Hosting: For those of you that have been long-term (1+Year) with your host

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TechieSooner

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Lots of advice on hosting comes from folks that have only had short-term experience with their webhost.

Who here has used their current webhost 1+ Year and can share your experience with them?

I'm currently looking at Site5 or Bluehost but, being shared hosting- I don't know how good they are for long-term feasibility.

How long has your site been up with your host? Any downtime? Support issues?
 
I've been with iMountain.com (Iron Mountain Hosting) since August of 2007, myself. The package I have is a shared cluster-hosting with them. There's been very very little downtime, and they notify you via email of the status + estimated time if there is (it's happened 3 times for about an hour each in the time I've hosted with them). Support when I've had questions or issues has been amazing, they are fairly quick to respond but very thorough and polite. I can't recommend them enough, personally :). Their packages are a little more expensive than the average, but the support and quality is definitely there in exchange, as well as it being a solar-powered hosting facility which is a nice green touch (as to whether that matters to you, it's a personal preference of course).
 
I've been with Bluehost for about 14 months now, but only use it for basic stuff like SMF. Downtime is near nonexistent - I think there has only been one time for a few horus and they sent an email notification beforehand. SMF encounters a database error about once a week, but I don't know if that's a problem with the hosting or SMF.
Support has been pretty good as well, but I've only used it once outside of billing questions and whatnot. They helped me diagnose an error I had that turned out to be an htaccess misconfiguration.
 
2.5 Years with Site5 and very little issue. Great support, great uptime, FAST servers even though they are shared (big one for me, all the other shared hosts I have been on have been slooowww with lots of complicated pages).

I was on ipowerweb for a long time as well, great in the beginning but then really started to slide and the servers got to be slow. 1and1 I just hated (bad support, shitty control panel, etc.), but experiences seem to vary widely with them.
 
Kilos said:
I've been with Bluehost for about 14 months now, but only use it for basic stuff like SMF.
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What do you use otherwise?

Grentz said:
2.5 Years with Site5 and very little issue. Great support, great uptime, FAST servers even though they are shared (big one for me, all the other shared hosts I have been on have been slooowww with lots of complicated pages).
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What about Bluehost? Any experience with them in regards to Site 5? Seems they're cheaper than Site5, and I don't have to buy 3 years to get the good pricing, either.
 
Never used them, sorry.

One more little snippet, I monitor uptime via basicstate.com (polls every 15min), and for the entire year of 2009 I have 9 registered failures (aka my site was not able to be connected to). Really not bad at all for shared hosting, and all of those came up very quickly that I can remember (within a few minutes).
 
I've been with Hosting Trends for I think close to 5 years now. They've been great, although they don't have an online account management portal, but the one-on-one email customer service with them has been top notch. It's the fact that I can email a real person and they'll respond back quickly has been a big plus in my staying with them so long.

I don't know exactly what my space allowance is on the server, but at one point I was having trouble updating some pages and kept getting errors. I emailed about it and they said I ran out of allowed space and simply increased it for me. Service is less formal, but I've been very happy with them.
 
TechieSooner said:
What do you use otherwise?
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Not quite sure what you mean. Other stuff that's been run on the Bluehost servers are several CMSs (Drupal, Wordpress, Nucleus), file sharing (uploading / downloading), image hosting, FTP, and general PHP&MySQL interactivity/practice. Like I said, basic stuff. I haven't tried anything resource intensive, so I'm not sure how well the shared servers handle that. They also have SSH access, but you must submit to them a photo ID, so I have not tried that out either.

Maybe someone that's less of an 'average Joe' can pipe in and give you more of an answer that you're looking for.
 
Nah, that's fine. I had assumed you meant that you used someone else for intensive stuff already.

Grentz- never seen that before, but good idea. Especially if you need data to backup your claims if you have problems.

Odoe- I think I'd want something a bit more controllable (with an admin panel).

Still looking at Site5 or Bluehost ATM. They seem very comparable, BlueHost just seems to be cheaper.
 
i've been with Godaddy for like 4 years now and they have been perfect for me. No issues at all. I moved to them from Network Solution (who is terrible in everyway and I even worked support for their shoddy and old technology products)
 
TechieSooner said:
Nah, that's fine. I had assumed you meant that you used someone else for intensive stuff already.

Grentz- never seen that before, but good idea. Especially if you need data to backup your claims if you have problems.

Odoe- I think I'd want something a bit more controllable (with an admin panel).

Still looking at Site5 or Bluehost ATM. They seem very comparable, BlueHost just seems to be cheaper.
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If you have multiple websites, the Turbo option at Site5 is awesome. Only host I have ever seen with something like that as well. Works great, but only if you need to host a few sites.
 
