It’s only February and already there are a couple of casualty hosting providers. A community driven hosting provider in Canberra had customers report, on its company forum and WP, downtime for over a dozen severs. We also saw reports of a Melbourne based hosting provider with servers being destroyed due to power overload. 7 servers were destroyed along with thousands of customer’s websites and emails that took over a week to recover. Can downtime be avoided? I believe it can if the right infrastructure is put in place.

When looking at this industry both here and overseas, it is flooded with thousands of small web hosting providers. The reasons why there are so many of them is due to the very low barriers of entry to set up a hosting business. You only need 3 things to start a hosting business: a cheap Dell server, a CRM system like MondernBill, and a customer control panel such as Plesk, cPanel or Ensim. Like most small businesses, they want to keep their costs low so they will start with one server and once filled with customers they will buy another one, and so on.

This model works fine if you offer a real budget service and only grow to around 10 servers. If you grow any bigger and want to offer more business grade services, you will run into trouble. The reasons are:

1. Single Dell Servers are not fully redundant. You will notice small hosting providers will talk about the ‘greatness’ of their new Dell servers but the reality is there is only a single point of failure. There is no clustering and no business continuity solution so there will always be downtime. Also, they don’t tell you the ratio between server capacity and customer numbers so you don’t know if they are cramming customers onto servers to reduce costs.
2. Third party control panels such as Plesk and cPanel are buggy and due to their proliferation are always under attack for security. Look what happened to Mdwebhosting 5 days before Christmas:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22953634-5013044,00.html
3. Modernbill is a 3rd party CRM system which has many limitations. Firstly, you have to make this backend system available to the public through the internet (as opposed to a closed system intranet) to work correctly, with limited security features and limited flexibility to integrate innovate new products. Would you want your personal data available in a CRM system that is accessed via the web?

If you look at any large web hosting company in the USA or Australia, they do not adopt the above model. In Australia, there are only 3 web hosting companies that have built a complete customised solution that includes a fully clustered server and storage solution, their own control panels and their own CRM system. These companies include SmartyHost, NetRegistry and WebCentral.

SmartyHost built a technology which we called the Business Process Management system (BPM) which integrates and automates the entire business backend. It includes our CRM and server management. We have also built our own control panel. Our latest infrastructure is powered by Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com.au) which includes Quadcore servers, clustered and high end enterprise Storage Area Network. We have over a $1M worth of enterprise equipment located at OPTUS, main exchange data centre.

It is a real shame that customers are getting recycled in our industry. Customers are going from one small hosting provider to another. According to AusRegistry around 5,000 domains are churned every month in Australia. As customers move from one small hosting provider to another, they have great enthusiasm and hope that their website and data be safe and stay online. There is very little difference between each of these small hosting providers. They all claim to have the same cheap Dell server, they all have the same cPanel or Plesk control panel and they all manage your personal information in a CRM system called ModernBill. The only differentiation between these providers is different owners, company name, logo, prices, and hype.

As an industry we need to look beyond just MB’s of storage and price and look at what is really under the hood. Some questions to ask your provider are:
1. Do you have fully redundant servers with clustering?
2. Do you use enterprise grade servers such as SUN or IBM?
3. Do you store my website, email and information on a Storage Area Network (SAN)? Your information can only be secure and redundant if stored on a SAN.
4. Do you have an inhouse CRM system? Can it be accessed via the public internet?
5. Do you have a custom built control panel that you can support locally?
6. Where is my information stored? Is it a Carrier owned data centre or is it just a local data centre or local server room with possible power issues?
7. Do you host our DNS on the same servers that has our website data? If so then there is another single point of failure to watch out for.