Since I’ve blogged on their flaws, I should mention a couple nice things about HostingMatters. They’ve just issued a token credit to the accounts of all its clients as compensation for their recent outages. It’s a nice gesture, since the DoS attacks presumably cost them quite a bit of money in overtime pay to its tech support folks. They also rather quietly increased the bandwidth and disk space allocations for all pricing plans at the beginning of October without raising prices. (Indeed, I only knew about it because I e-mailed in late September asking about a custom package to buy more of those without paying for more e-mail accounts and other things I didn’t need and was told to wait until the 1st because they were upping the allocations.)
My concerns of last night remain justified, however, however unfair they are to HostingMatters. All the tech types I’ve talked to or that have posted comments say HM has done everything they could reasonably do and I have no reason to think otherwise. But their large size has, unfortunately, made them a target. Whatever sick joy computer terrorists get in launching these attacks would presumably be rather diminished if they were only taking out a few tiny sites. Taking down InstaPundit–or, even worse, forcing upon him the indignity of skulking off to BlogSpot for temporary refuge–has to be more fun.
My concern here is about overcentralization, not poor service. I have no immediate plans to leave HM to seek out another service, even though there are certainly cheaper places to host. I’m hoping a technical solution to minimize the recurrence of this problem can be found. But the DoS attacks and the mention of their name along with them almost have to be hurting them in getting new enrollees. If they continue to be the main target of these attacks, my guess is existing clients will migrate. To some extent, that’s a matter of “the terrorists winning” or “punishing the victim.” But I’m not planning a vacation for Jerusalem anytime, either.
