The hosting blogger

He was Born in Taiwan, now live in Australia and prefer US services and hosting companies to host his projects, and has also very clair ideas about this industry and his developmente for the future. HostingTalk.it has interviewed Scott Yang, a young programmer that decided to open a blog called HostingFu.com about hosting companies and services, where he usually review the services that use. In the international scene blogs dedicated to hosting sector are owned by individual companies,  HostingFu.com is a rare case that over time has managed to increase its number of readers and the number of reviews related services.





Started as a hobby, today his blog grew as he would have never thought and his problem is now find time to write! We talked to Scott of our industry, what are the trends he sees and thinks of how we can evolve, even in relation to concrete issues such as spam and management of e-mail.

Speaking with Scott is a true pleasure, HostingTalk.it will look for other cases of single blogger involved in this sector, with great professionalism, providing details and information often difficult to find elsewhere.


Scott’s Profile on LinkedIn.

Scott’s Blog: www.hostingfu.com



Hi Scott and welcome on HostingTalk.it! Firstly, can you explain to our users who you are and what it your experience, also as customer, in hosting industry?

My name is Scott, born in Taiwan, raised, educated and currently work in Australia. I do not, however, work in web hosting related industry. Instead, I work as a software architect for an ISV (independent software vendor), providing financial planning related software and services.

I first exposed to the World Wide Web in 1995 and had my first dynamic web site up and running in 1996 (coded in good ol’ Perl CGI). The place where I work also provide web-based service with hundreds of co-lo dedicated servers in two different data centres in Australia.

However I did not actually become a hosting customer until 2005. Prior to getting my very first web hosting account, I just hosted all my personal projects off my ADSL account from home.


Well, when i asked to you an interview, you told to me that you are not in hosting industry, but you have an hosting reviews blog, well, how is born the idea of this blog and why?

Something tragic happened to my home server in 2005 which taught me that hosting valuable projects at home is simply not a good idea. So here is someone with 10+ year experience in Linux and software development, but was completely clueless when it comes to buying web hosting packages. I decided to document what I have experienced in the hosting industry, and HostingFu.com was born.

I bought my first shared hosting package (attracted by the gigantic amount of disk space + monthly data transfer of course, before I know anything about “overselling”). Soon I found it was not something I want and the performance was appalling. Then I discovered virtual private servers which gave me the power of root that I was familiar with, at a price that can be justified for my “hobby projects”.

I started writing reviews for the hosting products that I have used — some are excellent but some are not that good — because I think hosting related products deserve detailed reviews. A lot of reviews you get on the net are either biased (affiliate sites), too short or not detailed enough (what you usually get from hosting-related forums). I also happen to write reviews on other products I bought on my other blogs, so it just makes sense to me to write hosting related reviews at HostingFu.com.


I read in your blog profile that you are Australian and Chinese, what is your experience, about hosting, for those countries? Any differences?

Honestly I have absolutely no experience with web hosting in South East/Far East Asia (except everything hosted there seems to load very slowly in Australia due to bad peering). So I guess I will skip that one.

As of Australia, it is a big country with relatively few people — 25 times the size of Italy but only with 1/3 of population, which translates to expensive infrastructure cost. English is the primary language which means a lot of content are coming from US and UK, which are thousands of miles away. Combine the two you get expensive bandwidth cost. Due to the level of demand we also don’t have the scale of economy. Most hosting companies will charge you around 2-2.5 Euro per GB excess on data transfer.

If you are hosting a latency sensitive application then there’s not much choice, but now most of my personal hosting accounts are in the States (which has much cheaper bandwidth cost).

Sei di origini cinesi ma vivi in Australia, quale è la tua esperienza nei servizi hosting di questi paesi? Quali sono le differenze?

Sinceramente non ho alcuna esperienza con il settore webhosting del Sud Est dell’Asia (considerando inoltre che tutto quello che viene hostato in queste regioni appare veramente lento in Australia, per via del cattivo peering). Per cui non posso dire nulla per quanto riguarda l’Asia, mentre per l’Australia devi considerare che è un grande paese ma con pochissime persone - è grande 25 volte l’Italia ma ha un solo un terzo della sua popolazione - il che si traduce in infrastrutture costosissime. L’inglese è la lingua ufficiale quindi la maggior parte dei contenuti provengono dagli USA o dalla Gran Bretagna, che si trovano però a migliaia di chilometri di distanza. Combinando le due cose, ottieni dei costi per la banda davvero alti. A causa del livello di richieste sul mercato inoltre, non abbiamo un’economia di scala. La maggior parte delle compagnie addebita circa 2-2,5 Euro per ogni gigabyte in eccesso consumato.
On HostingFu.com you review vps and shared services, how do you contact companies and, in particulars, what kind of relations do you have with them?

