-
Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
Time to rebuild my host spread
- Thread starter TaoPhoenix
- Start date
Absolute agree with Schmarvin. Service or not, you're running a legitimate business and need to take responsibility for who and what you host. I would never, ever, ever put my corporation, my family, my well-being, etc. at risk because somebody thinks they should get hosting services without needing to provide me with an ounce of information.
Best of luck indeed, and good for you for running a legitimate business as a legitimate business should be run.
Best of luck indeed, and good for you for running a legitimate business as a legitimate business should be run.
It's a tense judgement call. You can reverse all the superlatives by saying "I would never risk my real information to a host that exudes bravado only until they vanish without a trace." So best regards to you wswd if I read you as deciding you do not care to join either. Business is full of cross-beliefs that prove incompatible. The goal is to do so while avoiding emotional attachments.
Wswd, please see your PM.
Hi,
Read the PM. I have nothing to prove to you, and have no intention of joining your circus. I let my 15+ years of business, my salary, and my very happy clients speak for my services and reputation.
That said, I have no issues with your thread. I think it's a good thing for those who wish to participate...the hosts with something to prove in the industry. If you search through my posts, I don't remember a single post here advertising my services. I have no need to. I don't care if I get clients from this forum or not, to be perfectly honest. I'm not here to prove anything about my services. I'm here to share the community with other hosts, discuss the web hosting industry, and have some fun in the process. Unfortunately with the cut-throat industry web hosting has become, that "community" has gone away and instead, each host is here to bash all the others and get as many clients as they can from the others. Not interested.
As I told you very clearly in response to your PM, my agreeing with Schmarvin has nothing to do with your thread. Simply put, at the end of the day, you (the host) is the one who is going to be paying for a team of lawyers at $400/hr. each, when the you-know-what hits the fan. If that's a risk you are willing to take in your business, fine. Me personally? I collect all the personal information I can get, and run it through every fraud check I possibly can. I have been burned a few times when I have let up on my standards, and a couple have even resulted in lawsuits. You know as well as I do, I'm sure, that we generally aren't responsible for the content our clients host, however answering the paperwork, the subpoenas, collecting the evidence, having entire servers taken offline, and everything else to go with it costs significant time and money. Ever tried dealing with the FBI? Oh yeah...that's a fun one too.
Read the PM. I have nothing to prove to you, and have no intention of joining your circus. I let my 15+ years of business, my salary, and my very happy clients speak for my services and reputation.
That said, I have no issues with your thread. I think it's a good thing for those who wish to participate...the hosts with something to prove in the industry. If you search through my posts, I don't remember a single post here advertising my services. I have no need to. I don't care if I get clients from this forum or not, to be perfectly honest. I'm not here to prove anything about my services. I'm here to share the community with other hosts, discuss the web hosting industry, and have some fun in the process. Unfortunately with the cut-throat industry web hosting has become, that "community" has gone away and instead, each host is here to bash all the others and get as many clients as they can from the others. Not interested.
As I told you very clearly in response to your PM, my agreeing with Schmarvin has nothing to do with your thread. Simply put, at the end of the day, you (the host) is the one who is going to be paying for a team of lawyers at $400/hr. each, when the you-know-what hits the fan. If that's a risk you are willing to take in your business, fine. Me personally? I collect all the personal information I can get, and run it through every fraud check I possibly can. I have been burned a few times when I have let up on my standards, and a couple have even resulted in lawsuits. You know as well as I do, I'm sure, that we generally aren't responsible for the content our clients host, however answering the paperwork, the subpoenas, collecting the evidence, having entire servers taken offline, and everything else to go with it costs significant time and money. Ever tried dealing with the FBI? Oh yeah...that's a fun one too.
And for those who may be asking, "Why all the tension?"
I received, what I felt, was a rather condescending and "holier than thou" PM from Tao earlier this evening, apparently because I simply agreed with Schmarvin's business practice of collecting personal information from his clients. If that was not the intent of your PM Tao, then I sincerely apologize, but that is certainly the impression I got from it. Well...that and your trying to belittle me as a host. That's the funniest part of it all. I'm sorry if you had a bad experience with Schmarvin, or any other host, but that really isn't my problem. I have no idea who Schmarvin is, no idea who you are, no idea what issues you two have had in the past, aside from what you told me in the PM.
I'm not supporting Schmarvin as a host (never used him), I'm not supporting him as a person (don't know him); I'm simply supporting that one single business practice. Nothing more, nothing less. Not sure why all the hostility.
