The course of a young fighter: how to get along with the hoster

Inspired by another story of a person who was disconnected by the host for spam from his account, I am writing this post. It is based on the stories of familiar customers, support and admins, posts on forums and horror stories from neighboring topics.

Quite often there are situations of misunderstanding between the hosting provider and the client. This is primarily due to the fact that the client himself is often not ready for a successful relationship. Namely, he does not know his rights and obligations.

However, this post is not about how to condemn your hosting provider. But rather, on the technical side of such a relationship.
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So, how not to lose your hosting, your money and your customers.

Attention, this post may cause you to increase hatred of the author, hosters or their clients. I warned.

Attention # 2, a lot of letters. Yes Yes Yes. If you are "niasilili", do not report this good news in the comments.



I did not set a goal to chew each item on 10 pages. It's just a collection of general rules ... And to be honest, I am sorry that I generally had to write this post. It would seem absolutely obvious things.

If there are any questions, especially on the technical part, I will be happy to answer in the comments.

Stage selection provider.

Most people relate to the choice of a hoster very easily - I found the first site through Google, chose the appropriate tariff, paid for it.

This is fundamentally wrong.

Tariffs

Tariff tariff discord.

For most hosting providers, rates are roughly the same. By the amount of disk space, domains and databases.
But this is absolutely not the case. There are always "pitfalls" that are not shouting on the main page. However, this can always be read - as a rule, in the contract and TOS.

What should you look for when comparing tariffs:

1. Resources . Not disk space and not the number of domains. And the processor time and the amount of allocated memory. Often it happens that the number of sites specified in the tariff is 100, and in fact, already at 1-2 not the largest sites, the CPU or MEM limit is reached.
2. Traffic. The main thing to clearly understand - no limit does not exist . Everything. Everywhere, where the beautiful word “unlimited” is written, there is another restriction: on the width of the channel, on the ratios or on the link load. Or, even worse, implicit restrictions - for example, upon reaching a consumption of 5 megabits, you are “politely asked” to switch to a higher price or get out at all. The “real” unlimited limit on the 100mb band costs much more than the most expensive shared hosting.
3. Restrictions on the number of subdomains, databases and other resources.

Terms of Service

Rules for the provision of services have most hosting providers. The first thing you should do is read them carefully .

This document defines your responsibilities as a client in terms of resource maintenance, server load, inappropriate content, and other crucial things.

What you should pay attention to:

1. The procedure for payment of services . Some providers, especially those engaged in providing VDS or dedicated, require payment for the next month a few days before the end of the outgoing, and not five minutes before midnight - they will not have time to process your request and funds will not be credited -> server or site will be stopped. Now with the spread of instant payments, it has become a rarity, but it still exists, especially in terms of payment by credit cards and bank transfer (protection against bank charge-back).
2. Prohibited content. Yes exactly. Many providers have banned such types of content as torrent trackers and sidboxes, political sites, religious sites, a site for the sale of medicines, etc. (Herbalife, Yeah). Almost all Russian have porn, warez, spam and spammers, phishing, viruses, etc.
3. Terms and time money-back.

These conditions, as a rule, are not at all terrible. But you need to know and remember about them, so that at one point you will not see “Your account is temporarily blocked” instead of your site.

Technical

Let us turn to the technical part.

1. Configuration. Before buying, check if the server’s software configuration meets the requirements of your website (apache \ php modules, settings, etc.). It is highly likely that no one will install software or change settings especially for you - dozens on a server such as you, and it’s impossible to get your own software for each user.
2. Password. Never tell anyone your password from the control panel \ FTP. For all actions performed with the client password, the responsibility of the client! If you are blocked, say, for spam, it will not bother anyone, you are spamming or your friend \ wife \ programmer \ cat. In part of the control panels, you can create additional login: password pairs, use this feature to give temporary access (for example, to the designer) and delete outdated pairs.
3. Viruses. Approximately 80% of IFrame viruses and 50% of spam is not sent at all through holes in the software or hosting platform, but through a password stolen from the site administrator. Install and configure an antivirus, do not store passwords for hosting in an explicit form and do not save it in third-party programs (especially unfamiliar). Consequences - see point one, your password - you answer.
4. Backups. About backup it is necessary to think for yourself. Find out exactly how your hoster backups. Often, the hosting administrators' representation of copies does not coincide with yours. For example, you need an incremental backup with the ability to roll back on any day, and the hoster makes a general backup of the entire account once a week. Be sure not to have a very old copy in it. The hoster may have problems, death HDD, an explosion in the data center, etc. In order not to lose the data - keep it at home. I know a case when a person’s website lived on a hosting with 1 line of code before it was launched into operation, without a single local backup. When all this once died - it was __ insulting.

Psychological

And specifically - how to make you understand and help you. Blitz blocks, I think chewing is not required.

Communication with those. support:

1. If the site contains different contacts, do not need to write to all at once . It is necessary to report a maximum about yourself (account, server, what error, where). This is the most important thing that can sometimes reduce the time to solve a problem by a factor of three to four.
2. Speak politely. No need to try to run into, scream and threaten support \ managers. It will not help, but the attitude to the "client Ural" will be appropriate. Also, do not write in Albanian, “petrosyanit” and in other ways wind your nerves. Your originality is usually of little interest to the hoster.
3. STF hosting deals (surprise!) Support hosting. They are not required to teach you to install linux, program, typeset HTML, fly a helicopter. Such questions are best not to ask.
4. No need to ask again 100 times "well, when ??", "you are here ??? 77", "I'm tired of waiting! 1111". This will not speed up the answer, but slow down - maybe.

Errors in the work site:

1. Specify the site . Servers - not one and not five, telepathically find out exactly where the problem is far from easy.
2. “Nothing works for me” is not a bug report . Always describe the problem in detail and clearly. Correspondence length of 50 messages does not speed up the solution.
3. “But on VasyaCoolHosting - it worked!” - this is not an argument .
4. Make sure it is not working properly . If it works correctly , but not in the way you want it to be, it is useless to ask.
5. Make sure that the problem is massive and the matter is not in your specific settings.
6. If the problem has disappeared by itself or you have solved it on your own, let us know. Do not make people catch a non-existent bug.
7. It is useless to ask to change the global settings \ software version. You are not alone.
8. The standard time for solving non-critical technical issues is 24 hours . The sysadmin is also a person, and he has other tasks besides your most needed button in the control panel. During these 24 hours you do not need to ask again every 10 minutes “how is it ???”.

Problems with accessibility, speed, brakes:

1. Check if there are any problems on your side (firewall, proxy, problems with ISP, blocking by local administrator).
2. Make and attach to the description of the problem ping and tracing.
3. If the site has a debugging system (for example, recording the execution time of scripts or queries to the database) - attach its data.
4. “Brakes” is generally a very subjective concept.

With the composition of the post helped by examples of kolobus , support www.nkvd.pro .

That's all. I hope this post will help to avoid new problems with hosting for clients and clients for hosters. Ready to answer questions in the comments. :)