Isn't it amazing how simple some things in life can be for those who dont have to do them? How often you face what seems to be a totally intractable problem, and someone can just come up with a simplistic solution that seems to be completely reasonable. It wont work but it's hard to explain why in the face of such simplistic views.
Our government in Australia is trying to sell us that their deregulated industrial relations environment is great because if we dont like the conditions dumped on us by our employers we can just go somewhere else. If we dont like all the fees the banks are charging us, we can just take our accounts across the road to another bank (who has the same kind of thing). If we dont like the way our phone company has a bewildering array of plans we can just go to another phone company. If we dont like the deal our hosting company is giving us, we can just take it all somewhere else.
These notions are all true, but are so simplistic they ignore the realities. If we change banks, we lose the fees structure we hate. But we get another one just as bad. We change phone companies, we lose the incomprehensible array of plans, but we get a different but still incomprehensible array of plans. Speaking with our feet doesnt tell the banks or the phone companies anything. As we join the throng taking our accounts across the road, we pass another throng doing the same thing coming in the opposite direction. The people at the banks and the phone companies dont care a damn if we take our accounts somewhere else.
If we dont like our hosting company, we can just go somewhere else. True. But the chances are, we will eliminate one problem, and inherit half a dozen more. I've been moving 45 sites over the last few weeks from one server to a new one, from
CFMX6.1 to CFMX7. And it's a big job. I have to coordinate all my clients, to make sure they know what is going on, that I dont inconvenience them, we dont lose any email in the process, the databases are in synch on both machines etc etc.... all relatively straightforward jobs, but it's still a big job, and requiring acute attention to detail late at night. It's not a job you do lightly.
And you certainly dont pack up 45 sites and just take them somewhere else willy nilly. Your new host is likely to have differences in structure or rules. It's highly unlikely you can just take all those sites and plonk them on the new box at the new hosting company and expect them all to work the same - the new host will be likely to have a some tags disabled that you use, or require something to be kept in a different place, or have the email server set up differently or something. So each site has to be moved and tested thoroughly before you can move the domain name.
Or they are quite likely to be using the industry-leader HELM control panel, which is marvellous and offers truly wonderful control to the site owners and is a generation better than any other control panel on the market (I've used most of them at one time or another), but you cant see your site without the domain name being delegated to it. So the site has to go live there untested. In that case, you have to move the code, hope it works, that nothing got corrupted, then delegate the domain and be ready to fix anything that's gone wrong quick-smart.
My point is not to whine, and I'm NOT whining. I enjoy the hosting business and it fits into my strategy well, even though it only brings in pin-money for me. But it's not as simple as Sean thinks it is. I know Sean is not ignorant of the ways of small business, but he hasnt got a clear grasp on the realities of the small hosting operation in this case.
Cheers
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer
AFP Webworks
http://afpwebworks.com
ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer
AFP Webworks
http://afpwebworks.com
ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month
On 11/7/05, Sean Corfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
----------------------------------------------------------On 11/6/05, Nando <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hmmm ... i wish it was that simple. It isn't.
Sure it is. You get what you pay for. If you care about your site
being up 24x7, you need to pay for that and get a dedicated server.
> When you're employed, you don't lose your job on days when someone is
> fiddling around like that on a server you've got a shared site on. But when
> you're running your own small company, those are the days you lose clients,
If your business depends on it, you should be using a dedicated
server. If you "save money" by using a shared host, then the cost may
well be lost clients.
I'm sorry, but this is a really simple business equation.
I mean, come on, how much is a dedicated server? How many clients can
you host on it (and resell the hosting fee yourself)? How much is your
reputation worth?
--
Sean A Corfield -- http://corfield.org/
Got frameworks?
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive."
-- Margaret Atwood
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