The Mega Hosts Consolidate into One Datacenter that Keeps Failing

When you talk about shared hosting, the concept of mega-hosts the idea is to cram as many sites into the smallest space possible for the lowest price. The plans are usually seem too good to be true because they hide the real details of what they provide which is in fact very little. The word "UNLIMITED" is always present and in every case it is limited by the terms of service which contradict the unlimited claims on the front pages.

But the granddaddy of all mega-hosts is EIG, Endurance International Group, Inc.Their portfolio is huge and growing daily as they buy up all of the smaller companies and transition them into one central datacenter in Provo Utah.

Unfortunately, the services of these hosts were bad to begin with, but as you take away the original founders and the ideas that made them grow and plop them into a corporate managed entity that is heartless and only looking at the bottom line, the service sufferers even more.

It is no secret that the mega-hosts like Bluehost, Hostmonster, Pow Web, iPage, FatCow, Homestead and others are the most complained about hosts online. Of course, when you have the volume of customers that they have it is expected to see complaints. But they consistently fail their customers in a big way and it keeps getting worse.

What people don't know, is that they are all owned and managed by the same company, Endurance International Group.

First take a look at the hosting brands owned by EIG:

There is no doubt if you have done any searching for website hosting you have found many of the names on this list as some of the brands are the most visible in the mega-hosting market. They are the ones offering website hosting from as low as one penny and typically in the range of $2 to $5 a month for unlimited hosting plans.

Now, that would be amazing if the hosting product was as good as anyone else, but the fact is, the basic architecture of shared hosting plans are insecure, unreliable and poorly managed.

Shared Hosting Architecture

• Cheap servers, usually budget desktop models

• No redundancy or backups

• email support only not phone and 1 to 3 day response time

• No website building support just ftp and availability support

• You get space, bandwidth and that is about it

• Anything else, you are on your own

• Websites get shut down for exceeding 5% CPU usage

• Websites get shut down for having too many visitors

• Websites are down constantly due to hacking

• Websites are down constantly due to equipment failures

• Service sucks

These plans date back to the first hosting back in the early 1990's and have not really changed. They offer cheap space and bandwidth but they are little more than a bunch of websites crammed into sardine can servers that were never really intended to manage anything more than a few static pages.

These companies bank on the fact that 90% of the people will never do very much with their website. But that leaves 10% that are angry and do complain over and over about the service.

For them, it is totally acceptable because they make 90% of the people happy but what they missed is that the10% that are successful and need a reliable website spend 90% of the money on website hosting.

So even though they have very popular brands, that does not mean they host the majority of Internet traffic. In fact, the websites hosted at these companies often get little more than bots visiting their pages. And if your website has no visitors, then $3 a month is all you really need to pay for website hosting.

Transition EIG to One Location

But now, all of these brands are moving to one datacenter managed by EIG. In the process, customers are seeing down time, interruptions and problems with websites in general. The changes are proving even more unreliable than before and customers are looking for better solutions.

Just recently in December 2013 the datacenter experienced a 10 hour blackout affects some of the biggest brands and that comes off the heels of similar issues in August and November. Now I don;t want to harp on downtime by our competitors because datacenter problems are part of doing business and shit happens when you try to keep things running 24/7/365 without interuption. But, as the company gets bigger and bigger it seems like it might be too much to manage and the problems are affecting more and more brands that ran quite well on their own.

Of course nobody wants their website to be taken over by another company. Nobody wants their hosting to change or the support to change or the service to change.

But change is exactly what is happening with the major hosting brands, they are evolving into a hodgepodge of brands all managed by the same company.

So how is hostgator different from hostmonster?

If the run from the same datacenter, on server right next to each other and managed by the same people how are they different? The answer is, they are not.

Assuming All The Bad with the Good

So while EIG may be acquiring hosting customers by buying smaller brands, they are also assuming all the complaints combined of each brand. They get the good with the bad and that is a lot of bad to take on.

Then they have colossal failures in the transition with downtime affecting all customers in those already challenged brands.

I must say, it is not a good way to impress the clients you are acquiring through the sale.

But it is pretty common in these transactions to have a decrease in support and service as they trim the fat, fire the existing workers and move their teems in place with more efficient practices that make the company more money.

There is no question, if I was inventing my money and my stock portfolio was going to include website hosting services, I would invest n EIG. But as a person that know how bad shared hosting is, I would never host any of my website with them.

That does not mean they wont continue to grow and make money, but it is not the business model I would trust my website with and certainly not even close to providing what most true business will need.

It is actually the smaller companies that make up the other 10% of the hosting that make the most money because they provide reliable and upscale services for their customers. Worrying about performance and service rather than how much money they make or if it is cheaper to run from one datacenter than using multiple locations for redundancy.

Mega Hosting Flawed Hosting Plan

As companies like EIG buy up all the brands they actually make it easier for smaller companies like pageBuzz to get customers. As people realize that what they are on is less reliable and really does not offer what was advertised at all, they look for better options, more personal support and something they can deal with.

For us, if we have hypothetically a datacenter outage, customers can call us, ask what is up, get answers and now that we are working to correct it.

But with the brands listed at the top of this page, millions of customers are just left guessing when they will be back up, what is going on, is it just their website or the whole network? It is frustrating and no way to host a website or run an online business.

If the cost is the only factor and you like paying $5 rather than $20 that we charge, then absolutely you get what you pay for. Because in order to provide service that cheap, they have to cut corners, have employees that manage huge support volumes and servers that are maxed out and just can't handle anymore than typical daily traffic.

When one website gets busy, it must either be shut off or risk having other sites on the server fail. It is mega hosting at its finest and if you use a mega host, you just live with it.

If you business is work an extra $10 or $15 a month, then you use one of the smaller hosts that has a better handle on each and every website, server and network component.

Enough for Everyone

Of course there are enough customers for everyone and everyone provides a different service. Not everyone drives a Rolls Royce or a Ford one ton pickup. But there are enough people out there that need high end hosting to keep companies like pageBuzz going even though companies like hostgator advertise hosting for one penny.

We would never want to be a mega host, it is not our plan or or business model. We are a smaller boutique in house hosting service that provides a much different product. There is no doubt we will always be in the shadow of bigger companies like EIG, but it is also true that EIG will never provide the level of service or website building tools that we do.

EIG has no interest in how you build your website. They will never add a sitebuilder to their hosts, they just care about making money and if that is all you need, then you are a good match.

But if you want more out of your website, hosts like hostmonster, iPage and others just wont give you what you are after no matter how many website are promoting them or how many average people use them. Just because other people use them does not mean they have what you need or even want.

So before you build your own website, check out what they have and understand, these EIG brands are big, but have very little substance and are all pretty much the same service.