November 19, 2007 at 3:43 am · Filed under General
When it comes to shared hosting, Hostingplex has traditionally been considered a “budget host”, meaning our main hosting plan has typically stayed well under $10.00/month.
What many people do not understand is, the only thing budget about our hosting has been the price. We have always invested in the best technologies available to us to facilitate the services, and many full-time techs to support them.
Regardless, with all the time and money we have spent on deploying these services, we do have customers that are left feeling frustrated and maybe even short-changed, which is something we do not want our customers feeling, and something that I take personally as a business owner.
One of the areas we admittedly lacked at times is support. For the most part, the negative perception many customers have of our support is a result of a misalignment of expectations.
1. We have never offered live chat support. Our live chat was put in place for sales and basic customer service; however people are always on there looking for help. We try to provide help regardless of the fact that it is not meant for that use, but it is not manned 24×7 so some people get very frustrated when they cannot get through.
2. We have never offered 24×7 phone support. Like live chat, the main purpose for our phones is for sales and basic customer service. There was a very short time that we tried offering business hours support to customers that upgraded or purchased our S2 plan (no longer exists). So, customers get very frustrated when they cannot reach us outside of business hours, even though that was never part of our contract.
3. We do offer 24×7x365 support by email, however this does not mean your issue will be resolved within minutes. It is a method where you can submit a ticket any time of any day, and technicians will be notified right away. We then prioritize the tickets we have against the resources available at that time and work to resolve the issues. Some issues are stubborn and it can take days to resolve, others can be resolved in minutes. What might seem to be a simple issue to the customer could have very complex implications to our system.
Another area where we often have an issue with customers’ expectations not being in line with what we were offering is backups. We have always had systems and technologies in place to protect against issues on our side, such as drive failures. As a result of these technologies we have never lost customer data that I am aware of, knock on wood. Having said that, on a regular basis (weekly) we have customers contact us asking for a backup of their site to be restored, because they accidentally deleted it, or an old web-designer deleted it, or they have overwritten files by mistake, or hackers accessed their account and damaged the files, or any number of reasons. When a customer brings one of these requests to us, we have to remind them we do not store archived backups of their account, we do not have the facilities to restore a single account to a specified point in time, we are protecting against server-level failures. This is a sad situation for everyone involved, even though it was not our responsibility, we are left looking bad to the customer, and of course it is very unfortunate for a customer to lose files.
SPAM has also been a major issue point for us. Mail providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL etc have systems in place to block certain mail from even entering their network, and putting other mail into spam folders. The user generally has no control over how this is handled, and is sometimes left frustrated by the lack of choice. To date, we simply provided tools packaged with cPanel so customers could handle spam themselves, essentially using box trapper and spam assassin. As most are now aware, box trapper has been totally removed because it is such a poor solution and is actually counter-productive in the fight against spam. As for Spam Assassin, it requires the customer to manage parameters themselves, and without knowledge of it, you will end up getting spam or not getting legit mail. They are not the best tools, but that is what we were including.
One last area we continue to have issues is with customer contents. We are providing hosting, and allowing users to install whatever they want into the account, and the customer is responsible for the account and maintaining its contents. When a script gets out-dated and then subsequently hacked, we are forced to suspend the account, as the customer is now unintentionally in violation of our terms.
So all the issues I have just mentioned that clients have with our service, are not a result of us failing to provide what we promised, but more a result of customers assuming certain things existed that did not, expecting more than they subscribed to, mostly resulting from not having a technical background. Times have changed, we use to have mostly computer guru’s and experienced webmasters subscribing to our service, but today we find people of all skill levels starting sites.
This brought us to a conclusion, that the package we are offering is not enough for what customers need. The price might be right, but most customers do not understand enough of the technical side, or do not read enough of the service description to realize what is missing and what elements are left to the customer to handle.
This realization was reached some time ago, and we have been working in the background to address all these issues, and we are ready to launch a new plan that solves all these problems, but of course at a price, which will signal Hostingplex’s exit from a market we feel lures people in by price and places them in over their head because they just don’t understand what they are not getting, that is legitimately lacking from the offers.
My next post will explain how we have already addressed all these issues and what it’s going to cost.
Written by Kevin
September 10, 2007 at 1:07 pm · Filed under General
Overselling is a great tool for service providers. For the past 7 years Hostingplex has used overselling as a means to offer affordable pricing to everyone, and I have personally been a big supporter of it and defended the system in numerous online forums. Below I will explain how it worked at Hostingplex.
We calculated the average usage per resource of our entire customer base, and from that number calculate what our average cost per customer is. We placed a markup onto this amount and put it to the market, with quota’s that accommodate both the small user and large user.