I received, what I felt, was a rather condescending and "holier than thou" PM from Tao earlier this evening, apparently because I simply agreed with Schmarvin's business practice of collecting personal information from his clients. If that was not the intent of your PM Tao, then I sincerely apologize, but that is certainly the impression I got from it. Well...that and your trying to belittle me as a host. That's the funniest part of it all. I'm sorry if you had a bad experience with Schmarvin, or any other host, but that really isn't my problem. I have no idea who Schmarvin is, no idea who you are, no idea what issues you two have had in the past, aside from what you told me in the PM.
I'm not supporting Schmarvin as a host (never used him), I'm not supporting him as a person (don't know him); I'm simply supporting that one single business practice. Nothing more, nothing less. Not sure why all the hostility.
Maturation of the industry
Tone is difficult to maintain when mixing the complicated mix of passion and complexity sprinkled with frustration. I overextended a little and ended up sounding arrogant.
I believe we are seeing the maturation of the industry, with both Clients and Hosts no longer content for a fast & loose relationship.
It's an interesting jump point "I don't know you / I don't know him". That is the very issue I am working on here.
The use of third parties to provide ratings of service providers is called Attestation. That is what I am doing here. Anyone can quickly know that the four finalist hosts have undergone live duration testing. Changes can happen at any time, but previously demonstrated duration is correlated with continued uptime tomorrow. This is a Client Side service.
If Clients want proof of stability, what do Hosts want? Where I overextended was an attempt to provide proof of content against TOS. The FWS software is reporting that I am nearing the 1000 post mark. Suppose 50 posts got a little sharp. I am confident that the rest are mostly within any host's guidelines. The quantity of that content is the assurance to the host that it is not the trick of current rogues "post 1 2 3 then spam".
The frustrations arise from a couple of interacting signature issues that I believe are at the heart of free hosting. Consider a 2 x 2 risk grid based on identity information interacting with certain external events. One corner is the old school "Both Anonymous". Joe9 gets hosting from PiltdownHost. While Client stays within TOS and the host is up and no legal letters arrive, everything is fine in the old school style.
When trouble arrives, it is two issues that work in opposite directions which I consider to be a dead heat in severity. Those issues are the new rise in aggressive copyright enforcement vs the seemingly only distantly related concurrent rise in identity theft. One has "vertical single incident risk" and the other has "horozontal multispread risk". The rise of botnet powered spam is what has made client side identity theft more dangerous when a host folds without a proper exit plan. Near the worst case scenario was an outfit called L4rge.com from the early endgame of my active study. I used some honeypot methods and tracked a fairly clear increase in spam stemming from the marketing affiliates of that host.
On to the file side. The process of using methods between two companies/people/machines to demonstrate that things are most likely in order is called Authentication. I believe this is a Host Side process. I am working on copyright compliance documentation methods. My particular name for it is "WhiteSourcing". It turns out that the very unskilled nature of my graphics obscures the very proof that hosts are looking for. I am moving toward 100% documentation of all the elements on the page. A report would be available such as "File List / Element List / --> Source of Element". For example, many of the solid colors are swatches from the Prelinger Archives. A couple of graphics have documented clearances or were custom made. Therefore there is little legal risk for the material hosted.
The obvious downside is of course that it is a tremendous amount of work, so it is far faster for the host to look at the type of content and evaluate the overall copyright risk. The Righthaven group that has been the poster case of copyright agression is being turned back by fresh rulings from judges who are beginning to say that random companies cannot troll the web looking for documentation holes and creating lawsuits. If we get a little more precedent in that direction, we should soon see a reduction in the copyright risk.
Summary: There are a few interacting issues that create variants on standard judgemental positions which will always be in modest tension. I hope to reduce some of the uncertainty with some more scientific metrics that let clients get on with enjoying their sites and reduce headaches for the hosts. There is a lot of work to be done here and I know some of the best ideas will come from other folks.
Tone is difficult to maintain when mixing the complicated mix of passion and complexity sprinkled with frustration. I overextended a little and ended up sounding arrogant.
I believe we are seeing the maturation of the industry, with both Clients and Hosts no longer content for a fast & loose relationship.
It's an interesting jump point "I don't know you / I don't know him". That is the very issue I am working on here.
The use of third parties to provide ratings of service providers is called Attestation. That is what I am doing here. Anyone can quickly know that the four finalist hosts have undergone live duration testing. Changes can happen at any time, but previously demonstrated duration is correlated with continued uptime tomorrow. This is a Client Side service.
If Clients want proof of stability, what do Hosts want? Where I overextended was an attempt to provide proof of content against TOS. The FWS software is reporting that I am nearing the 1000 post mark. Suppose 50 posts got a little sharp. I am confident that the rest are mostly within any host's guidelines. The quantity of that content is the assurance to the host that it is not the trick of current rogues "post 1 2 3 then spam".
