Web hosting in the Cloud. Few things to check?

Hi folks,

I went to all the treads and saw few users banned because they have obviously tried to use the DP community as a way to sell their services. Unfortunately web hosting forums are loosing credibility for 2 reasons: a) they are full of marketeers; b) providers use gimmicks to sell and are very unfair in promoting their hosting services.

There are few things that consumers and businesses would check before considering any service provider.

Autonomy System (ASN): If the company has its own ASN, it means it is an independent entity and has authority online. ASN means that the company is regional registry and member of ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, AFNIC.

Network: If one knows a company's ASN, one would check its network at http://bgp.he.net/ by placing the full ASN number aft "bgp.he.net/". Some companies might have their own ASN, IPv4 and IPv6 space, but at the same time to lease infrastructure from any data center service providers. This is not a bad option as most smaller and midlle-sized web hosts choose to leverage on larger corporate networks instead of spending hundred thousands on infrastructure.

Physical Location: It is important that any IT host or Managed service provider has at least one main location where it owns or operates infrastructure. This says a lot about the company and shows that it is serious about its business. To be fair to many web hosting providers, we'd say that there are some who specialize in Managed services only, which means that they buy infrastructure on demand and manage it for customers, instead of spending on building its own data center. It is a legitimate model. However, the one who needs a service has to make sure that the provider is open and correct and states very clear on its business structure.

Cloud: "Cloud" does not say a lot these days as virtually each and every provider claims to be on the cloud. If fact, not very many operate a real cloud infrastructure as it is quite expensive to build a networking model of computing. In the Shared Hosting niche for example, there is virtually no cPanel Cloud accounts (there might be Shared Account hosted on Cloud VPS). When it comes to virtualization, one would better ask about the infrastructure and software platform used by any provider who claims to offer Cloud services. Nowadays "everything is Cloud", so we'd be careful and would better ask providers to explain what kind of systems they use.

Anything else - network uptime, reliability, support, etc. - is not hard to measure. If one doesn't know whether to commit to a long term contract, it is better to get a service like VPS and to test it for a month or two. When it comes to Shared hosting this is obviously not that important as most Shared hosts offer money back guarantee.

Finally, I'd suggest anyone to stay away form "the best". Those who have nothing else to say, always claim they are "the best", which apparently is far from being true.

 

What's the source?

 

yes man, i read your text and i found it as the same case as mine. actually i was confused about managed cloud service and i did a bit of googling and found the article about data center cloud and it totally helped me. it gave me the exact solution that i needed. maybe u should check it once too.

 

when picking right webhosting provider and is not sure whether he is good or not. He can prepay just monthly. Keep external backups of website data and if not satisfied, he can just pick another hosting.

 

Also check on the web host's money back guarantee. Some are charging by daily and the users are billed each day, and there is no worry. Some other web hosts are giving discount on signup for their cloud hosting, and the refund policy might varies from one web host to another. Call up their sales department if you need clarification on payment and refund.