Site5 Web Hosting Blog

The Death of Web Hosting

Posted by Kevin Hazard, February 23rd, 2006

Site5 is no longer a web host… At least not in the web hosting industry’s implicit definition of what a web host should be. No, we are not dramatically changing our business model to selling knock-off sunglasses from the back of an unmarked van down by the river, and we are not saying that we will no longer provide what is expected of us as an understood member of the web hosting community. We approach this “change” with the intention of broadening the scope of what we can provide to our customers, both now and in the future.

A Web Host

• Provides Space - Now essentially a commodity
• Provides Bandwidth - Becoming cheaper and cheaper
• Provides Server/CPU - See Moore’s Law
• Provides over the counter resources to allow users to access/modify/interact with data
• Provides Customer Support in case of problems
• Prices product at market with the expectation that “Cheap hosting means cheap hosting experience” and “Expensive hosting means luxury hosting experience”

Now don’t get the wrong idea, none of these (except maybe the last point) are inherently bad, and several companies in the industry provide great solutions for anyone looking for this service (I would hope Site5 is associated in that group as well), but the danger to the web hosting industry as we know it lies in the fact that as the different components are being commoditized, we will continue to see competition based on price and an industry-wide decline in the overall customer satisfaction level with their web hosting experience (based upon the assumption that the sixth point is true).

I fear I will have to continue to urge you not to get the wrong impression since a post like this could implicity be seen as a “We figured this out, so we are so much better than everyone else.” On the contrary, we think we have found a problem, and we are looking at ways to approach it (both for our own sake since we like to eat, and for the sake of the customer who will have more money in his pocket from the cheaper prices but less hair on his head after pulling it all out in trying to figure out why his website is not working anymore). The web hosting industry needs to become dynamic… the quote from The Shawshank Redemption says it best: “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.”

Site5’s Vision

• Provide as much space as people would rationally need
• Ensure the quality of hosting over enforcing quotas
• Allow customers to simply and easily access sites without having to concern themselves with things like server loads, space and bandwidth quotas, and being affected by other sites on the same servers
• Provide innovative resources which enhance the customer experience
• Provide helpful help
• Be an interesting company- a market leader, an innovator, a fun place to work, provide as much information as possible (transparency)

So the cynics are now poised and ready at their keyboards to blast this “Vision” into the realms of “Pie In The Sky” pipe dreams, so another disclaimer I feel I should make is that we don’t claim to have these points accomplished, but they are where we (and other hosting companies) should move in order to salvage the industry.

Why and How?

The best way to understand the entire vision is to look at each of the points individually.

• Provide as much space as people would rationally need

In a majority of cases, especially with quotas and prices where they are, the average hosting customer essentially has unlimited space and bandwidth. No, I am not advertising that Site5 offers unlimited space and bandwidth, I am saying that most customers will not need the amount of space and bandwidth they are “given.” We can already see the toll this is taking on the industry when we see the arguments about “overselling” and the negative effects that are believed to typically result from that practice (increased server loads, higher probability of downtime, a poor customer experience). This argument is a great segue into the next point:

• Ensure the quality of hosting over enforcing quotas

Overselling is thought to be bad because it is implicitly connected to “overloading” servers or selling something that isn’t really there… like the old fable about the emperor’s new clothes. Now the ethical issue of selling space that isn’t technically present (under the industry-wide understanding explained in the first point) at the time of purchase is a circular debate that could make this post go on forever (though it may seem like it is already doing so right now), so I will touch on the condemnation of the idea of overselling as the arch enemy of quality.

A completely rational argument would suggest that by giving away more resources than you have at any given time would cause something to break or at least cause you not to be able to provide the excess amount of your end of the commitment…In relation to a real-world example, it is just like the run on the banks in 1929 as the Great Depression began where the banks did not have the money to allow for the withdrawal of all of the funds. I have never seen this kind of rush in the realm of web hosting, and I would assume that the only cause would be something parallel to the Great Depression on the internet… maybe some discovery that there is a universal disk space limit that we are approaching and everyone wants every last kilobyte. At Site5, we have to focus on providing a great quality service before worrying about “How will Jimmy get his 11GB of disk space if we only have 10GB assigned to him on the disk.” Bandwidth and disk space (as you can see in the “A Web Host” section) are essentially commodities, and the only thing really limiting a site is the CPU usage (or server load). Overselling is an easy scapegoat for outsiders to note as the cause of all of web hosting’s evils, and too often, it is seen by hosts as a “well, can’t really do much about it” kind of problem, but we need to strive at committing something along the lines of “Loads under control 99.9% of the time” as opposed to mere uptime guarantees… which coincidentally leads into the next point:

