I see so many people talk on these forums about any and every hosting company out there. A lot of people talk about how they have poor providers for their dedicated or co-lo service - course 9 times out of 10 I notice they're referring to the more 'value' oriented hosting companies in existance. And to be honest, a vast majority of people do admit "you get what you pay for" mantality. For the most part though, I simply don't see to many people saying the same remarks made about these value oriented companies towards companies like Rackspace, Verio, etc. who charge higher rates for their services.

Question is: do you think potential customers realize this too? (The 'you get what you pay for principal?')

Meaning, they'll see ads for 1,000's of companies out there (most of which are whoring themselves out for .3% profit margins to get the business and willing to sacrafice quality bandwidth/facilities to make up the difference) but as a whole, do you think most customers understand that for the 'cream of the crop' service, you're going to pay for it - plain and simple.

Its a matter of physics: quality bandwidth, facilities, engineers costs money. You can't actually expect to get quality services, and true 500GB of transfer for $79.95/month (as an example).

I know some people will have the bad experiences and will learn the hard way 'you get what ya pay for', but from what I'm seeing, most people either: [A] don't care, and willing to sacrafice the quality for a cheap rate; yet bitch and complain when they receive poor service, downtime etc. OR [B] have to get burned before they figure out the concept of it all.

Basically, the reason I ask is I find it frustrating at times that because we only sell premium quality services, its impossible to to compete with guys who sell sub-par services. And yes, though 1 out of 10 customers will be the larger orginzations that want uptime, quality BW, etc., what about a vast majority?

What do you guys think?

I would never consider entering the budget end of hosting. Being located in a sub standard datacenter just so you can afford to offer ridiculously low priced plans would drive me nuts. Always wondering if your services are going to be up or not, chasing the spammers off your servers, dealing with the excessive DDOS attacks. I am quite content to stay in a quality datacenter and avoid all the anguish I see so many people going through because of their budget minded choices.

The only downside to providing a higher level of service at a quality datacenter that I can even think of, is that it takes a bit longer to fill servers. When you look at the quality of the clients that you do attract, you forget about that aspect pretty fast though.

For those that want to be a flash in the pan, go the budget route. For those that want to be around a while, get yourself located in a quality datacenter and settle in for the long term. Build a stable client base with quality people and I doubt you'll ever regret it.

But you also need to figure this... WHT isnt the world... and how many people here on WHT do you think use Rackspace or the other High End providers?

I see it this way. Rackspace doesnt market to the WHT crowd. They market to larger companies to provide servers solutions for those companies.

Are there any hosts here who have servers with Rackspace?

do you think most customers understand that for the 'cream of the crop' service, you're going to pay for it - plain and simple

No, for the simple reason that most Clients are not cream of the crop. Most Clients are the average person who, for their own reasons, what a somewhat "affordable" Web Hoster and don't want to investigate or learn, all the ins 'n outs of Web Hosting -- nor should they need to. What the average person needs to do, is a spend a little more time checking out their potential Hoster.

A few eMails, phone call or visit to the Hoster's Forum, will answer many of their questions. More important though, they can get a "feeling" as to what it would be like to do business with that company. May not be scientific, but most of us have learned to trust our "gut feeling" when thinking of doing any long term business with a company.


Hosters, on the other hand, should always be using a cream of the crop DC. This saves everyone a lot of time & frustrations. Lots of threads at this very moment, about a certain DC that is not a cream of the crop and yet, still get lots of people using their services. Why is that?

It is unfortunate that many Hosters do not take the time & effort to check out various DC's and pay a good buck, for good services. That is why Hosting Clients need to start asking the Hoster, "What Data Center is used?" or "What company is used for connecting to the Internet?".

More people are starting to ask how long a Web Hoster has been in business, and that's a good sign. Now, if they start to do some digging and check out a Hoster as mentioned above, we will see less people complaining about poor services.