Forum Moderators: phranque
I recently added a site with them for that reason. It went down the first day (but that was apparently a DNS configuration problem that has been resolved). Other than that, no problems. Quick response from tech support on a couple of issues.
If you do choose Westhost, be sure to give Brett referral credit.
In terms of technical infrastructure, westhost seems somewhat reluctant to spill too many details on their site, which makes a truly exact comparison difficult. Here's what I could figure out:
Startup , I meant to say that $50/month is my limit currently. I went for my present host siteturn mainly because of their attractive price($19/month) which gives a static ip ,500 mb of disk space and unlimited hits ( ??)
But i have nothing but bad experience with them . Their tech support is pathetic and will return your mails with a cut and paste response. I am a experienced unix admin and even if i try to help them they will not understand. I now believe a hosting company should have a nice margin to remain stable and also to hire good tech support people.
So now i decided not to sacrifice support , stability for price .For me hosting is the only cost and there is no paid advertisement as google is good to me (thanks mainly to this forrum !)
Mardi_Gras , I will sure give credit to Brett whatever host i choose. I strongly feel that he is doing a great favour for all of us without much return.
By the By , I am still confused about pair and westhost :)
As a Unix Guy i believe FreeBSD is more stable and its network performance is slightly better than Linux.
So Pair beats Westhost in this regards...
You can configure incoming email to a specific address to also be piped to a program that you've written, in my case a perl script. Certain emails come in from a lot of different places and I can scan the headers and (sometimes these are form fields) other fields in the mail. From there I can give a customized autoresponse (not like the normal autoresponders). You can come up with a lot of ideas for this kind of thing.
As far as pair's customer support, I've only had to use it one time, and I was very pleased. Quick response time, and a personal email back to me stating that the problem had been fixed.
More Suggestions ???
Was just flicking through some westhost pages for some unanswered question, and a java box popped out of nowhere. Seems Westhost are playing around with live support - so i asked the questions......pretty sweet because they didn't have the info i needed on the site.
He/She was a little slow.....but on westhost:
1) You can parse .htm files through PHP but not ASP file extensions (looks like I'll need to figure out mod_rewrite)
2) I can get cURL if I ask for it when I sign up
2b) They are just toying with the idea of live support :)
Not bad- it added a brownie point to their account from my perspective as a customer.
have used both - and both have good prices and support.
Also i mentioned webmasterworld and Brett in the comments field on their signup page. Not sure how this will help , but i think brett can cut an affiliate deal with pair and westhost and request the users to refer webmasterworld. This is not gonna make a lot of money , but hey , ANY MONEY IS GOOD MONEY :) ...
I don't think that any security aware hoster will give you root access. If you want this, then you need a colocation service (rent the rackspace but bring your own box), which is a very different business model. Note that you can install pretty much anything on a pair box already (dunno about westhost), and even more so on a dedicated server. Most software that you'll need (besides the httpd itself) doesn't really need root priveledges, after all.
Well, actually I rent a rack in the datacenter with a few boxes of my own and have a dedicated box with a root access in another location.
I'm about to get rid of most of my clients and get rid of the rack.
Just going to get a few dedicated boxes. But the current host where I'm renting the box sucks so I'm looking for something else.
So if anyone knows of a good host that rents out boxes - please let me know.