Grentz said:
If you have multiple websites, the Turbo option at Site5 is awesome. Only host I have ever seen with something like that as well. Works great, but only if you need to host a few sites.
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How's this any better than just assigning different directories to different sites, unless you've got different domain managers for each website?
 
Bigbacon said:
i've been with Godaddy for like 4 years now and they have been perfect for me. No issues at all. I moved to them from Network Solution (who is terrible in everyway and I even worked support for their shoddy and old technology products)
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I'd plan on using for Email as well, Godaddy only allows 1GB of that unless you also go and buy one of their email packages.
 
Have you looked into the MediaTemple (gs) grid service? I've been working with MediaTemple for a while now (lots of clients use them) and have never had any problems. Their customer service is top-notch.

I recently got a dedicated virtual (dv) server with them, and it's simply amazing!
 
No Hostgator love?

I used Hostgator for over a year under their shared hosting plan and was very satisfied. I like CPanel and that is what they use, their support is quick (ticket system), you can get shell access for free by opening a ticket to have them enable it (it is not enabled by default), and they keep people updated about up/down time on a per server bases on their forums.

I've since switched to their top level reseller account (over a year ago) and have still been very pleased. I had a problem initially with the server they moved me to (for the reseller account) and had it handled quickly with a ticket. The nice thing was, the issue was fairly complicated and I was worried their online techs would be clueless... and well the first one was, he quickly moved the ticket to someone who spoke my language and we had the issue tracked down and fixed by the end of the day.

I've also used GoDaddy, Site5, and 1on1 for various projects over the years. GoDaddy servers were good, but I do not like their account manager at all, very sluggish. I had a good experience with 1and1 but I've heard plenty of not so good experiences at WebHostingTalk. It's been ages since I used Site5, but they were really good back then (~7 years ago?).
 
Hostgator is #3 on http://webhostingjury.com/

I just don't want to commit to anything long term yet, so the 1 year prices is what I'm looking at.

I must say reading up on them, most people's reviews are like yours, they all note the intelligence of the techs. I'll have to add them into my pool. I think it's coming down to Site5 or HostGator...
 
TechieSooner said:
How's this any better than just assigning different directories to different sites, unless you've got different domain managers for each website?
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It is like you have a hosting package for each site. Separate logins, separate domain managers, separate quotas (that you set), everything is separated.

Much better for security and simplicity (forwarding domains to subfolders and such gets messy quick).
 
Grentz said:
It is like you have a hosting package for each site. Separate logins, separate domain managers, separate quotas (that you set), everything is separated.

Much better for security and simplicity (forwarding domains to subfolders and such gets messy quick).
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Could be useful if you're re-selling I guess, or hosting multiple sites that each has a different Administrator for.
 
Hello,

I would surely like to share my experience about my present UK web hosting company ..have been with them for 1 year now I had 0 down time and best customer support, true 24/7 tested them on Christmas and new year as well, got help on live chat as well as emails instantly,

Anyone looking for UK web hosting services should surely try them.. and they are really cheap as well check out http://www.webhost.uk.net/shared_hosting.html.

Any one wish to know my site with them PM me..
 
I've been with Axishost.com for 3 years now and am getting ready to write a review for them on webhostingtalk.com. I use a start reseller plan for my multiple domains. I have had only 1 problem this past year and that was my cPanel license expiring for some reason. It was fixed in an hour.

Oh, and before you get too excited, there is no such thing as unlimited space and bandwidth that some sites advertise. hard drives have physical limitations and bandwidth has to come from somewhere so I would reach the ToS for a hosting provider that offers unlimited because they are known to cut your service off if you exceed so much each month.
 
TechieSooner said:
Could be useful if you're re-selling I guess, or hosting multiple sites that each has a different Administrator for.
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You cannot resell on them anymore. But it is very useful to keep things organized and separated form each other (security).
 
I've been with 3 hosts in the past and my current one (LiquidWeb) is BY FAR the best. Amazing customer service, proactive monitoring and alerting, fabulous reliability and uptime, and their price is spot on. This month marked the first of our 4th year with them and I can say nothing but amazing things about them. I can't speak to the on off shared hosting accounts, but I'm on a VPS which (from a customer service perspective) is very similar to the dedicated offering. I use a third party independent monitoring service which pings various ports on an interval to check for uptime. Over the last rolling 9 month period it has reported no downtime at all. LiquidWeb even emailed me a couple months ago with a date and time (which was in the middle of the night) that a possible 3 minute downtime would occur for switch maintenance. Their service is top notch, and I would recommend LiquidWeb to anyone in a heartbeat.
 
