Good Web Hosting Companies?

[Manfred Lopez]

Probably misleading advertising again. If it's cheap hosting, then it's probably some un-important part of WB, ABC, etc.

If it's expensive hosting, they are getting a very different product (and probably level of service) than you are getting.

I know I know... that's why I put a smiley next to my claim. Media temple does offer expensive options for those companies and I know my little tiny site is on the bottom of the barrel priority-wise for them... but then again I just have small site so I really don't care right now.

What seems great with MediaTemple is that I can probably grow my site there without too much trouble. Their claim to fame seems to be able to handle sudden spikes without any problems at all since they spread all sites over all their servers so it becomes this giant, self-aware entity that one day will take over the world... or something like that. :tongue:

 

[Andrew Gentle]

We use Dreamhost and have found it to be very good in terms of reliability and data allowances (unlimited everything).
The trick they use is to get people who sign up on discounted deals and then put the prices up to normal. We got our entire first year of hosting for less than our thirteenth month. It's around $10/month now, which isn't too bad.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

I use Servint http://www.servint.net/ t

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm in the process of moving all my stuff over to MediaTemple now. I guess it's a good excuse for me to actually build myself a new web site too.

I was still using InMotionHosting partially because the service was OK and the price wasn't too bad. I've butted heads with them once or twice before on usage policy. Anyway, I have to say goodbye to them after a little ordeal this weekend. They did some sort of DNS update on their servers, but it apparently didn't propagate through to all their hosting accounts. Or at least that's what I'm being told... I was busy all weekend and didn't notice, but I've been without email and have had non-functional sites for a couple companies here for the past 48 hours. No fun to have dozens of people calling me on monday morning asking why their email accounts are not working or they can't access a web site, etc.. I was told the fix would propagate through their system in a couple hours close to 4 hours ago... Starting to get impatient.

Ketch, I looked at servint today and chatted with them a bit. Seem like an OK bunch, but I didn't think they were offering very much for the price. I've used Media Temple off and on and I have most of the bigger sites I have designed for clients hosted with them these days. My only complaints about Media Temple is the bandwidth allocation and fees. Overages are $0.25/GB... That's painful. Then again, most of the "unlimited" providers out there are not truly unlimited. I've had DreamHost, BlueHost and InMotion shut me off for bandwidth usage before. They claim unlimited, but if you read the fine print, some of them still cap bandwidth around the 500GB to 1TB mark. Or if you put too much load on their systems, they'll just shut you down and come up with some lame excuse or some form of smoke screen. Had a client site last year, hosted with one of those guys, make the front page of Digg. Hosting provider pulled the plug and it took 3 or 4 days to get the site back, just so we could salvage blog responses, etc.. And move it to a different host.

 

[Martin Weiss]

I know my little tiny site is on the bottom of the barrel priority-wise for them...

Over the years I've been in contact with MT customer's service a few times, and even though I have the smallest of all possible plans, they always responded within a few hours, and were very helpful when calling on the phone. They really seem to heave a 24/7 customer support. They are 4th host I have had in about 15 years, and the one I am most happy with.

(For example, two weeks ago some of their customer's databases were hacked due to crappy passwords chosen by said customers. MT decided to take it safe and changed all passwords, and made that automatically.
Also, they allow for multiple sites hosted on the same account, and to have multiple databases.)

 

[Barry Gregg]

MediaTemple is excellent.

Globat is really, really bad. Terrible customer support, they kept charging after the account was canceled, and worst of all they stole my domain name.

 

[Martin Weiss]

worst of all they stole my domain name.

Yeah, it is important to use a reputable domain vendor, some have it in their agreements that they are actually the owner of the domains that you are "purchasing".

I learned that the hard ways in the 1990s when I lost cinematography.org to some shark...