This works very well, because you are able to offer an awesome deal, lots of features for a low price, knowing that only a certain percentage will be used overall, and all the small users offset the large users.
The downhill trend started when a new system was adopted within much of the hosting indstrury, whereby a company simply takes the resource quota’s offered by their competitors and up’s them by say 25%. This is a vicious and competitive cycle, and it has resulted in what we see today, plans offering hundreds and thousands of gigs of space and transfer, all for the same price of course.
As a marketing strategy, this is still very effective as many users do not know how much space or transfer they need, so will go with a company offering more for the same price just in case. It will not be able to continue this way for much longer, the quotas are already excessive, what will be next petabytes? Or even worst “Unlimited”?
However, from a technology standpoint this is a very bad system. The gap between allocated and available resources has become so large, many or most companies could not even handle a small increase of use across the board for their clients. This includes companies that have scalability and storage efficiency through the use of storage area networks (Hostingplex included). All it takes is a a group of users to start using large percentages of their quota’s, or even a small increase of usage across a larger group of customers. The potential for this is not extremely high, but it is a very large risk, and a lot of companies despite what they say, terminate accounts once they are even using over 25GB for example. I know this first hand through discussion with other hosting company owners. This is a practice Hostingplex has never engaged in, which is why we are always fighting to stay ahead of the curve and adopt a new system for allocating resources in a reasonable manner.
Here is a quick snapshot of where things were in 2004.
| archive.org: November 2004 |
| Company |
Price |
Disk Space |
Web Transfer |
| hostingplex |
3.95 |
5GB |
110GB |
| canaca |
3.95 |
5GB |
100GB |
| bluehost |
6.95 |
2GB |
75GB |
| dreamhost |
7.95 |
2.4GB |
120GB |
| ipowerweb |
7.95 |
2GB |
- |
| powweb |
7.77 |
2GB |
~150GB |
We have a solution to this issue that keeps things flexible for users and brings sanity back to the pricing. We will be announcing it this week so keep an eye out.
Written by Kevin
August 19, 2007 at 10:28 pm · Filed under General
Hello!
Well, there has been a major backlash with the removal of boxtrapper, many people forming conspiracy theories… i’m trying to calm everyone down, one at a time, but I thought I would post a link about why boxtrapper is so poor.
Also, I am working on inserting SPF records into everyones domains to address a coming change in outbound email routing. All shared hosting plan will start flowing out mf1.hostingplex.com and mf2.hostingplex.com and so on, and the SPF records are being put in place to ensure your mail isnt blocked. The reason for this change is to try and filter mail for spam before LEAVING our network to further avoid black lists.
Here is the example to try and explain why boxtrapper had to go:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Mail/challenge-response.html
Written by Kevin
August 17, 2007 at 1:10 pm · Filed under General
Hello All,
In an effort to improve the performance of our services to create a faster user-experience for customers and their users, and to reduce the number of emails that are mistakenly tagged as spam, we have made some changes to all email accounts.
1. BoxTrapper is now removed. This feature puts substantial stress on our resources, and for many clients results in their senders not completing the process and the message is gone. It is not an efficient way to deal with spam. [Additional Info] One of the biggest issues faced by BoxTrapper, is the fact, most spam is spoofed, therefore our system sends thousands of Verification notices to people that are not actually trying to mail you, and they report them as spam and we become black listed.
2. Catch-All will be disabled soon. We are in the process of identifying clients that are using catchall, and will ask them to create actual accounts or forwarders. Catch-ALL is not a viable feature anymore with the new environment of aggressive spammers.
We understand some clients will object to these changes, but the intention behind these changes is to improve the quality of service.
One of the biggest challenges we have is, clients who are forwarding email addresses hosted at hostingplex to their other email address on hotmail, gmail, comcast etc. The issue is, when you receive an email here that is spam, we forward it for you, which causes us to be marked as sending spam and then we become blacklisted.
For customers that are looking for an effective and efficient way to block spam, please login to your cPanel and enable the enterprise anti-spam solution, there is a one-time cost of $30.00 to protect all existing and future domains under your account.
Again, I would like to reiterate that the motive behind removing the existing cPanel anti-spam features is not to sell enterprise anti-spam activations, but to improve the quality of service by removing ineffective tools that are causing more harm than good.
This topic and other topics are open for discussion in our community forums located at http://forums.hostingplex.com
Thanks,
Written by Kevin
July 4, 2007 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Articles
Who is at risk?
