Host a party (not your website)
David Reese — August 30, 2009
I hate website hosting. It’s been the cause of more headaches and panicked emails than anything else in my freelancing business. Every new client I take on is a new client who will, one day, call me with hosting issues.
The good news: with Percolate… no more headaches.
The basics
Every website needs a server. The server is a computer, usually in a big warehouse somewhere, with files and images ready to be served up to the world. For all but the largest sites, a portion of a computer is fine, so your site probably shares a server with other websites.
If your site is dynamic – for example, if you have a blog, or a content management system (CMS) – you will probably also need a database on the server. Again, your database probably sits on a shared server that serves up databases for hundreds of other websites.
All this to say: if you have a website, you’re probably paying five, ten, or twenty dollars a month to a company for the service of hosting your website from their server. This is shared web hosting.
Hosting headaches
I’m all about a good metaphor, so let’s try one here: shared web hosting is like renting a cheap apartment in a great big apartment building. Usually one with very thin walls, an absentee landlord, and the occasional rowdy neighbor.
![Crowded apartment [(c) stevecadman]](http://assets1.percolatesite.us/w/003/images/0000/0413/tenement-1.jpg?1251833879)
Fig. 1. Shared hosting. [image credit: Steve Cadman]
You can see where this is going. In shared hosting, most of your problems come from your neighbors. Since the hosting company sells in volume – the more users it can pack onto a server, the more it profits – it can’t screen applicants like a good landlord. The end result is that while your server does have many conscientious users like you, it is also home to weekend programmers who occasionally bring down the whole server with their unstable scripts. Or worse, spammers, who move in and monopolize the server’s resources, slowing the system down to a crawl.
Of course, some web hosts are better than others, but in practice, any $10 or $20-a-month shared host will have some amount of downtime, when either the whole server is down, in which case your entire website is inaccessible, or just the database goes down, which causes its own problems. And somehow downtime has a way of showing up, not in the middle of the night, but just when you need your website the most.
Landlord surprises
Besides your neighbors, your shared hosting “landlord” can also cause headaches. Surprisingly often, shared hosts change settings or upgrade server software without notifying the tenants. At least once a year I find myself scrambling to fix websites that worked fine until a hosting company did a “security upgrade” or changed some kind of configuration.
Percolate has your back
With the Percolate CMS, you don’t need to reserve space on a shared web host – the Percolate server becomes your web host. And instead of a crowded, run-down apartment building, getting on Percolate is like getting a room at an exclusive, luxury hotel. Percolate runs on high-quality servers from Joyent, and your only neighbors are other well-behaved Percolate customers. More importantly, since your Percolate neighbors don’t have direct access to the database or the code, they can’t wreak havoc the same way your shared hosting neighbors could.
Fig. 2. The very exclusive Percolate hotel. [image credit: Dainee]
Our servers are monitored carefully for bumps in usage that could cause issues. And the Percolate web servers are monitored 24/7 for uptime – if there is ever a problem, we get notified by email and on our cell phones, so we’ll get right on it. Here’s our uptime emblem, which calculates the Percolate CMS uptime since May 2009:
Moving websites to the Percolate CMS from shared hosting means fewer headaches for me, and fewer headaches for my clients. I’m moving everybody over as soon as I can — you’re welcome to join us!