Web hosting recommendation.

looks awesome and i would gladly sign up... can you, or anyone else, vouch for their shared hosting plans? thanks!

 

I grabbed a dedicated server and I have to say I've been very impressed with their service. Their support team is actually on the same campus as the machines so they can address problems quickly. I wanted to install something off the windows CD at 2 am in the morning. I called them up, a guy answered 1st ring, he didn't know how to install the specific feature I wanted but he walked down to my machine and put the windows disk in the DVD for me.

 

Now that's impressive!

I was going to recommend DreamHost for folks who can't afford LiquidWeb. If yuo really cannot afford more than peanuts (i.e. it's your first game and you're working out of your bedroom) then DreamHost gives by far the best service of the four or five hosts I've used. But I also have to accept that cheap comes at a price. The DH guys do miracles, but there is a limit to the service they can offer at the ridiculous low prices they charge. When I am able I'll probably move to LiquidWeb.

 

I'm with dreamhost, they have a fair bit of downtime (not so much lately in fairness) and their servers seem overburdened (or just plain slow at times) compared to others.

However, they are cheap and generally reliable/decent features - I wouldn't recommend them though from my experience, and their newsletter style is annoying, everything is a joke (even your site being down for half a day) to the guy who writes the newsletter, however I suppose he's just trying to "keep it real" or something, i'd rather have more uptime and less jokes.

 

I use Godaddy's hosting (Metropolis?) for my shared server stuff. The price is super cheap and I haven't noticed any downtime. Even recently when supposedly they were having problems, my sites were up. However their $20 a year email service sometimes has problems... Once and a while Thunderbird times out after connecting to the server.

EDIT: I have canceled Godaddy's email plan because they now silently filture out spam on all email plans - and you can't turn this "feature" off. After missing a few emails from Asia, I found out they were getting caught in this new spam filter. There's no way to recover these lost messages or even find out how many were lost. This makes Godaddy's email plans completely useless for anyone who can't afford to miss messages.

For the mean time I have switched to tuffmail.com for my mail account. Seems to be working well so far, but it's still too early to recommend them.

I use Hostdime for my dedicated server. Recently they've been fantastic. No downtime and my FreeBSD server hasn't been rebooted in at least a year. However I had a lot of problems when I first started with them (under the Servercove name) so it may be too early to recommend them. For dedicated servers, I'm now of the opinion that paying extra for good onsite tech support is worth it in the long run. There's just such a huge sense of helplessness when your site/server is down and you can't get in contact with anyone or they aren't sending you repair status reports, etc. Liquid Web looks pretty good and I may try them in the future.

I will recommend AGAINST Yahoo for webhosting, however. I registered two domains with them in 2001 and when I finally got tired of their abysmal email service (and customer support) I tried to transfer my domains to Godaddy. Yahoo clutched onto my domains in a death grip and it took 1 1/2 months of back and forth between them and the registrar they use (Melbourne IT), both companies claiming I should talk to the other.... before I got my domains back. I swore never to use Yahoo again and since then I've recommended to everyone that they avoid giving business to those yahoos. They got the last laugh, though, because after I cancelled my accounts with them (a necessary process in their insane domain transfer procedure) they continued billing me and I just discovered it recently, four months later.

 

For me I have been extremely sastified with lunarpages. The other hosts that i'm using are Vistapages and p4host.

As for domain, i'm using namecheap.com, netfirm (4.95 per year ) and yahoo.

I may go for LiquidWeb managed server some time in the future , thanks for the recommendation

 

We are using site5
way better experience after lots of other hosters.

 

Oh hey, thread resurrection. Suppose I'll post:

We actually moved to a Liquidweb server a few months ago, very shortly after a bad move to Layered Technologies. Liquidweb has been fantastic--very prompt support for all of our questions. I monitor our server with Hyperspin, and only had a tiny bit of downtime this month (3 minute monitoring):

LW is a little more expensive, but it's definitely been worth it.

 

I highly recommend Godaddy. Cheap, easy to setup, great service and support, and it's easy to find discount codes to make it even cheaper. I paid less than 100$ for three years of hosting and a domain name!

 

I used to use LiquidWeb along time ago, when they first started up (circa 1997/98). Pretty good experience overall, although they definitely had some teething troubles back then. I left to share a dedicated server on Rackspace, which was great but crazy expensive. I've been with ServInt for the past 4 years or so and have had no problems. Would highly recommend them.

 

What about 1and1?

 

I noticed that most people don't seem to use websites from the top ten lists I see. Is this because most of these lists are rigged? or because most of them don't offer dedicated servers.

hosts like host monster are almost always in the top ten. Has any one tried a site like this?

 

not to hijack your thread mike but..

I just have to mention Servage.net as an awesome host!

This year I've had no noticeable downtime at all, 360GB of webspace, 3600GB of monthly data transfer all for $6.95 a month! Almost a quarter of what I was paying previously for an inferior setup... Yup, I'm happy with servage!

Another feature is the webdrive program which adds your server drive into your My Computer to use as a normal hdd, nice!

 

The top 10 lists you usually see are all affiliate stuff - meaning you click on them and sign up and you get a generous cut or free months of hosting (see mooktown's servage.net and Mike's Liquidweb links above tagged to them ). Many of the hosting companies used around here don't have aff programs so you won't see them in the top 10s.

 

3600 GB of monthly traffic is essentially "unlimited traffic" since 99.99% of users would not even come close to using 0.1% of that amount. So I wonder what would happen, performance wise, if they actually got a user who did use that much? In that upper range, my host offers 5 TB of traffic for $300. I trust them not to cut off or throttle back on performance if I pay that much. But if I'm only paying $6.95, I'd be a little wary. Actually, a lot wary.

Anyway, the only way to find out is to see if someone is using that much on Servage. How much are you using each month, Mooktown?

 

I looked at servage when I was shopping for a web host. I liked the high bandwidth limit, but when I read the fine print it turned out that their limit is daily not monthly. So it's 3600GB / 30 per day rather than 3600GB per month. Probably not a big deal unless you get huge surges of traffic. (The most I've ever used in a day is 5GB.)

 

Yeah, nowhere near that much unfortunately!

 

Still, 120 GB per day is a huge amount of traffic. If their typical customer used that much, I think they'd be quick to rethink their $6.95 pricing model.

 

hostmonster.com is pretty good. They have nice ratings and they have 600GB web space along with 6 TB monthly transfer.