Anyone LOVE their hosting company?

pair.com - developer account.

I've been recommending them for years.

Pretty much the host I see get recommended by others is Dreamhost and for good reason. It's cheap, lots of features, very reliable, based in the US, unlimited subdomains or MySQL databases, etc. Their e-mail support has been pretty prompt and helpful in my experience. I've been using them for quite a few months now already and they're constantly making things more efficient and adding features that the customers themselves want - most recently multiple MySQL databases on the same domain and being able to log in to e-mail using the actual e-mail address instead of a mailbox name (m3134609 or such).

People can make their own coupons to help refer people to Dreamhost and like everyone else,

Let me know if you need any more details, and there's a Dreamhost wiki which has lots of information.

http://dreamhost.com/

I am currently using bluehost for php stuff. They have been low cost, I will give them that much. It's hard for me to recommend LAMP hosting, being until recently 100% microsoft based. As 99% of bloggers and blogs use PHP I am sure it is PHP hosting you are after right?

We have used Westhost ever since we we have had a site with our own domain and now we are resellers through our business. Their tech support is Outstanding and they are very reliable. The hosting is done via virtual private servers for basic hosting but they also have dedicated options as well.

http://www.westhost.com

Guys, no affiliate links, coupons or referal codes please.

It devalues a thread like this pretty quickly

thanks

Sorry, thought it was related to topic at least, Nick beat me to removing it.

And for good reason. They're good. But they also have an innovative affiliate program that has a strong influence on the boatloads of DreamHost goodwill out there. (I say this having referred quite a few people.)

DreamHost is a solid choice, but if you want to get someone on the phone, look elsewhere.

So far, so good. Have had bad experiences with hosts and in particular with crappy resellers. I'm going to try out Textdrive for a new projec.

I just had an idea, see what you think. Whoever comes out tops I will get an account and give them a review so you don't have to risk your hard earned cash. Worthwhile or waste of time?

Sounds like a fantastic idea...

I'd like ot see it extended to the top 5...

I would recommend siteground.com - their servers are in Houston but their customer support is in Bulgaria which means the cost is actually OK. I have never waited longer than 10 minutes for a response to a trouble ticket. The only criticism I have is that they only do weekly backups which makes me nervous.

If you are considering doteasy.com or adfreewebhosting.com then run as fast as you can. They both suck.

Another vote for DreamHost.

I was having problems a few months ago with my sites going down. I emailed them and got v prompt response with reason for problem and no issues since.

I've been with them for a year and am about to renew for another year.

www.t35.net
Extremely cheap, with virtually anything you like. E.g. unlimited number of MySQLs DBs and FTP accounts, or they can allow you to have couple of more addon domains for free just because you asked for it.

This is a small company run by several rather enthusiastic people and it is a source of both pros and cons.
On the pros side:
- they tend to be very feature rich. There offers are not unique, but you can never find that many stuff together for that low price
- email and forum support is personal, you actually talk to the person who fixes the problem

On the cons side:
- If you calculate correctly, 99% availability means that your site is down for 7 hours per month. And it is what happens on average. Your sites are not going to be down for long and not often, but they won't be online 100% of time
- couple of persons cannot know everything, so sometimes they cannot solve the problems quickly even though you see they try hard

Anyone used http://www.webhosting.net? I have been looking at them because they do both PHP and Microsoft hosting and both can be upgraded to dedicated servers. I have a whole bunch of hosting accounts and would like to consolidate them, it's getting to be a pain keeping track of domains, ftp accounts, etc

I've been using a place called rochenhost for the last year or so and they have been absolutely great.

I find it really hard to believe that Dreamhost is really that good. It seems that because of their affiliate programme all reviews are just way to positive. It is like the first Dreamhost recommendation on this page, it is so obvious that this has been written to make some money through the referral programme (referral link has been removed now) that I cannot take this seriously.