I'll add another vote for Site5. I've been with them a little over two years now and had great service the entire time despite issues with some of the servers and such. The new owners (Ben and Joel) took over in Oct 08 and have been working very hard to improve things. Hardware upgrades, regular software updates, support improvements, central email cluster, and such. You can read more about stuff on their blog http://www.site5.com/blog/

The turbo option is basically your typical WHM/Cpanel reseller account, but they have their custom skin and simplified things greatly. As Grentz noted you can't use it as a reseller alternative, but it's great for separating sites for organization and security. I use them to create subdomains for testing stuff and when i'm done just delete the account.

In my mind the best part of hosting with Site5 lately has been their interest in improving things. You can find Ben on their forums regularly helping people if only asking for their ticket numbers to check on how support is handling things. Heck I asked him about getting gzip support figuring a month or two later I might see something... No, it was already planned and they were setting it up as needed. I asked Saturday and Monday it was setup on a shared server! I suspect the delay was Ben taking the weekend off to relax ;)

Oh, I monitor my site with basicstate and get great uptime as well. Oh, and if you watch their discounts you can find up to 30% off using coupon codes. Right now it's "JAN2010SAVE27" try changing the 27 to 28, 29, or 30 and you might be able to get even more off...
 
TechieSooner said:
Hostgator is #3 on http://webhostingjury.com/

I just don't want to commit to anything long term yet, so the 1 year prices is what I'm looking at.

I must say reading up on them, most people's reviews are like yours, they all note the intelligence of the techs. I'll have to add them into my pool. I think it's coming down to Site5 or HostGator...
Click to expand...

I've been with many hosts, past and present for years worth of time. I will try to comment on all of them later, but I figured I'd chip in my opinion of Hostgator since you're looking at it.

I currently have a reseller account with them for a little over 11 months, not quite a year yet... but almost there. I opened up the account at the very beginning of February last year. They offer a lot of great features for their resellers which is ultimately when led me in their direction. They have been releasing a lot of great tutorial videos in their support forum to help you do the most basic functions to more intermediary changes.

The servers have been reliable and speeds have been adequate. I have never sent a ticket in to them because their live chat support seems to always be there waiting to help. The wait to speak to a technician is never long (never waited for more than 2 minutes) and they have assisted me to my expectations or beyond whenever I have contacted them.

They are very honest and open to their customers about their business practices and direction. They have a long standing reputation of upholding their quality regardless of how large they grow (which has been a problem for many hosts with me in the past). They also just started offering VPS hosting which is nice middle point from their shared/reseller plans to their dedicated. This allows you to move up your level of hosting as your site/business expands with a good variety of options.

If you're looking for a quality host, I would highly recommend Hostgator. I currently own or manage 3 hosting accounts with three different companies for about a year or more (Hostgator-1yr, Midphase-5yrs, Knownhost-3yrs is included) and I have owned or managed accounts with many other companies in the past (Bluehost-3yrs, Dreamhost-3yrs, Ipowerweb-2yrs, Godaddy-1yr, Network Solutions-3yrs etc). Hostgator thus far has been the best.
 
I HIGHLY recommend Site5. I've been with them for almost a year now and haven't had any problems. Their support gives off an enthusiast vibe. I've used other hosting sites in the past and they've all been too slow for my needs. I build webapps that are heavily user intensive. I first went with Godaddy for hosting and quickly found their services to be WAY too slow for any AJAX application. Even the simplest httpxmlrequest would have a huge delay. Site5 is very quick and works for my most demanding apps. My only complaint is that SFTP uploads seem to be limited to 1Mb/sec. This shouldn't me a problem for most people, but does cause be to wait on some uploads. Their support is second to none though. If you have ANY question about hosting or websites, they can answer it.
 
Here are some other reviews:
Midphase: Their customer support is average at best. They offer unlimited hosting, but they set their bandwidth limit very low for new accounts (when account was opened). This has shut down my client's website very quickly and he barely went over 5GB of bandwidth for the month. Contacted support and was told we are required to monitor our bandwidth manually through cPanel and when we get close to reaching the cap we have to contact them and they'll increase our bandwidth. At the time they referred to their bandwidth as "unmetered." I asked them if they found the irony in the fact that they require their customers to manually monitor their "unmetered" bandwidth for over usage. They did not.

They have upgraded their plans since the account was opened with them, however, they never upgraded their previous accounts. For example, they used to offer only 3 databases per account, but now they offer unlimited. The hosting account my client has still only has 3 databases available.

