Over the last few years, business ISP costs have been tumbling to levels that seem too good to be true. But when things go wrong, the hidden costs can be huge and there’s virtually no comeback.

When I started my new business I just couldn’t believe how cheap 1&1 internet was for hosting my web site and managing my email. Two years on, and I was still relying on it to manage these services for me, seemingly for a fraction of the cost of doing it myself. Like many small business owners that rely on 1&1, last week I found out the catch.

After a week of receiving emails at random intervals we finally gave up and set up our own email server. As a managed-service software company we were beginning to look a bit ridiculous saying “sorry but our email still isn’t working”. However, this week our support team started to get calls from users of our web-bookings product, complaining they couldn’t access the site. Further investigation revealed that overnight ,1&1 had started directing traffic to the wrong server (something known as DNS for the technically minded.)

When we rang 1&1, we spent ages on hold, only to speak to someone via VOIP who seemed to only be able to read things out of their online help PDF. Eight hours later, our support issue remained unsolved, but luckily we could provide a workaround to minimise client impact. An incredibly tedious conversation with someone in the US, who was seemingly from another planet over VOIP (I speculate it was someone on the West Coast at around 4am local time), was a considerable improvement on our previous support calls. Last week, when we rang up to ask about an unrelated matter all we could get was a recorded message about the email problems and earlier this week, not wishing to sound like Jade Goody, the Indian accent really was totally incomprehensible.

Luckily, we were able to solve these problems ourselves but for the thousands of small businesses that have to rely on companies like 1&1, I have the utmost sympathy. Having no email looks unprofessional and having no website costs money. But when you check the small print, you have virtually no comeback.

Standard terms offer precious little when things go fundamentally wrong - for example, should your servers be disconnected for 3-4 days (90% availability), you may only get a 25% refund. Assuming costs are marked up by at least 100%, that means that during an outage that could put you out of business, and that could only be caused by its incompetence, your hosting company agrees to only make half as much profit out of you!

I looked at 1&1 as offering virtually no support for a low price, but having the basics done cheaply. Over the last 10 years, I’ve experience of ISPs at both ends of the spectrum, and have been ripped off spectacularly by a top-end ISP, while finding smaller ISPs just can’t provide the bandwidth.

So for small businesses who are at the mercy of these companies, my tip is to pay a few hundred pounds a year for a mid-size hosting company like www.firstserv.com. For a little more money, you may still get the odd hiccup, but at least when there is an issue you can shout at somebody technically competent and they do something about it! The trouble with these foreign call centres is they apparently need you to speak more slowly, not loudly, and that’s not always easy when you’ve got 10 clients on hold wanting answers!

Why you can’t call a premium rate number to speak directly to somebody technical is a mystery, but that would be as logical as an email apologising and explaining the recent issues. I can dream, anyone else got any recommendations on ISPs that offer good value for money and service?

There have been a number of similar discussions over at the A4U affiliates forum where a lot of site owners were hit by the recent 1&1 issues. We ourselves were without email for the first 2 days in our new office. Coming on the back of almost a fortnight of delays from BT getting our broadband set up I wasn't best pleased.

This isn't the first time it happened so I also have servers with other providers. I keep the management of my domains separate at 123-reg.co.uk so I can always move my sites around at fairly short notice if needed.

The ones that seemed to come to the top of the pile were Rackspace, whose customers rave about them but are in a different league of costs to the likes of 1&1.  Other honourable mentions went to Clook.net

There are a load more recommendations at this thread:
http://a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=51152

To be honest, if it's just a hobby, you may as well stick with 1&1.

Whilst the outages this week and last were very serious for a full time online business, overall my experience with them over nearly 4 years has been  OK while my needs were  quite basic.

Ask around other users and all the services for the same costs as 1&1, and up to two or three times as expensive, will all have their horror stories.  When you're talking about  a  full time business, then  £250 a month for an entry level dedicated server isn't a big deal when it's backed up the kind of service  that the  likes of Rackspace offer.

Just because you can get one at 1&1 for £60 doesn't mean it is adequate or has any kind of service attached to it. If cost is your only criteria you may as well get a dedicated IP address from your ISP and host your own.

I have a 1&1 account and a server which, to this day has not caused any problems whatsoever.

However(and this is a big however), I am likely to be markedly different from most who want hosting for small business use. I don't use (and actually refute) the supposedly 'simple to use' graphical interfaces for managing email and websites. Often, they are clunky, poorly designed and allow a plethora of errors to be entered which, without knowing, will take a site down, or block email.

Beware the snake-oil salesman...

Low end ISPs load simple (and usually free) software onto small low-spec servers. Servers which you will usually share with others. They create server-images, so they can replicate the same systems across many machines in a data centre. Often, a poorly written piece of programming by one customers can take down a whole server and ruin your day as well as other peoples to boot. Welcome to cheap hosting!

Unless you have experience (or someone - which costs money) to look at the problems from a technical standpoint you're in trouble. Low cost ISPs work on a volume game, nothing more. Technical support, if you're paying less than £500 per year (in my opinion) is a waste of time and effort - you may as well put your cash straight in the bin.

ISPs in the lower bracket will provide you with basic FAQ support and maybe an 0845 number (which they make money on) to provide the same information to be read back to you.

Managed-hosting (where you have an account manager and hopefully an SLA) costs money. Starts in the high hundreds and ends in the millions or more.

