Hostgator is not watching closely on cloud hosting! (what's next?)

I know many folks in DP are involved in web hosting business. In a recent interview (http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.com/featured-articles/10-questions-with-hostgator/) Hosgator manager (Douglas Hanna) mentioned that the company does not have any specific plan in cloud hosting - they are watching closely, but not working on it.

It's surprising to see that large hosting companies, such as Hostgator with over 200 employees are not taking the issue seriously (whereas I think cloud hosting is the future of hosting). My question is, what's your take to this issue? Will cloud hosting kills hosting companies business? And what's scary is that will this change the landscape of hosting affiliate business?

 

That is a bit surprising. They dont expect cloud hosting to compete with them directly in next few years and I just hope they are right about it

 

Hostgator is hosting for hobby sites; why would they do cloud hosting which is more geared for people who actually make money with their websites and applications.

 

What's the difference between cloud hosting and clustered servers?

 

With cloud hosting you pay for bandwidth, storage, used memory *and* cpu cycles. So you can have hosting for $0.05 / day if your application uses very little of these resources. When your site grows, the idea is that you (automatically) can scale to any traffic or load on your server without spending any time on it. When it grows, your bill grows as well. But, let's say you have a site running a political forum and it is running with 10000 uniques/today normally, now you have some New York Times article in which your site is mentioned and traffic (+server load) spikes having to service 1.000.000 uniques for 2.5 days; with cluster hosting, you either would've had to have already running server to handle that all the time, or buy new servers for 1 month (for 2.5 days usage only!!). With cloud hosting, you just pay for the extra things used in those 2.5 days.

It is flexibility that is at the heart of cloud hosting; much more so than clustering.

 

^^^
Great explanation = Close to what I thought it was.
Thanks

 

Hey Kwaku. I think that's a bit precious of you. I host some very large and successful websites on HostaGator including some major real esate sites. Comments like that are what cause people to waste a lot of unnecessary money

 

Hostgator are a company shooting for small companies / sites and as much as they can; they grow very very very fast in number of sites and servers. Making is logical that they cannot a) provide enough support b) enough services c) not oversell d) care about single persons or businesses. I know some people here have good experiences with them ; that's great; glory to you.

Thing is; if you are dependent financially on your site(s), I personally find it extremely irresponsible to yourself and your family to host on such a bunch of cowboys. There are *countless* descriptions on internet from people who actually had something go wrong and had their business go down the toilet on HG. Because in the end *they don't care about you*; you pay nothing and they don't have enough people as they are cheap.

When you pay good money, get guaranteed 24/7 support managers which will be at your server in 5 minutes; pro-active monitor and fix, do monthly checkups of your software and hardware and call you every few months to discuss your growth, I can tell you that you feel *a lot* more comfortable and secure. And indeed I had a server crash (error in the raid controller; can happy any time) on such a host and they had the hardware replaced and restored my site completely from a snapshot they make every 24 hours. Within far under 60 minutes (which is the guarantee).

Everyone his / her own, but if you are making serious money I would advice against hosting anywhere else than top notch companies.

 

Yeah I have a few friends that run massive site through Hostgator dedicated servers, it's there business. Hobby site are sites like freewebs website and stuff like that.

 

What is massive though; I would call 'massive' anything that does like 100.000 uniques/day or makes like $3000-5000/day. And yeah ; their dedicated servers are ofcourse better for that, also at HG, but I heard the word 'cheap' and their dedi's are not cheap.

 

Well shared hosting falls into everyones budget more or less so if you run a business or not, then it's a cheap option for web hosting.

Hostgator is well known, and have good up-time reports... so and when your business depends on your website being online 24/7 then it seems attractive to small and large internet business.

 

But dude; that would be interesting if you didn't have a hostgator affiliate link in your sig; now it is quite obvious you would say that even if you don't mean it. You make money making people believe it has go up time. I've had sites go down on there for hours, but worse; when you pull a bit cpu they suspend your site. And they won't listen to reason either. The again; i'm not trying to sell HG packages

 

Dosn't matter who you host with you will always have downtime. But on a performance rating they would be quite high.

 

interesting info - never heard of this before.

 

I think they make the right choice to only focusing on their biz plan on normal hosting.
Its not wise to targeting the market that you have no expertise at.
Cloud hosting is only used for high end market so there will be few people buy it.