It is a common misconception amongst our clients that, if a website is unpopular and/or small, or is not containing some valuable intellectual property, that it is not a target for hacking. The truth is, the majority of security breaches of our customer accounts are not in fact to inflict damage to the clients website or steal their data, but in fact to take advantage of their account for illegal and malicious uses such as operating phishing sites, creating repositories of copyright material, sending spam just to name a few.
What if you get exploited?
If an account on our network engages in activities in violation of the law and/or our policies, as soon as we are aware of the situation we will suspend the account immediately without advance notice to ensure we are operating in compliance with the law and to protect other client accounts from experiencing service interruptions. Once an account has been suspended the customer is presented with three options:
- Account Reset- All publicly accessible files are moved into non-publicly accessible directory and the account is unsuspended. It is the customer’s responsibility to then re-construct their website by moving files back into the public folder after verifying they are safe and secure. Hostingplex will provide this resolution method free of charge only on the first offence. This option is not available for future offences.
- Account Repair- Hostingplex technicians will review the customers account in detail to determine the method by which the account was compromised and patch the affected files and unsuspend the account. This type of work is classified as security breach recover and is billed at $150.00 per hour. An incident typically takes 1 billable hour to resolve and is complete within 6 hours of the invoice payment.
- Account Cancel - In the event the client wishes to cancel the site or move it to a different provider, a request to cancel the account can be entered which voids all prepaid service, no pro-rated refund is provided. If a backup is required we will provide a full backup of all files, emails, databases which is billed at $75.00 and is delivered electronically.
Ways to protect your account:
Delete Unused Files / Scripts- A very common source for account exploits is abandoned scripts which are not updated. Clients often install scripts for testing and forget about them, which are subsequently exploited and used to hijack the entire hosting account. Remove stuff you are not using.
Know your account!- Keep track of the scripts you have installed and use, ensure they are up-to-date both by checking the scripts main website and subscribing to their newsletters. We do not automatically update scripts as some clients make custom modifications which would be destroyed. It is important to understand the future support implications prior to modifying a script. If your email address has changed ensure you have updated your records with Hostingplex so we can send you notices regarding outdated scripts.
What Hostingplex does to protect your account:
Password Enforcement - Some customers become very frustrated with the inability to select their own password for their account, but this was a measure we took to protect customers. By ensuring the password is unique and secure we have dramatically reduced the number of exploited accounts due to brute force attacks (guessing of simple passwords).
Request Filtering - We use a module called mod_security on all servers which tries to detect and block requests to your website which take advantage of vulnerable scripts in an attempt to prevent the customers account being compromised. While this is an effective tool, it does not reduce the need to ensure all scripts are up to date.
Network Host Filtering - Utilizing data collected internally and through use of external database, we block traffic from networks and hosts known to be involved in malicious attacks so they cannot even attempt to access your site.
Proactive Administration - Our technicians ensure that the server software is running at the latest version supported by our system, to avoid lower level security breaches.
There are many other things we do behind the scenes to protect the system and all the accounts within it, however it is crucial each and every customer ensures they are not undermining our efforts by running insecure scripts.
Written by Kevin
April 4, 2007 at 11:05 am · Filed under Affiliates
Each day at Hostingplex we do our best to monitor our traffic and see where all of you are coming from! We look at search terms and keywords, uniques and total hits, even the peak hours of the day where traffic is higher than average. Exposure is great but knowing where your traffic is coming from whether it be a blog post or directly from a search engine such as Google is critical in the Hosting industry.
This is where the affiliate & partner programs come in to play. An affiliate program for those unaware:
A Web-based pay-for-performance program designed to compensate “affiliate” partner web sites for driving qualified leads or sales to a “merchant” web site.
At Hostingplex we have been rolling with our affiliate program for quite some time however very recently have placed more focus on it. For every unique person that signs-up through your affiliate code you get $50usd. This value increases after 10 sales and after 21 sales. With some research and development our customer can now fully manage there affiliate codes, statistics and outstanding payments due to them all through their Account Manager. Getting our customers involved with Hostingplex’s affiliate program has a ton of advantages for both of us. For example, you get paid for every single sale through your affiliate code, we get a new customer. With our customer base growing the company grows and that can only lead to success whether it be faster response times or more services the affiliate program is designed to cater to everyone. With affiliates our brand is exposed with banners or text links that are placed on the customers site. At Hostingplex our affiliate program is definitely growing but we want more action! We want our customers to be a part of this lucrative business. Why not make some extra cash online? This is a multi-billion dollar global market so why not take a piece of the pie =)
In most cases when you click on a banner or ad to purchase something online you are likely going through an affiliate. Last year alone affiliate networks generated nearly 6.5 billion dollars world-wide (no I didn’t count, I wiki’ed it)
Amazon.com was definitely one of the pioneers of affiliates programs and it is still one of the largest affiliate programs online. The ability to make money for simply placing a banner or link to a site is marvelous, the intention is harmless and the result is prosperous. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to try our affiliate program, I urge you to give it a shot, definitely a great opportunity!
