Hello Marghanit,
Someone else mentioned CPANEL -
That would have been me. My point was that a considerable amount
of server administration has been de-skilled and delegated outside the
company running the data centre, it has been passed on to the customer
who subscribes to their service at the wholesale or retail level.
To make this commercially viable relies upon convergence in the market:
* Web hosting is a commodity, you can buy functionally identical
hosting from lots of vendors.
* Availability of GUI environments (cPanel and Plesk), with similar
reseller tools like WHM, these 3rd party tools largely describe the
hosting products, some companies are persisting with their own
management environments, but that is an uphill battle for them.
* Curiously the Name Registrar market with even lower margins does
not show this convergence to uniform 3rd party GUIs.
* Costs are so low that providing support has to be a big expense,
everything is done via FAQs and video tutorials to have the client solve
their own problems up front.
* The true quality of a hosting company is only realised through
experience, with even a single outage or support event it is possible to
see into the real nature of the host management company. This informs
the questions you really should have asked when signing up, and will ask
next time. Given the commodity nature of hosting it is relatively easy
to jump ship, not trivial but easy.
* An implication for web developers is that you are crazy if you
stray from generic programming techniques and hosting environments.
Getting locked into a host is death.
* Experience informs on selling policies and costs. For instance
it is my experience that providing clients with email via their
registered domain is as much or more trouble than managing everything
else, just dealing with email settings on their Thunderbird / Outlook /
iPhone, and the occasional email forwarding request can take a lot of time.
Note the high rate of mergers and acquisitions among hosting
companies, suggests to me tight margins and a desire to realise
economies of scale.
Regards
Ross Mitchell
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