Hosting Reborn Blog Developing a pay-as-you-go web hosting service

I periodically look at search terms through which people find Hosting Reborn and try to figure out how to get people the answers or information they want.

A new term I found today was "Is hosting reborn any good?", which had me lost for words.

How can you honestly address the question of whether your own service is any good? Can you honestly address the question?

Do I think my own service is any good? Yes, it works just fine for me. I use Hosting Reborn to host my own personal website, this blog, the Hosting Reborn public website and any personal project where I want to easily set up a separate hosting account to try something out.

I created Hosting Reborn to solve my own problems and from the perspective of a user of my own service I think it works quite well. But then that's a tricky thing to take at face value, which is the crux of the problem: I cannot avoid possessing a personal interest in seeing what I made become a success.

There is an unavoidable conflict of interest: can the owner of any service give a fair opinion? I'd like to think I can, but I bet there's some part of me, subconscious or otherwise, putting a positive spin on things. Even if I am giving a fair assessment of whether Hosting Reborn is any good, can anyone accept that as a fair and impartial opinion? It's hardly likely.

The best I can do is to market the service: to sell the benefits, to show you how it makes managing multiple hosting accounts easy and straightforward without lots hassle. I can hope to bring you round to the mindset that a hosting account on a shared hosting platform in not a product but a commodity, that a hosting account has no inherent value.

Of all the things I can do, the one thing I can never do is to tell you that the service is any good. I can try, but that's just not for me to say. It is at this point you come to realise that the service you created for yourself to use (and with the hope that others would want it too) grows up.

People I don't know are asking other people I don't know if Hosting Reborn is any good. That's just not a discussion I can join.

So what can I do? Nothing, really. I can't say that Hosting Reborn is any good because you don't want to hear that from me. And I can't prove it's good - that's just not possible. I can't even prove it's not bad.

I can't dig through customer feedback and see if anything or merit is said because that's not what happens - people get in touch when things go wrong or when they can't figure things out. If all is well, if everything works and everyone's happy the world of feedback is a very quiet place - how often do you choose to take the time to tell any service provider that things are going well? That just doesn't happen.

So, is Hosting Reborn any good? That's not for me to say - I'm always going to say it's good, aren't I? That's not really for others to say. People only get in touch when they need support - we're not generally in the habit of sending love letters to service providers.

Can you foster a community of interest around something that's not really terribly exciting, like shared hosting or bug tracking?

Or are you just at the mercy of a tiny vocal minority to say something good in a way that others can find? And how does that all start?

Hosting Reborn is an enterprise where people exchange money for services. And strange as it sounds, we don't want your money.

Of course that's not strictly true - without money coming in there would be no Hosting Reborn. So what I mean to say is that your money is not what I'm looking to acquire.

That still sounds a bit odd, so let's try this: earning money is not the goal but instead a by-product.

There's a subtle but important difference between having a goal of earning money and having a goal of something else that happens, as a consequence, to earn money.

The goal of earning money goes something like this:

We want to make money, so let's create a product and then charge people for the it.

Our goal is more aligned with:

We want to make a product so useful that people will be pleased to pay money for it.

This is a very important belief at Hosting Reborn. The main focus is always the product, not the money.

If the product is not good enough, if the product doesn't make your life easier, if the product doesn't disappear into the background and let you get on with what's important to you, if the product doesn't fit around your world, then we don't deserve to take your money from you.

Seriously, we don't deserve it. The money is your way of showing your respect for the service you receive. If you don't feel the service you receive is a fair exchange for the cost, why should we take your money?

For a service, if money's the goal there's always going to be conflict between the business and the customers.

If a service you subscribe to (satellite/cable TV, ADSL/cable broadband, telephone landline) is unavailable for a day or so, do you want a refund? Do you expect to get a refund? Are you entitled to a refund? Will you get a refund?

The answers are commonly: yes, perhaps, no and no.

Do you want a refund? Of course! If I'm paying £20 per month for ADSL broadband and it is unavailable for two days, in what way does my provider deserve the full £20? If I get 28/30 days of service in a given month, should I not pay £18.67? In what way does the provider deserve £1.33 for two days of non-service?

Do you expect a refund? I generally don't, I'm afaid. I think I've been conditioned into thinking this is normal.

Are you entitled to a refund and will you get a refund? No, you're generally not. Take a look at your terms of service, your contracts and your agreements. Your provider will certainly ensure that they're not liable for any interruptions to the service they provide.

Hardly sounds very fair does it? If something doesn't work out right for you, if something is faulty and doesn't provide, within reason, what you expect, you still have to pay whether you like it or not. Hopefully you're too tied into the service, or the friction of changing providers is too great, that you'll stick with it whether you like it or not.

Perhaps you can appreciate now why we don't want your money. We need your money to make Hosting Reborn happen, but if in any way it fails you, we can't deserve your money.

If we don't help you, if you don't find in Hosting Reborn something great that makes things easier, can we conciously take and enjoy your money and pretend we don't care?

If something goes wrong, or if any way Hosting Reborn is not right for you, would you want a refund? Would you expect a refund? Are you entitled to a refund? Will you get a refund?

Yes, to all questions. If we haven't given something of value to you, where you are the only person capable of judging the value, in what way could we expect you to give us something of value in return?