Written by Alfez
March 29, 2007 at 3:52 pm · Filed under General, Development
Over the past few months we’ve been developing some fairly interesting stuff behind the scenes. This week we’ve been concentrating on launching outgoing/incoming spam filtering and processing.
A few months back we ended up launching the new ‘Edge’ Hostingplex mailserver. The server spends all day, everyday processing incoming/outgoing mail. In total we send and receive a total of one million messages a day.
The amount of resources the amount of messages we receive a day is amazing. We estimate that nearly 75% of that is spam. We came to the realization earlier that the Edge system was going to be insufficient. Not only would it need constant management and attending to but just keeping the spam filters on it would be a real pain in the backend <teehee, literally>.
We’ve basically decided that we wanted to go above and beyond and launch some enterprise spam filtering for our clientbase. In the end it looks like we’re really hooked on the idea of the Mailfoundry system.
It’s not the cheapest solution out there but from the reviews it generally accounts for almost zero false positives and nearly ~100% of spam being removed. Mmm, yum! It also includes outgoing filtering as well which is something we’ve been feverishly working to launch: Over the past few weeks we have inadvertently ended up in a few blacklists as a result of forwarders to popular internet service providers like Comcast.
Spammers have always been targetting our systems attempting to gain access to send out the latest Nigerian scam or ebay phishing scheme. We almost always stop them immediately but the forwarders from users forwarding their own mail off to Hotmail/Comcast tends to catch us in the end.
At any rate we do intend on launching the Mailfoundry system shortly and we’ll be getting in contact with everyone soon regarding it’s launch.
See you on the other side!
Written by David
March 26, 2007 at 10:31 pm · Filed under General
So our first week of the Hostingplex blog was interesting… a few posts which was fun, but to my surprise the blog is rivaling our main website in unique viewers! However nobody is leaving any comments are the posts just that perfect there’s nothing to say? If so please send one dollar to…
We had another local client come into the office today, its always great to meet with you guys…email makes for a very impersonal relationship. Shared Hosting is definitely our major product, but our capabilities go way beyond that and we are providing some really cool services to companies ranging from 1 employee to hundreds of employee’s… with a major focus on business continuity and streamlining your business process with effective use of available technologies… we can suggest things you can’t even imagine, try us.
By the way we have XBOX, Pizza, and Red Bull to name a few. And, if you can beat me at the spiral game in fusion frenzy, you might just get some cool free stuff… but nobody beats me.
Written by Kevin
March 23, 2007 at 12:09 pm · Filed under General, Affiliates
Here at Hostingplex we seem to like giving things away. I think it all started with our $3.95 plan back in the day! Shortly thereafter our fearless leaders decided they’d have a forum competition to incite brawls love amongst our clientbase over the treasure: ipods and a laptop!
Surprisingly enough I was one of the forum members at that time - about three months prior to being hired by Hostingplex for being helpful within their community. Years later .. here we are again.
It’s been awhile since our last competition/awards of sorts. We recently offered ipod shuffles out to offer some incentive to get users to switch to our newest complete package, it was quite the blast! We enjoyed packaging them and shipping them out so much we’ve decided it’s almost time to do it again 
(Hey, it’s more fun than tickets!)
So we’re gearing up to give away a couple of Nintendo Wiis! Supposedly according to the folk lore news we’ve been reading on these things that they’re sought after. Kids fixing to get their well, fix! I’ll admit I want one too so we’ve tied up Kevin and he’s in the back room until he gives us a couple.
For now though it’s the lucky Hostingplex affiliates that will be getting them. For the month of April our top affiliate is going to get a Nintendo Wii along with their affiliate payouts!
The official announcement regarding the competition will be going out shortly.
In the meantime here’s a cute kid playing wii:
Click the link
Watch out. These things are DANGEROUS though. Alfez had to take a day off earlier this week because he hurt himself while playing with his wii. Scary thought.
Written by Alfez
March 23, 2007 at 11:50 am · Filed under General
Alfez decided he would take a much needed vacation from his work slumber here at the office. I didn’t realize how much fun taking 16 calls a minute was! So far so good though and at least things are looking up: It’s Friday!
Google tells me it’s going to be sunny too! Finally some weather we can abuse here in the frozen tundra known as Canada.
Written by David
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