July 19th 2023

Understanding modern advertising offers

Due to the impending closure of his current host, Robo is compelled to look for a replacement and finds himself digging through the hosting offers available today, the language used, and what each feature (or carrot) means. Going through the temptations being presented by hosts to attract new customers, he's quick to realise that a free domain isn't that enticing unless he's just starting out, otherwise why would he need another domain? He's also noticed that packages in the higher price ranges often include "unlimited domains" or "unlimited websites" - He needs help understanding just how far unlimited will stretch in reality, and the same goes for "unlimited emails". He's also not clear on the difference between hosting on "real servers" or in the cloud - That makes him suspicious of cloud and more inclined to go with a host that talks about real servers on their offer pages. How do we help him understand what he's looking at? Are the offers too complicated or too full of technical jargon? How do we help him, and all the others who will find and read this thread, work their way through hosting advertisements and find what they really need?

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What is the minimum downtime before you contact your provider?

It's a quick question from Haviv that's prompted quite a debate. When a service goes down the understandable reaction from customers is to want to know why, so they ask their host. In comes a flood of tickets and the provider, whose support staff are likely wanting to be working on the issue and not be distracted by the tickets, has to balance their team's time between the 2. Not everyone thinks to check status or announcement pages for updates first, or the social media of their host for any news, and some will want answers quickly and not be prepared to wait a while to see if the issue is fixed before opening a ticket. When you look through the outage section on WHT you can see how some hosts will respond quicky to issues being raised whilst others will work on the actual problem before posting a detailed explanation of what went wrong. And, yes, there's a few that just don't respond to outage threads at all. As a host, and in an ideal world, what's the way you would prefer customers to approach an unannounced outage. As a customer, how do you react if your site suddenly becomes unavailable, where do you go first, and are you even aware of your host's announcement or status pages (if they have them)?

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News from around the hosting industry

Our Industry News section is the place to find current headlines from around the world of hosting and infrastructure, but other general interest threads pop up in other sections of the forum, especially The Lounge. Here we we highlight just some of the interesting news items from around the forum:

• Broadcom to acquire cloud computing firm VMware - Britain's antitrust authority announced today that it has provisionally cleared the planned $61B acquisition by chip maker Broadcom of cloud services provider VMware. It was declared the deal would not weaken competition in the supply of critical computer server products in the UK. The antitrust agency initially thought the deal could allow Broadcom to prevent competitors from supplying hardware components compatible with software made by US-based VMware which could weaken choice and increase prices for customers, the regulator said at the time. But an independent panel determined the deal did not pose a risk to competition. The decision was reached after the European Commission approved the deal this month on the condition that Broadcom allows other companies access to tools and support that they would need to develop rival hardware products that connect servers to networks and storage.
• Acronis cyberthreats report shows massive increase in email attacks - The cyber protection firm released its mid-year cyberthreats report late last month revealing a substantial increase in email attacks so far this year. It reported that phishing is the primary method criminals leverage to gain login credentials. In the first half of this year the number of email-based phishing attacks increased 464% compared to 2022. There has also been a 24% increase in attacks per organization and Acronis-monitored endpoints observed a 15% increase in the number of files and URLs per scanned email.
• V.tal to open hyperscale data center in Brazil - The data center firm is expected to open its first hyperscale-oriented data center nicknamed 'Mega Lobster'. The facility will have capacity of 20MW and be integrated into the company's submarine cable landing station and to its 4MW edge data center 'Big Lobster', which opened in February. Mega Lobster will rely on V.tal's terrestrial fiber grid to connect to a neutral ecosystem, offering operators, ISPs and OTTs solutions to access Ceará's central PIX.
• LCL Data Centers deploys new UPS infrastructure - Caterpillar has commissioned a new 13.5 MVA standby power solution for LCL Data Centers near Brussels, Belgium. With the new UPS infrastructure, LCL doubled its Brussels-West capacity and increased Brussels-North capacity by a third. The new units also delivered operational efficiencies, translating to better PUE.

Got some news of your own to share? If it's news from your own company it belongs in Web Hosting Industry Announcements (no ads please!). If you've scooped some news about something else going on in the hosting industry we'd love for you to share it in our Industry News section!

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