Originally Posted by Lucas While you can decrease the severity of these hiccups, there will always still be there, the quality is in how fast and how good you can decrease/remove the problem. It's simply impossible to maintain a perfect service with no problems at all at anything. It's just not reality. I have not heard of one company that is problem free. I am not sure if you understand my point of view.

I understand your point of view, but now you're talking about something else entirely. Originally we were discussing the impact of growth and expansion on hosting services, vs the subsequent quality of service. Now you're taking this globally and applying it to pretty much everything else. Let's back up a little?

Maintaining a 100% problem free hosting service is not impossible, it's just not "cost effective" for most companies. It's not cost effective because they simply don't charge enough for their product to begin with, because they're oversellers. What then occurs is people are sold sub-standard hosting and they chalk down any issues they experience to the fact that it's "shared hosting" and "accidents happen". Accidents do happen, indeed, but not as often as people are willing to accept. Let's face it, how many times have we seen hosts claim "daily offsite backups" but yet one simple HDD failure and suddenly these offsite backups aren't accessible? I see this kind of activity almost weekly.

Many hosts cut corners in order to maximise their profits, and this is what I'm getting at. Overselling, inadequate backup implementations, you name it - it's all what people have come to expect from the hosting industry now.

I do not say that they have the right to have so many problems just because they are big, I know they could improve their service and reduce their problems a lot, as I have worked there for a while, but you will still have hiccups here and there, no matter what. Anything mechanic will always give you hiccups.

Sure, hiccups happen, but that's no excuse for negligence.