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Discussion on: You Don’t Need a MacBook to Become a Coder

 
adriansandu profile image
Adrian Sandu

Fair enough. As I said, I am not familiar enough with these systems to know what is possible to do when using them.

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

I would encourage you (or anyone else) to do some heavy research into hosting providers, as not all of them are created equal. Some of them are cheap for a reason. Things to research/ask:

  • What security measures do they take as standard procedures?
  • How much extra will backups cost? Do they provide a mechanism to validate the backups, or will that be left to you?
  • How easy is it to scale up/down service levels? Do I click a button, or do I have to reinstall everything from scratch?
  • Is there an uptime agreement? How is it enforced? Some companies will only hold themselves responsible for downtime you report, even if your site is down overnight, if you didn't catch it, they still maintain they are meeting their SLA. Some companies offer you close to nothing when they violate the SLA...some will only offer a 10% credit for the amount of downtime you can prove.
  • What hardware are you using? A lot of the really cheap vendors are running servers that are at least 2-3 years old. Some of them are slow enough that it would actually be cheaper to buy your own server than pay their monthly fee!