I actually don’t contact the hosting companies. I usually review the service I use, but I do not contact the company
prior to my review — I just write whatever I have experienced from a customer’s perspective. However, I usually won’t write anything if there is nothing good to write about (yes, there were a few occasions).

Sometimes web hosting companies do contact me asking for reviews (for example my recent review on Crucial Paradigm in Australia). Depending on schedule, I usually only do a review if I can see there is something unique about their product that I am happy to endorse. In one occasion (Linode), I actually become a paying customer after the review.

About reviews: what tools you use to review services?

I have mainly reviewed VPS and shared hosting products, and I have to say that my reviews are no where near systematic.

I have used various tools to evaluate raw performance — unix benchmark for overall performance, hdparm/seeker for IO, simple wget to test network throughput, etc. However I found it is difficult to test performance under real world scenario, unless I have hosted active sites on it for a few months.

Spam, the big problem. I think you have heard about the case of Dreamhost that suggest to your users to switch mail service to Gmail, what do you think about? Outsourcing is the solution for a hosting company? I found a your article about greylisting, how much it’s good this practice?

Yes I have indeed heard of the story. Do note that DreamHost is NOT forcing every one of their users to use Gmail, but (1) offer automated set ups to point DNS records to Google Apps (2) recommend their users to use Gmail instead of their own email system. Therefore it is not strictly out sourcing, as you still have an option to use their mail system (which has always been running in a separate cluster farm I heard).

From a user’s point of view I think it is an excellent move, that a host is able to acknowledge what they are not very good at, and are willing to out source it to someone else. After all it is not trivial to run a high-availability mail solution with good spam/virus filtering. Google seems to have the expertise in this department, so why not let them?

To me hosting email is very different from hosting web spaces, as email itself is an application whereas shared hosting/VPS/dedicated servers are only providing a platform so their customers can run their own applications on it. Web hosts probably should not feel too threatened with Gmail, unless hosted email application is their main business model.

As of whether out sourcing is the solution for a hosting company, I think it depends. Many tasks get out sourced in a typical hosting company already — payment gateway, data center, building servers, server management, etc. Out sourcing hosting emails completely to a 3rd party might not be the wise, but providing options (hosted email, Google Apps, or other MX) IMHO is a very good idea.

Greylisting — I think it is quite effective blocking out bots, but it does have its own issues, as sometimes important emails can be delayed. It is possible to do conditional greylisting, for example only greylist those coming from broadband/dialup IP range, or listed on RBLs, or do not match SPF or DomainKeys, etc. It can get complicated…

Well, about hosting industry, as blogger what the idea of this industry for today and for tomorrow? I say that there is no more one kind of webhosting, like shared hosting, but a good choise of different services for many people and for all needs, do you agree?


My idea of hosting industry in the future — it is either “managed” or “unmanaged”. Unmanaged service provides you a platform of all sizes, from shared service to a complete computing cloud, so that developers can build applications and host them there. Amazon EC2?

Managed service on the other hand IS the application been built. Everything is provided “to get things done”. No FTP, SSL, MySQL, PHP, etc. But blog software, accouting software, community software, etc. Or maybe should I say WordPress.com? Or SaaS?

I just don’t think today’s situation of a zillion overselling shared hosting providers is going to last very long. Platform providers are going to consolidate, but there will be more application providers as more people seeking turn-key SaaS solutions. But I can be very wrong

As blogger and software developer, do you think to start-up a webhosting company in future? Have you received, via blog, some proposals for that?

No. No way. I much prefer working on code, than dealing with customers, which would be inevitable when you start up a web hosting company. Hosting is also a very satuated market, where you definitely need to provide something unique to take lead.

So far I have not received any proposal on starting up a web hosting company. However I did receive interest in working on software-related projects. Sorry everyone — I have to say that I am quite happy with where I am at the moment.

Well, Scott, you plan to expand your webhosting blog in future?

There are always plans but there is never enough time! The blog has grown to a size that I have never expected it to be, and right now I just wish I can dedicate more time writing for it (which is always hard).

I am always interested in reviewing innovative products. I am interested in discussing new ideas, trends in web hosting, etc. If time allows.


Interview by Stefano Bellasio, HostingTalk.it
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