Forum Moderators: phranque
Does anyone have any recommendations for good hosting companies?
The TOS of does not allow discussing hoster specifics, but keep this in mind, you tend to get what you pay for, at least on the low end price wise, unfortunately in the mid and high end, there's no corresponding guarantee of quality. I pay to have no problems, and have never considered the few dollars I could save in exchange by using cheap hosting to be worth it, mainly because I've already travelled that road.
Major warning signs, run don't walk from these: unlimited bandwidth, which is not technically or financially possible to offer.
huge amounts of disc space for very little money.
Anything under $10 a month is very suspect IMO, although there are always those who've been lucky, but it's just luck.
No real contact information on webhoster site.
Major warning signs, run don't walk from these:unlimited bandwidth, which is not technically or financially possible to offer.
I think it's only offered with tongue firmly planted in cheek. If you believe in the offer and intend to use it then it's not the service for you :) I think it's only a reassurance that if things peak then there's no surprise increased cost.
huge amounts of disc space for very little money.
Well Google gives us all 2Gb free for email. How many email accounts do they have? If only they were a hosting company :)
Anything under $10 a month is very suspect IMO
Well there are probably millions of people paying under that who are quite satisfied (me included) for their non-commercial sites.
although there are always those who've been lucky, but it's just luck.
Agree. I've been lucky with a company who is notorious, albeit I don't care for their business practices.
No real contact information on webhoster site
Definitely! The biggie IMHO. Goes for all websites which offer fee-based services.
Other things I look for are clean, easy to navigate, professionally made websites that work on all major browsers, that aren't loaded down with amateur web design image bloat designs etc. Pro websites, that is, which you'd assume a pro web hoster would understand the value of. That one took me a while to figure out.
Re the bandwidth, look for the actual costs to go over, they are usually very low. The more stuff is fixed and in writing, the fewer surprises you can expect down the road.
Cheap hosters tend to be cheap because they scrimp on the backend stuff, way too many sites on a server, inferior server hardware, lack of redundant data trunklines for example, we had that issue on one site, a big one, their main trunkline went down, and so did our site. Pro hosters can handle these types of issues with no downtime. But that's because they pay for the added layers of protection, those aren't free. I'm happy to pay the extra few dollars to have that degree of protection.
Many cheap hosters also don't give you a dedicated IP address for your site, but rather use virtual name hosting, again, to save money, since IP addresses are a finite resource.
I agree with all the things you say in your 2 posts here. Some interesting thoughts in your second post.
Despite heeding these warnings, it does seem like a lottery if you get a good host or not. There doesn't seem to be any good place on the web to research for a prospective host without biased self-interest recommendations.
But it took some looking, after reading through a bunch of non commercial hosting reviews, on non commercial sites [that's very important, almost all hosting review type sites are total and utter scams, filled with lies and deception, which is why WebmasterWorld to their credit have banned any specific hosting comments or reviews], it boiled down to a handful, and out of that handful, only one had the right price/features etc.
In the last months I've had to deal with an unfortunately large number of different hosters, and each and every one, without exception, has failed in at least one key area, often many more, utterly basic areas too. Which makes me like the pro hosting I normally use just that much more each time I have to deal with another hoster.
It's actually not that hard to find good ones once you know what to look for, since only good ones offer these levels of service year in and year out. Just google:
<hoster name> problems
and you can usually weed out the bad hosters fairly quickly, since somebody has almost always had bad experiences with them and posted them somewhere. Just make sure the poster seems to know what they are talking about, ie, not, those scum took down my spam/porn etc site. Remember that negative comments far outweigh positive ones since a lot of hosters will spam forums etc with positive reviews of themselves, so those have really very little meaning when compared to negative ones.
[edited by: Woz at 4:50 am (utc) on July 26, 2005]
[edit reason] No specific hosts please, see TOS & Charters [/edit]
[edited by: Woz at 8:30 am (utc) on July 26, 2005]
[edit reason] Let's keep the discussion on the board please. [/edit]
