that compare different solutions . An important point: if there are benchmarks in the reviews, it is not at all necessary that you will get the same result for your money. Tests are usually carried out in "laboratory" conditions: on clean machines or under a "clean" load with a short ping. Therefore, the real experience of use may turn out to be either a little better or a little worse than those described in the materials of the provider. However, for good hosters, these are minor differences that only professional admins and devops can appreciate.
Hosting at a domain registrar is convenient!
This is the most common myth. Indeed, what could be simpler: one supplier, one invoice, one relationship. It seems to be a convenient option for both individuals and legal entities. However, in most cases, hosting with a domain registrar is only a temporary solution, which definitely should not suit you, since no registrar offers such a set of options and capacities as a hosting provider does.
Therefore, if you have a sufficiently loaded site or cloud service, it is better to refuse the services of a domain registrar for storing data. In the same way, it is worth giving up if you are going to develop and scale your small project - you will need flexible solutions with different properties and sets of services. The registrar packages may simply not be enough.
Site / application speed is 100% dependent on hosting speed
This is a myth, but in part. The speed of the site and application depends primarily on their architecture, design, features of software finds and methods. For example, each page on the website of one of the cafes weighed 29 MB, because it mainly contained a high-cut photo of the menu page. Of course, it loaded very slowly. An important role in the download speed is also played by the connection speed of the end user - it is clear that the most optimized website or web application at 3G speed will be difficult to load. This is an external factor that cannot be influenced, but which must be taken into account and provided for both optimization of the solution as a whole and adaptive versions.
But the role of hosting in the speed of your site or application is too high to choose a weak solution. Therefore, if you are counting on a large flow of visitors, choose a secure and powerful resource so that the download is as fast as possible. Modern users have lost the habit of waiting for the site to load, and even 2-3 seconds of delay can lead to the fact that you will lose your visitors forever. The site and web application should run discreetly.
Cheap hosting will let you down, but expensive hosting will not
Alas, the sky-high price is not a guarantee of the hosting quality. Providers with exceptionally high prices expect customers to choose them without bothering to compare multiple providers. On the contrary, large hosting companies offer a wide range of tariff plans: firstly, for any purpose (a student, freelancer, large corporation needs different solutions), for any budget, and most importantly, in order to give an opportunity to test their services and make sure of their quality, to then switch to a more expensive and advanced tariff.
Human beings are still more decisive than robots. There is no trust in artificial intelligence yet
Any hoster has its own data centers
Unfortunately not. There are companies that decide to enter the web hosting market or provide services such as a side product (like cloud CRM and web hosting for various business purposes). In fact, they buy hosting from a large provider and resell capacity at a premium, or rent servers in someone else's data center. Turning to such companies is a risky story, since the chain of interactions is too large and the possibility of non-fulfillment of requirements within this chain (relatively speaking, if the “sub-hoster” does not pay the owner of the servers, the sanctions will fall on the shoulders of end customers - and it will be almost impossible to negotiate directly). By the way, the years 2018-2019 were rich in such events in the Russian segment of data storage.
All providers offer the same
This is only at first glance. Each of the hosting providers, from the smallest to the top ones, strives to compete both in terms of price and non-price factors. Differences can be in the location and reliability of data centers, in the set of administration tools, in the administration capabilities, in the quality and level of technical support, in the sets of ready-made images and preinstalled programs, in the level of the server hardware itself, additional options, insurance, etc.
Therefore, before choosing your hosting, it is important not only to determine the set of tasks, but also to compare 2-3 offers from different companies, having delved into the details.
- What are you doing?!
- Well, you said you wanted to make a 360-degree view of our data center?
(Data centers are not a toy for adults!)
I can't handle the servers!
Sitting on Habré, picking Kubernetes, developing DevOps? Do you want to return your 2007? Try to implement something in a medium-sized wholesale or trading company: no automation, traffic control, shredder, printer with jammed paper clip and 1C. And also a sysadmin and ... your own server room! Unreal luxury and a subject of special pride. On board, by the way, Windows Server 2003, and even 2008! If you clean up the server room, you can find a pager. Well, okay, we exaggerated this about the pager. But the fact is that companies are dragging Legacy software and Legacy hardware, fearing to go to the clouds: what if it's expensive, dangerous, and what if we can't cope, what if migration will ruin everything that was acquired by back-breaking labor?
These are vain fears and completely unfounded torment with old capacities. Firstly, the hosting provider's staff will help with migration of any complexity, and secondly, the hoster's admin tools are so perfect that there will be no problems with them even with large amounts of data and tasks being solved. Convenient panels, ready-made images, pre-installed software - this is the minimum that a good provider will offer you.
If there is a VPS / VDS, the company does not need a sysadmin
Also a common myth, but partly true. If you have a small company and have a manager or leader with brains and roughly straight hands, he will cope with a VPS, because he is not alone - there is technical support and the provider's staff.
But if you have more capacity, there is development or complex, downtime-sensitive corporate software, all office telephony and virtual PBX in the cloud, or you supply cloud applications to your customers, a system administrator is strictly required. Moreover, it should not be an engineer, but a professional who is able to solve problems independently and together with the staff of the hosting provider, who is able to recognize and classify the incident, collect data, work with monitoring, containers, control panels, etc. Of course, a lot depends on the profile of the company, but in general, if a business works with data (be it a client base or a warehouse), it is better to keep the sysadmin at hand. This is an important part of a company's information security.
And yes, the presence of a system administrator in the company does not eliminate the need for technical support from the provider. These functions are complementary, but not interchangeable.
Well, on the day of the hosting provider, we wish our colleagues reliable ping, adequate clients, fast servers, 100% uptime and no nails, and, continuing the tradition of telecom operators, for communication without marriage!