Hosting: Does bigger equal better?

A #4 large-sized with a coke can be heard at my favorite drive-thru more times than my mid-section cares to admit.  10 minutes after I'm wiping my hands with the supplied napkin, it dawns on me that super size choice was probably wrong.

While thinking about this, I drew some comparisons to the current hosting (or cloud) landscape.  If you follow the hosting "in the news" there are a lot of acquisitions going on.  Shaw Communications acquires ViaWest, HostGator acquired by EIG, and most recently CoSentry acquired by TierPoint after TierPoint acquired Windstream's Data Center unit.

Is bigger a good thing for the consumer of hosting or MSP services?  Not necessarily.  Servers are still servers. Storage is still storage.  When a hosting acquisition is announced, the sales team of the acquisition target gets on the phone with their existing customers assuring them "Nothing will change", "Everything will be the same", etc.

So nothing will change and my workloads/systems are now a "smaller fish in a larger pond"?  It's also worth mentioning that your hosting cost will remain the same.  A suggestion is to monitor the responsiveness when working with the new support team.  Remember "nothing will change"!

I was contacted by a customer who went through a hosting acquisition.  They WERE a Premier level customer with their old vendor and they were concerned that they were now a "bronze" level customer with their new vendor (bronze, silver, gold, and platinum) being the new levels of service.  This was in spite of the initial promise "everything will be the same". 

Your technology defines you and your business.  It is one of the "faces" of your company.  If availability or responsiveness to your customers is jeopardized by a hosting acquisition, you've let your customers down.  Don't risk your customers by accepting what your told.  Challenge that sales associate.  Reach out to other hosting providers for advice.  Hosting providers do keep track of each other and we do know where each others armor is the weakest.  

You have choices.