If you decide to leave Hosting Reborn because it's not right for you, you're always entitled to a full refund of every single penny you've paid. We won't ask why, we'll just give you your money back.

Unless, of course, you've done bad things or are simply trying to take advantage of us. After all, that's only fair, isn't it?

In a typical shared hosting environment, you pay a fixed fee for a fixed-resource hosting account.

The main resources provided to you are disk space, data transfer and domain name hosting, and so you might, for example, pay £5.95 per month for a hosting account that lets you store 500MB of data, transfer 3GB of data per month and host 5 domain names.

This worked well 10 to 15 years ago but has since failed the customer in four areas:

• you can't use what you're paying for
• you can't tell what you're paying for
• you don't get what you're paying for
• your hosting account resources are fixed but your traffic and customer patterns are not

This is fine for the service providers, but for the customers it's hardly a fair situation.

You can't use what you're paying for

Imagine you're limited to 500MB of data and 3GB of data transfer per month and you hit one of these limits. What happens?

If you store inbound data you get into quite a mess. If you sell products or services and you've hit your storage limit, where do your customer orders get stored? Where does all your inbound email end up? Will new emails simply dissappear, or will they magically arrive once you delete some old files that are perhaps not as important as you thought they were?

The data transfer limit is messier still: your hosting account will be suspended. If you're lucky you'll get away with simply paying for the excess usage.

Whatever the result of reaching either limit, the consequences are too severe if you run a small online shop and so you simply cannot afford to reach or exceed any storage or transfer limit. Your only option is to choose a hosting package that has limits you cannot reach, which means you cannot use what you're paying for.

You can't tell what you're paying for

It's just too technical to understand.

The more straightforward hosting accounts place will limits on how much data you can store and transfer along with a clear regular cost. Most people can appreciate the cost and many can appreciate what the limits really mean. How many people cannot comprehend the two resource limits?

How does 500MB translate into web pages, pictures, video clips or products? How does 3GB translate into how many customers can be served each month? If you understand what these limits mean you can appreciate how there is no real answer to those two questions. If you have no idea what these technical limits mean, how can you understand what you're getting?

The less straightforward hosting accounts detail limits on databases, email accounts, hosted domain names, dedicated IP addresses and any number of properties that become more and more technical, precise and incomprehensible.

It's hardly friendly to the general consumer when you can't tell what you're paying for. Nor is it good business sense to limit your target audience through technical barriers.

You don't get what you're paying for

It gets trickier when you consider 'unlimited' hosting accounts. With shared hosting being a highly competitive market, providers aim to out-do each other by offering greater and greater volumes of resources. This has led to hosting accounts offering unlimited storage and data transfer.

We all know that an unlimited hosting account is impossible - a given server will not have infinite disk space, nor an infinitely large network connection. In this context 'unlimited' translates into 'no artificial limit applied beyond the capacity of the hardware'. What a provider is really meaning to say is that a hosting account has plenty of whatever it is you need and that you'll never run out of whatever that might be.

Just to make sure that you really don't try to use too many resources, your unlimited hosting account will have some fair usage policy associated with it, with penalities applying if you regularly exceed what is considered to be fair.

When your unlimited hosting account is in fact limited in ways defined only in small-print legalese, not only do you not get what you appear to be paying for, but you also can't tell what you're paying for.

We all know that people don't read terms and conditions, and those few that do struggle with the legalese. To lock details away in hidden places, to ignore the way people behave and to blame the customer for not reading all the fine print is hardly a good way to make friends and money. It's hardly usable or fair. It's not quite a scam but it's not far off.

Your hosting account resources are fixed but your traffic and customer patterns are not

Online shops are busier around Christmas than at all other times of the year. Many online shops have further large variations in customer levels with the passing of various shopping holidays.

Non-commerce websites face similar but less predictable problems. If your company, or some of your content, becomes the focus of media or online attention, your visitor levels, and associated data transfer levels, increase way beyond what is normal.

This is a special case of the you-don't-get-what-you-pay-for problem, as if you have to plan for the worst-case usage levels you end up getting nowhere near what you're paying for at anything but the busiest times of the year.

Working towards a solution

It was for these reasons I started Hosting Reborn - to offer a service focussed towards the needs of the users of the service in a way that fits the users not the provider. It's by no means revolutionary. You've had pay-as-you-go mobile phones for years. My landline calls have been charged by the second for as long as I can remember. But shared hosting seems oddly stuck in the monthly contract world of business models.

A pay-as-you-go hosting service tackles 3 of the 4 problems. It's impossible not to be able to use what you're paying for, it's impossible to not get what you're paying for and your costs fairly reflect how busy your website is.

We're still working on the problem of making sure people can tell what they're paying for. However this one pans out, we'll need to figure out how to express what a hosting account provides in everyday terminology. What does 1GB tranlate to in family photos? When is a website 'small' or 'big'? There's no precise answer to these sorts of questions but that doesn't mean there's no answer. We'll continue to work on that.

The problems of pay-as-you-go hosting

Whilst Hosting Reborn removes, by definition, most of the problems of fixed-resource fixed-price hosting, new problems arise. How can you tell how much you'll be paying from month to month or day to day? What will next month's hosting costs be?

We haven't figured out a solution to these problems either, but at least we recognise the issues. It's still early days.

It's still early days.