Tips for finding a web host

[slobizman]

I'm looking for a small web hosting plan for my son and I spent a couple hours yesterday looking around at hosts. All those plans under $20/month sound good, but when I then search on the net for people's comments about them, I find all sorts of bad reviews. It seems this area of web hosting is fraught with companies who go out of business, have too high downtimes and lack technical support.

How the heck does one select a web host like this? I don't have to have the greatest deal in the world, I just want a host that will answer the phone for a tech call, a server that stays up, and a company that will be there next year.

All those web sites that offer reviews seem untrustworthy--they look to be shilling for companies that they are affilaites of, and the reviews could be written by the web hosts or their competitors.

Any advice is appreciated!

(He needs maybe 100MB disk, traffic's not an issue, MySQL and PHP.)

[Dreamquick]

Assuming you're talking about a personal site or at least sites where small downtime issues aren't a big problem...

In my opinion as long as you have control over the domain names, maintain a backup copy of the site content and pick up your logs daily it shouldn't matter if your 20/month host goes under or you decide to leave them...

Simply stop paying the old people, pay the $20 to someone new, update the DNS, copy the content and your back in business with a new host.

- Tony

[slobizman]

Well, yeah, that's true of course.

But, why not try to get a decent one to start.

My question still stands.

[balinor]

I've been using Pair Networks for 8 years now, never a downtime, never a rate increase and never a problem contacting support. I don't even try to look elsewhere, as they are tried and true. IMHO, not worth trying to find el-cheapo web hosting if you just have to keep switching hosts because they go out of business. Find someone that is reliable and stick with them. That's the best advice I can offer you :)

[slobizman]

Thanks for the recommendation on pair. I was looking at them.

I agree with what you said and that's why I'm being a bit anal about this.

[top5jamaica]

try 1and1.com

[krieves]

I have a couple of sites hosted at ValueWeb. I've never had an issue with downtime. They offer 24hr phone support if you need it. I just started a new site on Westhost. So far, I'm very pleased with them. It seems to be a very good value.

[bheybugarin]

Im using acunett.com for over 2 years now and their support and uptime is great!

[yowza]

Westhost is good so far for me too.

I've had problems with Valueweb. Horrible support. I got about 10 different answers from 10 different people and the problem is still not resolved.

For a cheap host that is decent try ipowerweb.

Good luck.

[isitreal]

Pair, without any question, excellent in both price and service and performance, those guys are very good, rated top by netcraft.com in uptime, all the top 4 hosters were running BSD, by the way.

Example, I messed up the .htaccess file at 2 AM, they had it fixed and diagnosed in under 30 minutes, that's email support after hours, but that's fine, that's one way they keep costs down.

Like you, I searched for any problems anyone had with Pair once I found out about them and couldn't find any. Final convincing thing was when I saw that tomshardware.com used them, those guys know how to measure performance, that was enough for me.

The odd thing is, they are also very cheap, the basic PHP/Mysql package is $15 or so a month, and gives a lot more diskspace than almost anyone out there.

I tried bad ones first, and had started worrying that all hosters were bad, but that's not the case, there just aren't very many good ones.

Run don't walk from cihost, by the way, they are the worst I've seen.

[MatthewHSE]

For telephone support, I've never seen the equal of AIT.

For e-mail support, I've never seen the equal of EMWD.

Both offer all the best features and at reasonable prices.

[identity_00]

fliphosting is new - havent tried however.

[slobizman]

Thank you everyone. I ended up hooking up with Pair. I had to make two tech calls today and in both cases I got a very helpful tech support person with no wait time. I'm impressed.