Based on the Pinboard blog post The Five Stages of Hosting, and the follow on hosting discussions on Hacker News, I thought I’d put down a few simple things I want from a hosting service provider:

• Reliable and Consistent – I want high application availability, and consistent performance. If a disk (or an entire server) fails but it’s redundant, I don’t care as long as you fix it fast, but if the network is so slow that users can’t load the website, then it’s problem even if the servers are running fine
• A platform as a service layer based on CloudFoundry, where I can work on applications rapidly, with minimal up-front expense and little or no infrastructure work, using databases and services that “just work”
• Infrastructure as a service layer so I can manage the operating system stack if my application requires it, and run Linux or Windows when I want it
• Very reliable network attached storage for things that need it, like backups
• Less reliable block storage for things that don’t need to live forever, like operating system and cache files
• Backups, that can easily be restored to another environment when required, to perform testing of those backups and any application changes
• Geographically close to the majority of my customers – it’s the easiest way to improve overall network performance
• Cost effective. I explicitly don’t want you to be the cheapest, that would mean you were cutting a corner somewhere that it matters, but I do value my money

I don’t think there’s anyone providing this kind of hosting service yet, and probably won’t any time soon, whether it’s labelled as “Cloud”, “VPS”, or “Web Hosting”, but the day I find one, I’ll be signing up.

Photo of a Google Server Rack by Liz Henry.