Looking for perfect high quality, low price web hosting service

I've come very close but wanting just a little more

[nysus1]

I'm using a very good Apache webhosing service and have a resellers account though them. They are incredibly cheap and incredibly responsive at the same time. When I send them an e-mail, a real live person (not located in India) gets back to me in 5 minutes <b>every time</b>. And they use great back end software, called cpanel, that lets me control just about every thing I need to through a web interface. They also give me shell access when I need it. Even their rock bottom package of $4.99/month comes with all this. Overall, I'm pretty happy with them.

HOWEVER, there are some problems. Basically, they just don't seem like they know what they are doing when it comes to the nitty gritty of administering an apache server. Two major items: 1) they can't seem to get ImageMagick to work with Perl and 2) they can't get something as simple as the ExpiresActive directive working.

I'm very hesitant to dump them for these issues especially for the price I'm paying. Should I be looking for another host or should I be happy with what I've got?

[khuntley]

At $4.99 a month I would dump them the second anything better came along. At that price they can't be giving you anything worthwhile. It has to be a tease of some kind.

Kevin

[jeeplaw]

Take a look at www.hostpc.com, I have had excellent support and great service too. Tell them jeeplaw sent you :)

[Ankheg]

As an aside, having actually been there, failed to do that after three tries, I'd cut them some slack on installing ImageMagick on a virtual site (or a server hosting virtual sites). I've not found it to be as easy as the docs make it out to be. :)

[STeeL]

Sounds to me like they are resellers. It's not a bad thing, but when you need something to be installed on shared server, they have to ask their hosting service providers.

[nysus1]

Steel,

Yeah, that's what I suspected, too. It just seems whenever something technical comes up, they just hem and haw and come up with excuses for why it doesn't work. I'm not sure I'm willing to dump them because they are incredibly cheap and helpful.

[Shak]

never ever ever ever choose a hosting company based on price alone, never never never....

been there, got the T-Shirt and lost some serious £££s.

Shak

[gopi]

>>> never ever ever ever choose a hosting company based on price alone, never never never....

Amen ...

<added>

When i shopped for hosting i intentionally looked for premium priced ones as they are the ones who can afford good support and also will last in the business for years to come

BTB , check pair.com , they are one of the oldest and most respected ones in the industry . Most people here in WW have their sites hosted in either pair or westhost

[hanuman]

you dont get ssh access with them. i would think again....

[Undead Hunter]

Pair was great in '98!

'97, actually is when I started there. But over the years, so many others have added so many more features for less money.

If you choose a cheap host, you get what you pay for. No question - we have a good one, but we've lost email with them 3 times this year for about 6 hours at a time - problems updating their Cpanel software (which allows us to do a whack of things ourselves.)

But you know what? That's the LEAST amount of trouble I've had with any provider over the past 6 years. And I've tried quite a few...

I gave up pair not just because of the price and the lack of features, though - I gave them up because email was the only way to contact them... and there were 2 or 3 times when I really just needed either to pick up the phone or get a faster response than they were giving. The phone really would have made a difference in one crisis. I do check them out every few months - they were the most stable host up to that point, and they DO know their stuff (...man it wasn't for the faint of heart when I started, using Telnet, etc. to get anything, trying to write the right string to get log traffic stats, etc. Seems like a 100 years ago) - but geez. $17.95 a month for .php plus a setup fee? - that's over twice as much per month compared to where I am now, and since we're not doing anything "crazy" with .php...

I suppose pair is good if you're a serious programmer, and want stability. That's about that.