Also, I have heard that DH sometimes shuts off websites when their cpu usage is too high. Apparently this cpu usage limit effectively makes it impossible to use all the available bandwith and diskspace.

Even though the DH affiliate programme is tempting, I have chosen a reseller account at a small Dutch webhostingcompany. I have less bandwith and diskspace available, but it is cheaper and very, very reliable. Best of all, I know all the names of the staff because it is a two-men company ;)

I've been happy enough with bluehost too. Support is by a ticketing system. Response has been acceptable.

My biggest grief with them is they don't warn about upcoming downtime.

Bluehost have great deals.

I've never been slashdotted or dugg so don't know how they stand up to sudden huge traffic.

I wouldn't unequivocably recommend them, but I'd definitely recommend checking them out and finding out other's experience

anyone tryed WebHostinger.com and hostingzoom.com ? I prefer webhostinger plans, but hostingzoom is not bad. both have excellent support.

They clearly want to do good things, and their support is fairly good. But on the personal server I use for hosting, I get a lot of... strange issues, like processes that make the server grind and whatnot. I was forced last sunday to restart the server, since many of my sites were unusable.

But they do want to do better, so they aren't just leaving me out to dry. For the money they are pretty darn good.

If you have lots of money, Rackspace is the best managed hosting by far, but they charge an arm and a leg. They're support however is phenomenal, it's like having a Sys Admin at your disposal.

http://bluehost.com for your serious sites and http://siteground.com for your spam-- *ahem* -- cheap sites. SiteGround's customer support is amazing - however, the features offered are not exactly first class, plus you have to pay extra to host more than one domain on a n account.

BlueHost is excellent for blogging - atleast where WordPress is concerned.

Here's one host that you should avoid : http://netfirms.com. Not blogging-friendly at all.

ASmallOrange.com rocks! Great prices and great service.

http://asmallorange.com/services/hosting/

When you say good and bad for blogging what criteria do you use? For example I find auto-install of wordpress useful but I wouldn't write off one that didn't have it..

nureal.com has both linux servers (8.00/mo) and windows servers (10.00/mo) You can have up to 10 domains per account (and you can upgrade if you need more domains.)

I've been with them for over 2 years and I have one of each accounts. They've always been very responsive to my issues. I never see them listed in these sorts of lists. But, I like them a lot.

I use a free host known as frihost. Its free but it has a uptime of 98.247% (monitoring since dec 05, using siteuptime.com ).
www.frihost.com

I tried Dreamhost a while ago as I moved to a larger host which would allow my chosen blog platform (MT) to operate. I was looking at Dreamhost first and they failed miserably to transfer my domain, setup my account and respond to support requests.

I've since moved to WebAttention and I have to say they have been amazing with regards support and requests for assistance. I'd whole heartedly recommend them.

Generally speaking people want champagne on a beer budget. For example, filmstallkers complaint that a budget host didn't do a perfect job of a host transfer. Ok, but they only cost $5/month (if you get a good promo code that is - and those can be found easily in a quick search). For $5/month, do you really expact the white glove treatment?

Either personally or customers of mine have sites with several companies - resellers and actual providers: Lunarpages, Hostdime, STPWebHosting, Halfpricehosting, Dreamhost, and Aplus. Dreamhost is my favorite. As an advanced user, I get an amazing deal from dreamhost. If you don't care about advanced services then you won't be terribly impressed by Dreamhost. What do I mean by "advanced services"? Well, ssh access, multiple domains/account, jabber server, decent control over a unix environment, the hidden .snapshot backup directory which has saved my butt more than once. In addition to the affiliate system (which ever host has...) Dreamhost also realizes that if they provide features that are important to the digerati of the world then those people will be satisfied customers - and the digerati are the ones most likely to go around in a forum on a blog about blogging and write rave reviews (/me looks at self...chuckles).