The frustrations arise from a couple of interacting signature issues that I believe are at the heart of free hosting. Consider a 2 x 2 risk grid based on identity information interacting with certain external events. One corner is the old school "Both Anonymous". Joe9 gets hosting from PiltdownHost. While Client stays within TOS and the host is up and no legal letters arrive, everything is fine in the old school style.
When trouble arrives, it is two issues that work in opposite directions which I consider to be a dead heat in severity. Those issues are the new rise in aggressive copyright enforcement vs the seemingly only distantly related concurrent rise in identity theft. One has "vertical single incident risk" and the other has "horozontal multispread risk". The rise of botnet powered spam is what has made client side identity theft more dangerous when a host folds without a proper exit plan. Near the worst case scenario was an outfit called L4rge.com from the early endgame of my active study. I used some honeypot methods and tracked a fairly clear increase in spam stemming from the marketing affiliates of that host.
On to the file side. The process of using methods between two companies/people/machines to demonstrate that things are most likely in order is called Authentication. I believe this is a Host Side process. I am working on copyright compliance documentation methods. My particular name for it is "WhiteSourcing". It turns out that the very unskilled nature of my graphics obscures the very proof that hosts are looking for. I am moving toward 100% documentation of all the elements on the page. A report would be available such as "File List / Element List / --> Source of Element". For example, many of the solid colors are swatches from the Prelinger Archives. A couple of graphics have documented clearances or were custom made. Therefore there is little legal risk for the material hosted.
The obvious downside is of course that it is a tremendous amount of work, so it is far faster for the host to look at the type of content and evaluate the overall copyright risk. The Righthaven group that has been the poster case of copyright agression is being turned back by fresh rulings from judges who are beginning to say that random companies cannot troll the web looking for documentation holes and creating lawsuits. If we get a little more precedent in that direction, we should soon see a reduction in the copyright risk.
Summary: There are a few interacting issues that create variants on standard judgemental positions which will always be in modest tension. I hope to reduce some of the uncertainty with some more scientific metrics that let clients get on with enjoying their sites and reduce headaches for the hosts. There is a lot of work to be done here and I know some of the best ideas will come from other folks.
Last edited:
It's essentially a draw, why should I give my info to a host that has folded twice?
Bad luck happens to everyone.
People get to make third iterations of their companies, people only get one set of Birth Info.
Seraphim
Active Member
It's not necessary for them to on a paid service. The cash flow itself can be traced to determine it's source, a lot easier than a random IP can be found and it's user identified.
But if you ask me, proper client screening and monitoring client content is more effective than asking for personal info, since as a host you have no way to know if the info is false anyway.
I have found that it is actually most effective to simply talk to prospect clients before activating their signups. If they come talk to me in some way, I'll active them much faster than people who sign up without a word.
You can pay with cash, and that's essentially what I am looking for here. I'd pay for hosting with Bitcoins etc.
Meanwhile in certain classier locales they have your card on file and you don't need to present it all the time.
The third direction that related to my focus is when businesses fail they sometimes fail to shred stuff and then it is discovered when it is thrown out wholesale.
Last edited:
Precisely. My entire position in one line. The dashbar's still yours if you want it.
Seraphim
Active Member
Tao's concern is what happens if someone gets into your database and takes said personal info. Or what happens when you get rid of a server and forget to dban it to remove all identifable information from it's hard drive(s).
Someone could take personal data that was only needed for anti-spam purposes and use it to send spam, or commit other fraud.
Plus a lot of people will knowingly enter fake personal data online, especially when they don't have any kind of billing that would be cross-checking said data against their billing info. They do it for their protection against that info being used against them, and there isn't a whole lot that can be done about it other than making it Terms of Service to terminate accounts with false information in their registrations. When they aren't paying for it, they have no reason to be completely honest with you because you have no way to cross-examine them. And a lot of paying customers won't be completely honest either, they'll only tell enough of the truth for the billing system to work.
Someone could take personal data that was only needed for anti-spam purposes and use it to send spam, or commit other fraud.
Plus a lot of people will knowingly enter fake personal data online, especially when they don't have any kind of billing that would be cross-checking said data against their billing info. They do it for their protection against that info being used against them, and there isn't a whole lot that can be done about it other than making it Terms of Service to terminate accounts with false information in their registrations. When they aren't paying for it, they have no reason to be completely honest with you because you have no way to cross-examine them. And a lot of paying customers won't be completely honest either, they'll only tell enough of the truth for the billing system to work.
Great stuff Seraphim. I'll give a couple more examples that I think are even more dangerous.
