For much of March and April, I’ve been fighting with technology… and losing. We rely a lot on the reliability (catch the wordplay?) of various Internet service providers. We expect our broadband service to function at a reasonable speed every minute of every day. We expect any “essential” services for our businesses to be online and functioning.
But, that doesn’t mean I want or expect Congress to pass legislation regulating most web services as public utilities. They aren’t. We have a lot of choices, at a variety of costs, for how our websites and blogs reside on the Internet.
When Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or any other major service experiences outages, a lot of people panic.
My wife and I rely on a hosting service that is part of a giant created by merger after merger. Maybe there’s a reason Amazon and Microsoft are so successful. They have incredible speed and up-time for their servers. Endurance International Group owns many of the hosting services upon which small to medium-sized business depend. EIG buys brands of United States hosting companies, and then relocates the hardware and software services overseas. Eighty-three (yes, 83!!!) hosting and hosting-related companies are little more than EIG brands, today.
Changing host companies is, and should always be, an option to consider. In fact, we are considering a move in 2020 to a hosting service that offers better performance. That will cost more, which makes sense to me. Next year, I’ll be paying for more server resources. If I built my own servers, they wouldn’t be cheap.
Hardware costs money. The fastest hosting service requires more computing resources, and so you pay more as a customer. Likewise, if you want to assemble your own server farm, that will cost money. There’s no way to charge one set rate for all servers. That would be like charging the same for all vehicles, regardless of their design criteria.
Speed of service isn’t a “neutral” concept. Our server is slow. We need to pay to lease better hardware. Bandwidth also requires hardware. Streaming services burn through bandwidth. If you’re using the resources, you should be paying for the hardware required.
We can use contracts and competition to ensure better service. I expect my hosting service to live up to its contract with me. Likewise, competition should force all services to maintain reasonable services at market prices.
Bluehost, our provider, needs to offer better performance. If they don’t, they risk losing customers. That’s how markets work.
The last few weeks have been frustrating as our Web hosting provider suspended our account with the claim that our blogs and sites consume too many resources. There’s no reason for a basic HTML site and one installation of WordPress with a handful of plugins to overload a shared hosting plan.
The site has less traffic than it did a two years ago, and a tenth of the traffic the site had ten years ago. The blogs are also not well-trafficked lately. If anything, the website and blogs should be consuming less processing power and memory.
One has to appreciate the Office Space and Kafkaesque response of Bluehost:
Me: Our site is down because it was using too many resources. How can we address this?
Support: Log in to the site and adjust the WordPress, PHP, and MySQL settings.
Me: We cannot access the site, not even via the cPanel interface.
Support: Yes. The account has been suspended….
After three phone calls, two emails, and a very long online chat, Bluehost promised to review the account.
As our server access was restored, the server went offline. Visitors were presented with a message directly from Bluehost that there were server problems after an upgrade.
So, what are the odds nothing was our fault? It seems likely we didn’t do anything to violate the terms of service. Instead, the hosting service somehow messed up the server upgrades. There are a lot of moving parts (metaphorically) and any one of them could cause problems with a website.
Anyway, I’ve lost a lot of time trying to keep this blog and our others online. I have three months of posts for 2019 and archives dating back to 2007 that I would like to have restored as soon as possible. But, that will take time I might not have until May.
I’ve lost a lot of sleep getting things back online. I know these things happen. That’s one reason I keep a lot of backups of all things digital. Technologies fail, for many reasons. When they do, you need a plan to restore all those backups and settings.
I do practice what I teach. That still doesn’t make crashes and suspended accounts any less frustrating.
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