Chris - the multiple domains per shell account feature is what saves me from keeping track of 20 different accounts on 10 different hosts. It also saves me a tiny little pocket of cash each month since I just pay for the one account. The only accounts I have to track outside of Dreamhost are my customer accounts - and I get paid for those :)

Dreamhost support is about as good as every other budget shared host that I've had - they take a day or so and their response isn't always perfect but that's the same from every shared host! Occasionally their email servers go wonky or get blacklisted - but the same is true on all the other budget providers. Sadly, if you want really solid support and performance you need to pay for it.

Dreamhost also recently changed away from directly offering dedicated servers and now are a sales channel for Hosting.com.

On the spectrum between the budget providers and the RackSpace fanatical support, I recommend Codex Host. They provide a CMS installation - it's Drupal. I haven't used them but I've talked to the guy behind it and his goal is to be somewhere between the two. I have some faith in his ability to get there. Bryght.com also offers managed installations of Drupal and their setup is very slick. It's a bit pricey compared to the budget services, but you're getting a lot of value for that money. Figure it's $20-$30/month more than a budget host, but if that saves 15 hours of your time over the course of the year, it's worth it!

So, those are the features and decision poitns that are important to me. To do a hosting comparison it's really important in my mind that we point out what features we're grading.

>>ssh access

An absolute essential.

I also like to get dedicated IP's for all my domains (not that that is very many these days..)

I've done well with Bluehost: good uptime, advanced email features, helpful install scripts, and responsive service.

We've all had bad experiences with hosts, and mine have been with Omnis. It's the only host I've ever lost data with: a whole month's worth of blog entries after they crashed a server and had failed to keep proper backups. Lots of downtime, too. Stay away.

We host our blogs on ipowerweb.com and have been very happy with them. I like their customer service, their server response times and their hosting package. It should suffice for most blogs.

In February, my wife Jill's winter olympics blog had 106962 unique visitors, 457988 page views and used up 13.51 GB of the 250 GB of bandwidth. So it could have handled around 1.9 million visitors that month. If you expect more than a million visitors to your blog then you should probably go with a different host. If your blog has a lot of graphics it will likely use more bandwidth than ours did.

Another budget host that I have seen get really good reviews is bluehost and I almost chose them to host our blogs, but my brother-in-law who hosts his client's sites through ipowerweb sold me on using them. In part I was sold by the fact that they don't allow you to host p*rn sites, whereas some of the other hosts that I was strongly considering did allow you to host them.

Oh, and my sites rarely have gone down. I can remember them going down once for a security fix and when I contacted ipowerweb they were quick in getting back to me. I have had other issues, but they have always responded quickly. They also have 24/7 phone support, but I have never had to contact them by phone for an issue (unlike another budget host I have used).

All the best in finding a host that works for you,
George

I've been with them since last September and haven't had a single complaint along the way. A question here or there gets taken care of on the phone by the same one or two people time and again. For anything that requires a little research, they have a ticketing system that I've used 3x, all items resolved within hours and a personal telephone call to let me know it was resolved.

I cannot think of a single reason right now why I would consider switching to another hosting company because although many of them are probably just as good or better, I've got no reasons to want to leave.

http://ocssolutions.com/

I'm using for more than a year budgetwebhosting.nl and I love it :) 99.99% uptime and lots of extras for almost nothing!

Hey, I realize I'm a newbie here, but I really wanted to pass along a little find of mine. I am an absolute RAVING fan of liquidweb (http://www.liquidweb.com). They are not exactly the cheapest, but IMHO, and especially for VPS hosting, they stand way head and shoulders above the rest.

Their customer service is like GOLD! I had some trivial question in the wee hours one Sunday morning, and I actually got a live person within four rings!!!!!! I was so shocked to have someone pick up I apologized to the guy for bothering him, but he said no problem, that's my job! :-) If you've ever been stuck on hold for what seems like half your lifetime, only to finally get a recording saying, "We're sorry, all representatives are currently assisting other customers. Please call back later." CLICK... you will appreciate how precious this is.

