Summer has been with us for a few weeks, officially starting June 20th.  We are now in the season of summer hosts.

If you’re not familiar with that term, let’s do a little lore drop.  A summer host is a very old term in our community and comes from the following phenomenon:

• Young person reads LowEndTalk and gets a VPS
• The kid says “wow, this is cool”
• Same person has the idea “hey, I could make money doing this”.  I mean, how hard can it be, right?
• Once school is out for the summer and the kid has a lot of free time, and Super Duper Enterprise Grade Fantstihost is launched!

Some hallmarks of the summer host:

• Brand new domain.  The company didn’t exist until a couple days before the offer was posted.
• Free template.  Usually one you’ve seen a million times before.
• Crude Terms of Service. The kid isn’t hiring an attorney!  Sometimes you’ll find another host’s name mentioned in the terms of service since they copy/pasted it.
• Very aggressive pricing, owing to the business inexperience of the hoster.  He says “if it costs X, I’ll sell for a little over that” but doesn’t factor in chargebacks, taxes, the other costs of running a business, the unexpected, etc.
• Rented hardware.  The kid doesn’t have the cash to buy servers so he’s renting from OVH or wherever and running on a razor-thin margin.
• Fancy titles.  These “founders” always seem to give themselves grand corporate titles like Global Chief Executive or President of North American Operations or Chairman of the Consolidated Global Oversight Board.
• Yearly pricing.  This isn’t always done, but the less scrupulous will offer “get an 8GB VPS for $20/year” offers, where the kid is going to scoop up a lot of cash and then disappear when September comes.
• Melts down as soon as problems occur, because they really have no idea how to handle RAID rebuilds, DDoS attacks, or intrusion attempts.

Summer hosts used to be more common on LowEndTalk, in the era when anyone could post an offer.  Now the administration screens providers and is very leery of brand new hosts, particularly when they some of the above features.

But you’ll still find them on the Internet.  How to avoid them?  Apply a little common sense and examine closely for the above features.

Or save yourself the headache and shop on LowEndTalk/LowEndBox!  Or if you really want the cheat code, read reviews on ServerVerify and ask questions/ask for recommendations on LowEndTalk before you plunk down your hard-earned money.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.