I was viewing Digg this evening and came across this video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2398916025034509084

Needless to say, someone is crying right now! This leads me to my point- we want to price match, and we’re confident that we provide a ton of value, but all things aren’t created equal in web hosting and this video provides a great example of that, but I could think of examples all day long where providers cut corners to get their prices down. I’m all for affordability. I owned midPhase hosting, which provided, and continues to provide, an incredible value in shared hosting, and we’re doing the same with SingleHop, but we absolutely refuse to cut corners to provide ‘cheap dedicated servers’.

Here are areas that providers cut corners in, and you should be careful of, and bare with while I toot our own horn a bit!

Let’s first start with this whole rain issue. First off, you don’t put data centers in basements. If you have to though, make sure that there aren’t outside windows for water to drip down from. My guess is that this being sub-par office space in a basement made it cheap to rent, since no one wants to be down there. For good reason, but lesson learned. When scoping out our Chicago data center, we made it a point to select a site that would rule this out, and we picked a data center that has two roofs. Could we have gotten it cheaper? Sure, but it’s not going to be raining in our data center, or on to our customers servers.

Redundancy-
Redundancy all around. In our network we’ve invested over a hundred fifty-thousand dollars. Not a ton of money, companies have spent more, but few have spent more that push the little amount of traffic that we push. We push a little over a gigabit of traffic, but our network is redundant from the core routers to the aggregate switches down to the uplinks to our cabinets. No expense spared, within reason of course. We could have spent more if it were likely up to the network guys, but we have a fully redundant network, including redundant providers from different access points in to the building to the uplinks. We keep our costs low, and pass that to our clients, but we’re providing a valuable service.

Support-
We had cheaper routes for data centers. Data centers that were far out in the suburbs, or in different states, and so forth, but we picked a data center in Chicago, where the commercial real estate market is strong, and the data center market is even stronger. Space is not cheap, but not having quick access to our servers lessens the value that we can provide to our clients. We picked a data center that is right smack in the middle of the South Loop in Chicago, and we built out a network operations center that we staff 24 hours a day. By doing this, our technicians can quickly react to problems with clients servers, and even better when you call support, you’re talking to a support technician that’s literally 20 feet from your servers. Again, something that’s incredibly valuable to our clients, but perhaps an expense that prevents us from matching a particular competitors prices that has his servers across the country in a site selected entirely based on cost.

Thanks for listening to my rant. What I would like to get across though is that you should be cautious in selecting a provider. It’s not necessary to overpay in hosting. There are too many providers to do that, but selecting purely on price might put your business out to dry. (pun on singing in the rain… right.)

Zak