They also have very attractive shared hosting plans, so if you aren't quite ready to step up to VPS, then I can highly recommend them for that as well. Their setup is almost instantaneous and painless. I've yet to experience any downtime after three months or so. Their bandwidth and storage quotas are more than generous, not to mention the IPs you get included with VPS (4!!!!).

What more can I say? I guess, to put it succinctly, Yes, I have finally found a host I absolutely LOVE!

I've been using Pair for 5+ years now too. It's expensive but very professionally operated.

I feel that the performance of PHP/MySQL apps on the Webmaster accounts (not a dedicated server option) leaves something to be desired.

I have been with www.hosting365.com a few years and they just get better and better.
Its rare to achieve a personal relationship with a service provider but natural with these guys.

Thanks everyone for your responses! Looks like I've got a lot of reading to do this weekend. I'll have some comments to share with you later.

How is the hosting365 service on February29th?

;)

Do you get 4 years of free hosting if you buy in a leap year?

Hmm... you know, actually... more than just a facetious comment, that would be a cute promo contest.

SprialHost
I've been with them for years and they are good!

Greggles - "filmstallkers complaint that a budget host didn't do a perfect job of a host transfer."

I never said "didn't do a perfect job", I said "failed miserably".

The details were days of downtime for the web and email redirection with no response from helpdesk. Bit more than "didn't do a perfect job", that's didn't do any job - not providing the service they were contracted to complete.

They did cancel my order and refund fast enough though.

I've been very happy with 1and1.com

"I just had an idea, see what you think. Whoever comes out tops I will get an account and give them a review so you don't have to risk your hard earned cash. Worthwhile or waste of time?"

Love it. That's something that's missing from the dialogue-at-large on this topic

Well, I've just posted my list of required features - in a post on hosting features. Let me know what you think - do you agree? Disagree?

I've been using Jumba for a while now and they're pretty good. They are a really small host based down here in Australia, but they offer a free personal package and have an automated install of wordpress (using fantastico).

I dont know about 24/7 support, but they have always been prompt with my email questions (within a day) and no downtime (that i ever noticed)

Support responds quickly, price is OK, many features and ++, large space and ++, huge bandwidth and ++

I've been using a Micfo reseller account for about a year now. After our last host had a data loss, we were left with a 2 week gap in our data. (They didn't do backups!!)

We moved to Micfo and haven't had a problem since. Their support is quick and usually fairly helpful. They have a 24/7 support hotline. And, great prices to boot.

I'd recommend them to anyone and everyone!

I've been using 1&1 Internet (http://1and1.com) for about 2 1/2 years now. They have great features for great prices. Lately, though, it seems like my websites have been crawling, taking anywhere from 12 to 50 seconds to load. I have a friend who also uses 1&1, and he experiences the same slowness on his websites. Does anyone else use 1&1, and if so, have the same slowness problems?

I am on 1&1 too (in Germany) but no slowness. But I had some bad experiences with the MySQL server connections and also the main server had some seldom timeouts.

I just found out the president of my host, bluehost, has a blog. They just went up in my estimation!

Yeah, I do...

I have been using eHosting, a Vancouver based company for many years, for many websites.

Have never had a down-time.. and their support is superb.

http://www.ehosting.ca/

Tom

I've been with DreamHost for years and I would (and do) recommend them too. They are a good, solid choice. They respond fairly quickly to support tickets, although I haven't had to put many support tickets through.

Even though I am very happy with DreamHost I recently tried to open an account with BlueHost as well. I found them to be very rude and I was not at all impressed with the way they do business.

If you want to know the details:

I'm in New Zealand using a mobile wireless internet connection through the big monopoly telco here. For some reason my IP address is US based though.

I signed up for BlueHost, gave my address details as NZ, their sign-up process said successful transaction. They charged my credit card, but then wouldn't give me access to the services I had paid for.

Every time I tried to login the form said my address details were incorrect. But they were not. I put through a support ticket.