If you are expecting high-availability (see table below), then you're going to have to pay serious and increasingly large amounts of money for each '9' you want to add:

Availability %Downtime per yearDowntime per month*Downtime per week98%7.30 days14.4 hours3.36 hours99%3.65 days7.20 hours1.68 hours99.5%1.83 days3.60 hours50.4 min99.9%8.76 hours43.2 min10.1 min99.99%52.6 min4.32 min1.01 min99.999%5.26 min25.9 s6.05 s99.9999%31.5 s2.59 s0.605 s
5,6 nines and above are really the preserve of banks, stock exchanges, Google, amazon etc.

Promises to achieve any of these numbers by low-end ISPs should be laughed at very loudly, examined very very carefully and then laughed at some more - even if they have the infrastructure, they may not have or be buying the bandwidth from tier1 providers... Oh and they will never be responsible for network latency - learn this early.

One reasonable guide to look at when choosing a hosting provider is provided by Rackspace(not a plug - they are expensive) here: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/default.asp?docId=13028

It doesn't really matter that your looking to spend £500 or £500K, some of the same laws should hold true. For more sophisticated load-balancing, failover, redundancy and mission-critical apps - look to the big ISPs who have big teams of engineers, dedicated account managers on a DDI and offer amusing data-centre security measures such as 'man-traps' - I don't consider this high on my list of priorities but amusing none the less.

Having spent the last decade or more building scalable and secure online systems, the only real option for me is a bottom on a seat, managing the servers (system administration) - 'oiling the machines' if you like.

While it pains me to say it,  that's why I'm probably one of the only 1&1 customers who has not had a problem - I tinker, correct and maintain the server like a mechanic does a car.

I've experienced problems with 1&1 regards speed of access to a website that was on a shared server. We upgraded our package to avoid this but we still had speed issues, to be honest looking back we were expecting too much for the amount of money we were paying. The customer service was poor and they were not proactive in their approach so we moved this site to 123-reg.co.uk on a virtual server.

Nowadays some of the hosting companies are owned my the big guys, for example Pipex own 123-reg and Webfusion, offering different types of packages.
You gets what you pay for, and have to weigh up the cost of downtime against the extra cost for added reliability.

I have also experienced more reliable hosting from a dedicated server solution with Pipex, although the hardware costs were expensive but reliability from a comms point of view was good. Last year I decided to move this website to a local company that provides us with an excellent level of resillience. The move came about because we had had instances where we made either changes to our website or to the configuration of our server and it resulted in a problem. We would spend quite some time with our site down whlist either trying to remember what changes had been made or undoing the changes we had made.

The company we now use for this website is Griffin in Derby and they provide us with SNAP shot technology, which enables us to roll back our servers back to a particulary point in time within a matter of minutes.

On 19:09:23 24 January 2007 PositivePaul wrote:

Over the last few years, business ISP costs have been tumbling to levels that seem too good to be true. But when things go wrong, the hidden costs can be huge and there’s virtually no comeback.

When I started my new business I just couldn’t believe how cheap 1&1 internet was for hosting my web site and managing my email. Two years on, and I was still relying on it to manage these services for me, seemingly for a fraction of the cost of doing it myself. Like many small business owners that rely on 1&1, last week I found out the catch.

After a week of receiving emails at random intervals we finally gave up and set up our own email server. As a managed-service software company we were beginning to look a bit ridiculous saying “sorry but our email still isn’t working”. However, this week our support team started to get calls from users of our web-bookings product, complaining they couldn’t access the site. Further investigation revealed that overnight ,1&1 had started directing traffic to the wrong server (something known as DNS for the technically minded.)

When we rang 1&1, we spent ages on hold, only to speak to someone via VOIP who seemed to only be able to read things out of their online help PDF. Eight hours later, our support issue remained unsolved, but luckily we could provide a workaround to minimise client impact. An incredibly tedious conversation with someone in the US, who was seemingly from another planet over VOIP (I speculate it was someone on the West Coast at around 4am local time), was a considerable improvement on our previous support calls. Last week, when we rang up to ask about an unrelated matter all we could get was a recorded message about the email problems and earlier this week, not wishing to sound like Jade Goody, the Indian accent really was totally incomprehensible.

Luckily, we were able to solve these problems ourselves but for the thousands of small businesses that have to rely on companies like 1&1, I have the utmost sympathy. Having no email looks unprofessional and having no website costs money. But when you check the small print, you have virtually no comeback.

Standard terms offer precious little when things go fundamentally wrong - for example, should your servers be disconnected for 3-4 days (90% availability), you may only get a 25% refund. Assuming costs are marked up by at least 100%, that means that during an outage that could put you out of business, and that could only be caused by its incompetence, your hosting company agrees to only make half as much profit out of you!

I looked at 1&1 as offering virtually no support for a low price, but having the basics done cheaply. Over the last 10 years, I’ve experience of ISPs at both ends of the spectrum, and have been ripped off spectacularly by a top-end ISP, while finding smaller ISPs just can’t provide the bandwidth.

So for small businesses who are at the mercy of these companies, my tip is to pay a few hundred pounds a year for a mid-size hosting company like www.firstserv.com. For a little more money, you may still get the odd hiccup, but at least when there is an issue you can shout at somebody technically competent and they do something about it! The trouble with these foreign call centres is they apparently need you to speak more slowly, not loudly, and that’s not always easy when you’ve got 10 clients on hold wanting answers!

Why you can’t call a premium rate number to speak directly to somebody technical is a mystery, but that would be as logical as an email apologising and explaining the recent issues. I can dream, anyone else got any recommendations on ISPs that offer good value for money and service?