I've always used 1&1 as well, and have been pretty happy. They give you alot of features you would never expect with a shared hosting server (EG: SSH and SCP) and all for a very low price. Like ashburnham, I have had some problems with them getting the server up after it goes down, but they have a very nice control panel (better than damn cpanel imo) ~DtD
I highly recommend 1&1 - I've been using them for over a year and had nothing but good experiences. For the price they're amazing.
I've been using JaguarPC for hosting for my business website (security software, expanding into games) for years, and the downtime's been only a few minutes over the last three years and that owing to a hardware failure that forced them to move my site to another box. They want $9.95/month for their best-bang-for-the-buck account and it's got all the bells and whistles one could want, including a ton of space and bandwidth along with support for custom CMS coding if you dabble in Perl/PHP/mySQL/etc. Or, you can use a canned package (they have several, many with autoinstallers). Full disclosure: I do get a free month of thank-you for a new account referral, but they do that for everyone. In keeping with the no-advertising rule and the spirit of the board I'm not posting any affiliate link or info.
I registered a new domain name and plan to host separately from another company but some of these companies require that I transfer my domain name to them. I find these companies to be shady at best. I want to retain separate control of my domain name. I thought I only needed to modify my domain name to point to the nameservers of the actual webhosts. Why are some of these webhosts insisting I transfer my domain names to them? I find this to be a huge turn off and rather shady.
Which web hosts are these? When you say "insist" are they actually forcing you or is this just their recommended path (for people who don't understand web hosting)? Are you sure that they mean a transfer of domain registration?
It means when you order through their forms you either get options to order a domain name as well, and the other option is you transfer your domain name to them before ordering. Then there's one that doesn't tell you anything, but to just key in your domain name. Then if you check the javascript, it calls the function 'transfer' If you didn't lock your domain name when you bought it, you're pretty much screwed if they transferred it. I don't want to name some of these companies but they have been mentioned in this thread, which is why I checked them out, tried to order then I rolled back or rather, didn't proceed since the order form on some of them are like what I described. It's shady, and those of you who're not familiar with why one should never combine hosting and domain name, will certainly get screwed if you have any disputes and want to change hosts (but your domain name is owned by them because you transferred to them when you sign up)
If they really are forcing you to transfer your domain name to them then that is pretty bad. I'm well aware of the perils of not having control over it. Without seeing the form in question I can't really comment further, though.
Figured I would add in my two cents. I looked at the Liquid host people, they seem like they have a very nice setup! For years I've consistently used two hosts: One for my web hosting, and the other for my game server itself. For webhosting I use a company called Topclasshost, and for game server hosting I use biggameserver.com These were two companies I kinda found randomly, and what I like about both of them is that they're both run by small companies/actual people which is to say that in the three years of hosting I've always worked on support with the same people (which to me I find comforting!). They also have some nice hosting packages, although TopClassHost can easily be beaten in price by other people nowadays. Our team has also tried hosting from: Ipowerweb, GoDaddy (website hosting) and Serverbeach, Aplus (dedicated servers). Ipowerweb was terrible, GoDaddy was nice but their user interface was confusing. ServerBeach was alright, but if your game remotely falls into the category of "irc" (which most games do) then count them out. Aplus was alright but we experienced a lot of issues with the network which they attributed to hacking and could never figure out/they tried to resolve the issue by selling us more 'features'. To me the most important thing has always been to work with a company that's willing to work with me, which is why I tend to favor small companies (hey, like indies!) as opposed to the big commercial guys.
Joined LiquidWeb a few weeks ago using the link here to support Indie Gamer forums. Glad I did; great customer service, no issues whatsoever with red27studios website at all (so far touch wood etc), so happy to give them a big thumbs up. Pre paying 6 months at a time gives you month free (2 months if you prepay for a year, so the economies of scale are the same). PM me if you want any more info - happy to answer questions on them.
Tested servage.net I tested servage.net and my first impression is this: The support was really fast and nice but they seem to have many technical problems (my webmail did not work and some very vital PHP functionality were not working).
Yes, the first issue were resolve quickly and I got a good impression of their support. The second issue took three days and they seemed much less professional then.
Humorous vitriol, I've never noticed everybodys be down, or am I just lucky when I check it? Admittedly a pretty basic site but one that was used to base my recommendation on. Sorry! If anyone reading this takes Pkeods advice be sure not to hold bitterness towards him a year from now if you are one of the 1% of liquidwebs users who has a problem.
Do not use Site 5. I've been with them for almost 3 years now and have only experience a few downtimes. However this week, I've been up and down continuously over the last 3 days. I don't know how much money I have lost, since I'm trying to release at the same time this was happening. First they replaced 3 failed hard drives, a raid controller, and then finally a PSU. Then the CEO had to get involved because that didn't resolve the problem. Then they finally replaced the Ram and assured everything was fine. Now today another drive failed. WTF? Just replace the whole machine and get it over with. I do not recommend them especially if they put you on the Delbin server.
Wow, that's terrible! So if I get an email saying they are "upgrading" me to a newer data center (again) it could be time to look for recommendations! Cheers Pk
Just wanted to post about how great is liquidweb. Last night instead of going to bed I decided to try implementing my own Phpbb spam protection which ended up in destroying Phpbb mySQL database...! I sent them an email and in 1 hour they restored last backup, I lost nothing. If I compare this service quality with previous host companies I was with, there's really a huge gap...
They are all those things but since it's a free service, tech support is dismal and if you plan on using a database, expect it to be offline... maybe even for long stretches of time (personal experience, btw). Otherwise, they're great for the simple low maintenance or start-up websites. Oh, and I don't know if you've read the fine print, but you have to have an active site or else it will automatically be deleted. Active, in that one person at least visits your site every month, iirc.