Forum Moderators: phranque
Congratulations on a brilliant site which I've only discovered recently. After spending hours browsing this site I'm very, very impressed.
With the collective knowledge here I'm hoping someone can suggest a few good UK hosting companies. I agree with other posters on this forum that online ratings for web hosts are not necessarily accurate.
Just as with other posters here I hate being told "We need to escalate this/we need to pass this to second line support" and having to wait days for some email reply that suggests they haven't even understood the problem. From that angle Pair comes up smelling of roses in this forum and I'd love to try them out but they are US based (apart from phone charges on support calls there's also the time difference issue).
Our requirements are simple, list at the bottom of this post. Price is not an issue but what I'm hoping for is a host that
1. Does not give any BS. Netcetera with whom I've had a site for several years boasts a 99.8% uptime. In reality I've never got more than 98-99%. When confronted they'll find a way to justify claiming the higher figure. Nobody tells you that the % you see is not what customers actually get. When our site does go down the liesurely speed at which it's rectified is going to give me a coronary one day because I'm losing hundreds of visitors an hour.
2. A good SLA: I don't know if I'm alone in this but Service Level Agreements don't seem to mean much. I've examined the small print of at least 10 of them and the exclusions are so great that it's almost impossible to blame the hosts for anything except holding a druken orgy in their server room, giving everyone a sledge hammer, and offering a prize for maximum damage caused. (This item is not so important if they've got a great record of uptime)
3. Support staff who've been programmed with more than "I'll escalate this" i.e. who can actually resolve problems; support staff who don't automatically assume that you don't know what you are talking about and/or their service can't be at fault. Netcetera, for example, is very frustrating because I've got to find multiple proofs before they accept that there's a problem. And it's not just them. I've tried Hostway with exactly the same problem.
4. Support should not be on a premium rate number, and support staff should be easy to get through to without having to "log" a support call on their site and wait for days.
5. A decent control panel. Hostway's CP keeps falling over. For every 10 pages you actually see you'll get five 404s and you have to hit refresh. That problem lasted for weeks!
I'm looking for shared Windows hosting with
20-50 GB of space, 10-20 GB of bandwidth, FP 2000 extensions, at least one DSN, our own IP, IIS 5.0, ASP 3.0, support not on a premium rate number. I don't mind paying well for good service. Are you delighted with your current hosting company? Please tell me. Thanks for reading this.
I dont think actual hosting company names are allowed to be posted on the forum, but ill send you one I would recommend via sticky mail that should meet your criteria.
Regards
Scott
And thanks for your posting + your sticky, Scott. I have checked that company out. They seem like a great company. Shame that they don't offer IP numbers even on their £1500 plan. I've emailed them to see if they'd be willing to charge me more and provide that. I'm awaiting their reply.
But thanks again. Anybody else thrilled to bits with their hosting company? Please let me know via sticky. Thanks.
I've just discovered that my site is down again. It is with my new hosts who boast a 99.9% uptime.
My old hosts were probably worse, but I feel it is time to find a new host. It is really annoying because I don't know who to believe or trust anymore. Maybe I am just cursed.
I would recomend not paying a yearly fee, but pay montly so you can switch if necessary.
Tim
You're not cursed, and I'm sure you and I are not the only ones. The more features you use of the service the more you'll find that a lot of things go wrong a lot of the time. Very few webmasters even monitor their sites' uptime with a third party service. Unless they are actually using the site 24x7 they may not know even if their site went down several times in the last month and they got less than 50% uptime. Let alone knowing of database problems, emails bouncing, slow access speeds, visitors getting 404s on valid URLs, FP extensions getting damaged, incorrect stats being recorded etc etc.
Clinton