The first is about the newcomers that don't make it. Where do the assets of dead hosts go? It's like a classic xkcd joke, your database is double-ROT13-encrypted. It sounds flashy until you realize that the reason the newcomer hosts failed is ... lack of skills. So here's this flashy encrypted database... and in the corner of the hard drive is "inactive-clients.txt". So by definition even if the original owner was honest but unskilled, the asset wholesaler is a ruthless cutthroat to make his buck on thin margins.
The second is that as we are starting to see people less interested in either classic banners or post2host, more companies are trying "marketing affiliates". Again, their local data is crispy secure, and then they gleefully give out the client data to their marketing affiliates... who are getting all MinorityReport these days. Once again a FacePalm. I maintain honeypot-style coded levels of net branding for all these variants and I watch like a hawk when info begins to cross boundaries.
The first is about the newcomers that don't make it. Where do the assets of dead hosts go? It's like a classic xkcd joke, your database is double-ROT13-encrypted. It sounds flashy until you realize that the reason the newcomer hosts failed is ... lack of skills. So here's this flashy encrypted database... and in the corner of the hard drive is "inactive-clients.txt". So by definition even if the original owner was honest but unskilled, the asset wholesaler is a ruthless cutthroat to make his buck on thin margins.
The second is that as we are starting to see people less interested in either classic banners or post2host, more companies are trying "marketing affiliates". Again, their local data is crispy secure, and then they gleefully give out the client data to their marketing affiliates... who are getting all MinorityReport these days. Once again a FacePalm. I maintain honeypot-style coded levels of net branding for all these variants and I watch like a hawk when info begins to cross boundaries.
Last edited:
DGCWO is doing fine in their first week.
Panel Question 1
I have a Direct Admin question for you. Instead of a scroll bar, the file manager seems to create "pages" of files. Thing is, they don't seem to sort really well. I tried doing a name sort but a bunch of files are still on the second page. Any idea what that is?
Edit: Seeing it twice now, I sorta found it but I don't know why or if it's fixable: Direct Admin as well as CWahi's custom panel seem to like to separate out files with capital letters vs files with small letters, and list the ones with small letters at the end. That's really distracting! cPanel does the more intuitive grouping of them all together. Anyone know?
Hello, Tao,
Please plan on putting us on your list ...We are now offering Direct Admin, by the way.
I have a Direct Admin question for you. Instead of a scroll bar, the file manager seems to create "pages" of files. Thing is, they don't seem to sort really well. I tried doing a name sort but a bunch of files are still on the second page. Any idea what that is?
Edit: Seeing it twice now, I sorta found it but I don't know why or if it's fixable: Direct Admin as well as CWahi's custom panel seem to like to separate out files with capital letters vs files with small letters, and list the ones with small letters at the end. That's really distracting! cPanel does the more intuitive grouping of them all together. Anyone know?
Last edited:
Panel Question 2
Deeplist - nice new cPanel!
On the topic of subtle services, how did you manage to give me a 10 character user name? I've been told a couple of times the max limit was 8. Was there a new upgrade sometime recently by cPanel company that boosted the limit?
How hard would it be if I asked other hosts to change my user name?
Deeplist - nice new cPanel!
On the topic of subtle services, how did you manage to give me a 10 character user name? I've been told a couple of times the max limit was 8. Was there a new upgrade sometime recently by cPanel company that boosted the limit?
How hard would it be if I asked other hosts to change my user name?
File Managing
Re: all the discussions of what people want in hosts, file uploading is one that I am starting to notice. With deeplist's new Cpanel, he turned around for me what felt rather awkward - Plesk's file abilities were rather brittle.
DGCWO's Direct Admin and CWahi's custom panel apparently have a couple of quirks but they're okay.
Seraphim, that's putting you up for discussion of how to easily upload multiple files. Your panel is also a little tight on the file manager side. What options do you have to make multi file uploads easier? We were talking about experimenting with Dropbox, but I think we got stuck. Deeplist was doing an FTP option that I used a couple of times, though that still feels a shade off balance for me.
Ideas?
Re: all the discussions of what people want in hosts, file uploading is one that I am starting to notice. With deeplist's new Cpanel, he turned around for me what felt rather awkward - Plesk's file abilities were rather brittle.
DGCWO's Direct Admin and CWahi's custom panel apparently have a couple of quirks but they're okay.
Seraphim, that's putting you up for discussion of how to easily upload multiple files. Your panel is also a little tight on the file manager side. What options do you have to make multi file uploads easier? We were talking about experimenting with Dropbox, but I think we got stuck. Deeplist was doing an FTP option that I used a couple of times, though that still feels a shade off balance for me.
Ideas?