They link the cpanel login/password to your main database password and do not allow you to add new users to this database or unlink the password. My client requested a password reset on his cPanel (because he forgot it) on multiple occasions, when the password was reset his websites were taken down. In all instances Midphase did not warn him of such possible issues.

After this past New Year (at midnight server time) his sites went down. It was clearly a server configuration issue regarding time based on the php errors. I contacted support and had a good conversation with a technician. However, I found out later that the site owner (unknowledgeable) had also contacted support and their response to him was that both of his websites hosted on that server were hacked. They were able to quickly get them back up, but I didn't appreciate that they either lied to him or were that clueless to give such a response.

Knownhost - I've had an account with them for a few years now. At the time they were getting great reviews on a few web hosting forums. I use them mostly as a test box for personal domains. Uptime has been good. I went with them because at the time they had very cheap, reseller plans that didn't have all the storage/bandwidth options of most reseller plans. These plans are no longer offered, however, I have been grandfathered in. However, by today's standards my storage/bandwidth for the price is a bit outdated and I have been planning on closing my account with them and moving my domains to my Hostgator business account.

Customer service has rarely been needed, but when it has the support has been average. One thing that really scared me about them is that one time I logged into my cPanel and it logged me into another user's cpanel with full access. I took screen shots and showed them. I allow my web browser to store username/password so I know it was not a mis-entering on my part. Their response was that it was impossible and refused to admit or even look into the fact that I was able to log into another member's cPanel. This was some time ago, however, I would never use this host for confidential or eCommerce purposes. This instance scared me.

Bluehost - I haven't used them in a very long time, but a good friend of mine hosts a website with them still and has been very happy with their service. I had zero issues with this host. Speeds were average, customer service was never needed. Site was always up, no hassles. I know people who have been hosting with this company for almost 10 years and he still swears by them.

Dreamhost - I bought an account with them when they had their discounted pricing with coupon codes that everyone on the internet and their mother was taking advantage of. I kept the account open with them because they kept increasing my bandwidth to absurd levels and had really good customer rewards. Eventually their growth overcame them and their servers turned to crap. I complained and they moved me to a lesser populated server with less people mucking them up, but eventually even that server started to get bogged down. I was moved again and it wasn't much better. The service was unreliable and I closed my account.

ipowerweb - I think this was the name of the company I was with. They sell hosting under a few different names. Their website looks about what I remember so I'm guessing they haven't changed much in the past 6 years. They were OK for a while, but then I started having stability issues and their customer support was not where I felt it should be. Their ticket system took too long to respond. It was usually within 24 hours, but I was used to same day responses from other providers I had.

Godaddy - A client of mine has his site hosted on Godaddy so I've worked with them to manage the site. It works. Never had to use customer support. I found it's not the fastest servers in the world, but he has never complained that his site hasn't been up. So I can't say anything negative and the positives are that they appear to have good uptime.

Network Solutions - I haven't used them in almost 10 years. But at the time they were absolutely horrible. Slow response from tech support, slow servers and unreliable. They charge a premium for their service and it truly wasn't worth it. Out of all the web hosts I've used this one was probably the worst for no reason other than at the time we were using them they were one of the more expensive hosts for what you received (storage/bandwidth, etc) and the quality of their servers was just horrendous. The site seemed to go down for a day or two every few months. Eventually the site had to be moved.
 
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Very good reviews from everyone, keep them coming! Not only benefitial to me but also to other folks here.

You folks doing this long-term have invaluable opinions over this, most reviews you see online are folks that just jumped onto it brand new, or are new to hosting and have no idea what they're doing, etc.
 
realwebhost.net

Been with them for... 6 years. No complaints what so ever. It has been down a couple of times, but was back up very fast. Support is always on call and will fix any, even user error, issues fast.

Good people. I also like that they are flexible with prices/plans. If you don't need something, or need more of something, they are very flexible to work with.
 
It has been forever since I have built a website, however, I just accepted a job for a local small business.

Will the hosts mentioned here such as Site5 or Bluehost register your domain for you?

Also, back when I ran a site I could just login to the FTP server and copy the files from the site I made with dreamweaver over and it would run perfect.....can you still do the same with these guys?
 
Bluehost - I used Bluehost for over 3 years. Reliable hosting, great support and easy to use control panel (CPanel). They are great if you are going to be hosting your own personal sites, but I wouldn't recommend them for hosting a large number of clients.