The support reply came from their billing department saying more or less, "you say you are located in New Zealand but your location is the US. How do you explain that?" I had to ask twice before I found out they were coming up with the US as my location based solely on my IP address. They suspected me of engaging in credit card fraud. Rather than verifying my phone number with the credit card company and ringing me to check if I had placed this transaction or not, they were putting the onus of proof on me.

Besides the fact that they felt their method of determining my 'location' was flawless and implying I was lying, what really got me was that they charged my credit card, even though they suspected I was using the card fradulently. So I cancelled my account and asked for a refund, there is no way I'm going to deal with a company who treats customers that way.

Donna, I recommend contacting this guy http://mattheaton.com/

...don't forget that you'll never get a chance to use the ALL the bandwidth and/or space storage.

You'll end up upgrading or searching for another Host due "excessive resource usage".

Easy to say, very hard to prove.

diferencial, if you're referring to Dreamhost, you may want to take a look at this post about CPU usage at the Dreamhost blog. The CPU Minutes FAQ on the Dreamhost Wiki is also useful. Unlike some hosts, Dreamhost is willing to detail what exactly their policy is about CPU minutes.

After a long break from the blogging world, I am back. And think this is a good place to start. I have been using MJZ Hosting for the longest time. Pretty reliable - and for an almost a one-man show, Matt has been exceeding my expectations on many fronts. It is Linux-based hosting. What you can't beat is his pricing. Check out his prices and you'll know what I mean.

I recommend www.Mediatemple.com, their very reliable, 24/7 support and you can even earn roll-over bandwidth...depending on the package you choose.

Your topics are a bit advanced for me but I'm interested.
More and more hi quality free services abound. Would it be utterly ridiculous for me to recommend Yahoo Business solutions ? Just a thought.

All the best,
Robert

I love my hosting company Myriad Network. I have included them in the list of reliable web hosting companies I built

1&1 are a good host, but because they have offshored their call centres, the engineers can't understand what I'm saying, which makes calling for support frustrating at times.

Dreamhost are simply awful. If you've got a serious website, don't even consider them, especially after recent performance. I'm gradually moving my domains away from them, hence I've been looking at the new MediaTemple offering - grid server.

Hello,

From my personal experience (and from what I've heard), you should steer WELL CLEAR of APlus.net. I found their support to be extremely time intensive. I swear on my life .. I once was on hold with their "dedicated support" team one Saturday for about one hour .. only later to be told: "Oh, they were out to lunch". Then why did the recording tell me to please hold, we are experiencing high call volume??.

APlus misunderstood my requirements from the beginning. They waffled in their offerings and competencies. Their support was quite bad (especially when getting their "dedicated support" in Bulgaria - it was very tough to get someone in San Diego on the line). I was quite disappointed in them from the beginning. But I was eager to go into production, so endured them for a while. But finally, after it took them several attempts and two weeks to open a port, my web developer told me that he heard horrible things about them .. and that it's better to switch sooner rather than later. So I did. I switched to Phatservers.net, and let me tell you .... it's truly like "night-and-day". These guys are extremely responsive. And quite competent. I'm SOOOO happy I switched, and I thank them all the time. I also thank APlus all the time, too ... by giving me such a bad experience, I have a contrast by which to appreciate true professionals. Thank you APlus!

I own this company but we give great support, you can call me direct any time with problems if any develope. We are small but good.

Currently I am with dreamhost and I have to say that yes their support kind of does suck pretty bad, but the service is outstanding. I am a PHP Developer learning Ruby on Rails and the abilities they give you can not be touched.

What is Logical-Host?
Logical Host is a Free Hosting site that provides members the best hosting around with packages ranging from 1Gb Space to 50Gb for free!. We also have the best support around and can beat any hosting or free hosting companies out there.

Why should I go there?
if you are ever in need of hosting, why pay for it when theres the opportunity to get a better host for free, all you do is post Onetime and claim your hosting which is waiting for you.