2by4 - 6:52 pm on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

ifgoal, yes, I bet I can name the prior hoster, or at least give 3 good guesses, but tos doesn't allow it. But don't worry, in a few years the painful memories will just be that, memories, and unless you are unlucky, like me, and get clients who insist on using bad hosting for various bad reasons, you'll never have to even deal with hosting issues again. Sadly, I am constantly reminded of this fact because I have to deal with other hosting companies, who have, without exception all failed in one way or the other over time.

Of course, there are so many bad large hosters that it's a real competition to find the worst one, they are generally fighting for the 'worst hoster' designation since they will never achieve even a mediocre ranking.

If I contact my hoster about an actual technical issue once per year nowabout a problem, not caused by me, that requires resolution I'm surprised . And I've never seen one of my sites not up. I'm sure they are down now and then, but I've never seen it.

Eventually though if you keep looking and researching you have to find the good ones, there really are not that many, I only know of one good shared hosting company for example.

Oh, one more thing I've seen, no hoster that offers shared hosting with urchin stats has ever proved to be top end, that's because urchin costs a fortune to license per box, so they always cut something from the service somewhere else. I have seen no exceptions to this rule, although one or two companies got my hopes up, but after wasting a few hours with their tech support walking them through the process of figuring out why our site suddenly failed [server configuration errors] I now consider urchin stats to be another warning sign.

Another easy way to find good hosting is to simply search for: <hoster name> problems
on google. Everyone likes posting about bad hosting. When I found mine, there were literally zero negative pages on the web about that hoster. Now there are a few, because some people complain when their sites get kicked off of shared for using too many mysql resources....