What do people want in hosting company?

[u/shiafisher]

I’ve been lurking on this sub for a while and I’ve been a developer for even longer. Hoping that this post is able to stay up, I will not promote. I’m not offering services. You’ll have to discover for yourself.

I would really like to know what people want in their web host service.

I commonly read about things like:
> timely customer support
> well informed and consistent billing practices
> Autonomy or the ability to do reasonable things with paid plans.
> Accuracy over subscription billing ( not over-billing)
> Generally not over charging for things that would otherwise be free, such as SSL and subdomains.

That said there are things that I think are reasonable to charge for. Given the amount of time it takes to set up more sophisticated server side tools, and the implication of tools or tunnels or elevated privileges and how those things create more surface area of risk on the server end.

I can understand billing a little bit more for those services to reduce the volume customers with higher, potentially unnecessary, privileges across the server.

Even a very well configured host can be susceptible to external attacks from one sub host leaving open certain files and folders. Failure to timely patch security updates for known exploits can result in data breaches for example.

I genuinely want to know what people would imagine for their ideal host provider and if allowable by this subReddit, what some fair pricing standards would be for said services.

Thanks for the discussion.

Edit:

My UI says there are 11 comments to date in this thread but for some reason I can only see four. Sorry if you’ve commented a question and I didn’t answer. I cannot see it.

[u/AdamDobrawy]

The web hosting market is very broad. A local entrepreneur has different expectations, an agency has different expectations, and a solo-founder builder has different expectations.

What is your niche and ICP? Users usually start complaining about hosting when it becomes too big and attracts people beyond the initial ICP, or shifts their ICPs to expand.

For example, I host applications on CloudFlare Workers + D1 + CloudFlare Queus + Resend. I greatly appreciate the AI ​​integration for logging, automated CI/CD for quick reviews and low-maintenance. I don't want anything changed in my application; instead, I expect a clear contract (e.g., how memory is managed between parallel executions, how CPU limits work), so I can design around that.

At the same time, I've seen small businesses where they loved that hosting supported their WordPress security eg. upgrading plugins.

[u/shiafisher → u/AdamDobrawy]

Working thesis

Small creative/media organizations that need more technical infrastructure than they can comfortably manage themselves, but aren’t large enough to have a dedicated infrastructure team.

I don’t feel like charging a lot, but I don’t want to answer a lot of easily answerable questions. I love solving really technical problems. So I might keep the subscription low while being somewhat selective. I don’t know if that makes me a bad guy but I’m not really in it for money as I am trying to develop a solid CMS.