Media Temple - We have been using Media Template at work for over 2 years, and I've been happy with them so I recently switched my personal hosting from Bluehost to Media Temple. I have more control over my sites with Media Temple than I did at Bluehost. For example, at Bluehost when I wanted to update my DNS information I had to contact Bluehost support and ask them to do it. At Media Template, I have access to this and can update it myself. This might be a non-issue for some, but it's important to me and in the long run saves me a lot of time. Also, the Media Template Grid-Service is excellent for hosting a large number of clients. We host over 30 clients on our account at work and the performance is great for a shared hosting platform.
 
Been with Media Temple for a year and a half now, I believe. Couldn't be happier.
 
Ryan_Brantley said:
It has been forever since I have built a website, however, I just accepted a job for a local small business.

Will the hosts mentioned here such as Site5 or Bluehost register your domain for you?

Also, back when I ran a site I could just login to the FTP server and copy the files from the site I made with dreamweaver over and it would run perfect.....can you still do the same with these guys?
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Generally speaking, if you buy a domain at checkout with them: they'll set it up. And if not done automatically, they can help you do it.
Make sure they offer Domain Privacy though- otherwise your real address, phone, etc show up on the whois. It's a great place for spammers, solicitors, etc to contact you from. Whereas Domain Privacy puts the registrar's info in place of your own.

As far as the FTP: almost everyone (as in- I've never used someone that didn't) has FTP access. Most of these places offer web GUI backends to do it... But I like Filezilla FTP, and that's how I manage my site.

So yes to both questions, honestly.


Still haven't decided what I'm going to do yet... :D I just get cold feet when starting a web project again, just so much time-consumption...
 
I noticed that site5, BlueHost, and Host Gator all have hosting accounts (non-reseller) that say unlimited domains or unlimited websites, would these just be multiple domain names that point to the same webpage or seperate sites on the account similar to a reseller setup?
 
Kehl said:
I noticed that site5, BlueHost, and Host Gator all have hosting accounts (non-reseller) that say unlimited domains or unlimited websites, would these just be multiple domain names that point to the same webpage or seperate sites on the account similar to a reseller setup?
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You can have multiple domains with different root directories on their server.

Example:
example.com -> /Maximus825
otherexample.com -> /Maximus825/otherexample
lastexample.com -> /Maximus825/lastexample

So, technically you can still get to otherexample.com by going to example.com/otherexample, but basically you have the ability to create unlimited sites.
 
Maximus825 said:
You can have multiple domains with different root directories on their server.

Example:
example.com -> /Maximus825
otherexample.com -> /Maximus825/otherexample
lastexample.com -> /Maximus825/lastexample

So, technically you can still get to otherexample.com by going to example.com/otherexample, but basically you have the ability to create unlimited sites.
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Thanks for the answer, but now I have a follow up question. Currently I have a reseller account that is used to host multiple personal websites, so I am not fully utilizing all of the features. The price was less then 4 individual accounts at the time, but it may be more then I need now days. If i understand you right, each domain would act as a sub-folder of the primary domain name on the server side. From the users end, would otherexample.com then show up as the url example.com/otherexample/webpage.html or otherexample.com/webpage.html for each paged visited on otherexample.com?
 
Kehl said:
Thanks for the answer, but now I have a follow up question. Currently I have a reseller account that is used to host multiple personal websites, so I am not fully utilizing all of the features. The price was less then 4 individual accounts at the time, but it may be more then I need now days. If i understand you right, each domain would act as a sub-folder of the primary domain name on the server side. From the users end, would otherexample.com then show up as the url example.com/otherexample/webpage.html or otherexample.com/webpage.html for each paged visited on otherexample.com?
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If you vist them on otherexample.com then they will show up as otherexample.com/webpage.html.
 
Although this thread is getting a bit dated, I thought I'd throw in the host for my personal site, geekstorage.com. Geek Storage has been the best hosting service I've worked with for both my own site or the companies I've worked for. They have good prices, plenty of web-based tools and management options, as well as SSH access for people like me who prefer the command-line, and plenty of "cool stuff" options like Rails and such. In the few years I've been with them there has been no down time that I've noticed and the customer service has been amazing. One time I posted a C file with a buffer overflow exploit for a class I was teaching and my site was shortly taken down and I was notified that they were concerned my site had been hacked. I explained the situation and got the site back up immediately. Another great example is the shared host I was on didn't have vim installed, my preferred text editor. I sent them an e-mail asking about it and it was shortly installed and ready for my use. They do offer reselling/referral accounts if that is of interest to you.
 
I've really wanted to try Media Temple. After reading this thread, I think I'll make the jump.
 
Because I hear nothing but good about them. Customer service, reliability, freedom more so than regular shared hosting.
 
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