• Allow customers to simply and easily access sites…

If a customer never had a problem accessing his/her site and everything worked well, we would see heaven on earth. We would be extremely naïve to say “Site5 will provide this,” and a prospective customer would be even more naïve to believe it. It is our responsibility to try to get as close as possible to this level of service, and we should have systems in place to automatically make changes in order to ensure this service. Unfortunately, this is much more easily said than done, but we are not deterred by that fact… more energized in the challenge of getting a solution. Look at that… tying into the next point… (I love it when it does that)

• Provide innovative resources which enhance the customer experience

If this is the first weblog post that you have ever read from Site5, you are one of the few who have not encountered the developments, releases, and shenanigans of the Site5 engineering team. Their purpose in life is to make the Site5 customer experience better… it is their lifeblood… they all have irregular heart beats that happen to mirror Morse Code for “Customer Experience”… We can make up medical evidence to prove it.

The engineering team has slaved long hours with toothpicks holding their eyes open in order to come up with Synco, FlashbackPRIME, Backstage, domain integration, and a few other underground plans for systems to continue to enhance the customer experience. Eventually, they will strive to resurrect the Rapid Reflex system to enable immediate inter-server transfers if loads become an issue at any time, but their main role in the Site5 Vision is to take provide an easier way for users to do what they need to do… A great example would be David Felstead’s blog post about FlashbackPRIME where he explains a university experience:

I was at university, probably in my second year of a computer science degree, we were assigned the typical task of implementing a Quicksort algorithm in C, and benchmarking it against various other sorting algorithms. Of course, the cynics and the realists in the group wondered what the point of this was? Any programmer worth their salt knows that the C standard library’s qsort function implements the Quicksort – Why Re-invent the Wheel?. The surprise came when the class implemented the algorithm themselves and benchmarked it against the original qsort function. The result? Around 80% of the class had implemented a faster version of the algorithm, and these were second year uni students!

The web hosting industry has taken for granted that people are content with using the systems that are available… that trying anything else is a waste of time and money. The engineering team has become a central point of the entire Site5 mission because our success is contingent upon them helping provide a resource that people either don’t know that they need (not to say they don’t need it, just that they have been forced to be content without it) or that they think is impossible. Obviously, new software and systems mean new bugs and more problems in the short-run, so we must also remain true to the service and support that people need in their everyday use of their sites, but we understand that in the long term, these new systems avert so many of the old “can’t do anything about that” problems that customers have been stuck with for years.

• Provide helpful help

This is the simplest part of the Site5 Vision, yet somehow, it always becomes the most complicated. We have an amazing staff of sales, billing, and support at Site5, and as we grow in number of customers, we naturally have to grow in staff size. The task of filling positions for remote employees who will be functioning independently for Site5 is not an easy task at all… not only does an applicant have to be competent, he/she also has to be friendly and genuinely helpful. Customers seek help from real people because FAQ’s and Knowledgebases either do not have the answer or they do not have the capacity (being amalgamations of information) to care if that answer works. Site5 will continue to provide in-house sales and support with the specific intention of building a knowledgeable team of people who actually care about the customers they are to help.

You Stay Interesting, Site5

Rather than file the last point of the vision in the same manner as the first five, it is important for us to distinguish this intent in a special way… that special way being tying it in as a conclusion. We want to keep Site5 interesting and dynamic. It is important for us to continue to post in these blogs and to continue to strive for improvement because if we rest on our laurels, we may be one of the victims of the demise of web hosting. There will always be websites and there will always be a company to help you get access to those websites, but the only companies that will survive are the ones that learn that the web hosting experience is much larger than support response times and uptime guarantees… it is about transparently connecting the customer with the product (and doing that in easy, creative ways). Site5 has a vision to make it happen.

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