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What NT Web Hosts Are Good Web Hosts?

Posted by Cliff on from the finding-the-right-service-provider dept.

CritterNYC asks: "Anyone know of a good NT Web host? I've had 3 different hosting providers over the last 3 years and had horrible experiences with all three: downtime, unpatched servers, e-mail problems, security issues, configuration issues. Even tried one of the 'top-rated' hosts and it was even worse. Most of my problems can be traced to poor support. (I've administered NT and know what it's capable of.) I have a client store written in ASP and SQL7 to take live soon and am having trouble figuring out where to put it. Any suggestions?"

16 comments

  1. Re:Republicans then. by billybob2001 · · Score: 1

    They're all installing G dubya Basic.

  2. Plugit! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    http://www.plugit.com seems to do a pretty good job for us.......... pure NT.

  3. A Plug... by lythander · · Score: 3

    The company I work for, ServerVault , does secure, managed hosting. Check the link for the specs, but we work closely with clients to do what they need done. Super secure and super redundant. We can put up a box to your specs., and maintain it at whatever level you like -- hands-off, or watch it like a hawk and apply every patch that comes out (this last isn't the usual case, esp. for customers running custom apps as these fixes usually require a reboot, and often break those custom apps). It's up to the customer what level of support they want. We have lots of multi-OS expertise in house, 24x7 monitoring, etc.

  4. Check out Vservers by jsfetzik · · Score: 1

    Check out vservers.com . I use their *nix hosting, not NT, but they have been pretty good.

    1. Re:Check out Vservers by whydna · · Score: 1

      I have been using Vservers for over a year now... while i'm pleased with the price and services offered, my connection to them always seems increadibly slow...

  5. Good Servers / Co-lo facilities by Jordan+Block · · Score: 1

    One that I know of which is very good is NetNation.

    They've got locations in Vancouver, Sandiego and London. I've got 2 boxes at the Vancouver facility, and used to run off their hosted servers. The service has been great, and the uptime has be perfect. Hope that'll help.

  6. Good one by marklein · · Score: 1

    I've used CIHost in a variety of functions for a long time now. Very good in my experience.

    They had a huge server outage a few months back and the president himself wrote a letter to all the domain holders regarding it. I don't expect that it would happen again.

  7. No NT hosts are good Web Hosts by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 3

    Seriously, not just standard Slashdot Microsoft bashing. Look at Netcraft's uptime statistics. At the time of writing none of the top fifty most reliable sites are running on NT. That's no accident: NT just isn't robust enough for this sort of application.

    --
    I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
    1. Re:No NT hosts are good Web Hosts by lythander · · Score: 2

      But NT's reputation precedes it here. Could it be that because of NT's stability issues, those users regularly reboot their boxes? Especially in a load-balanced or other redundant system, that could be done without affecting availability, which is the TRUE measure of a website's usefulness, not uptime.

    2. Re:No NT hosts are good Web Hosts by blintz · · Score: 1

      According to Netcraft's FAQ, NT after SP4 does not display uptime information reliably.

  8. msidg.com rocks! by dudifeuer · · Score: 1

    Check out msidg. They have phat hosting, and they also do web development so they know what it's like to need good uptime and the like. They are alos really nice, I have dealt with them on a number of occasions and they are very honest.

  9. Only good NT host by musique · · Score: 1

    The only good NT host is a dead NT host! (I know, not that funny.)

    Host your own and subscribe to a good NT security newsletter, if you must use NT. Personally, I find Linux+PostgreSQL 7+PHP4 to be a superior alternative in speed, coding ease, and cost (given that the web copy of SQL Server 2000 will be $20,000!)

    Don't try to run Chili!Soft ASP for Linux as an alternative. It doesn't work. It tries to keep one connection to the database and when that gets lost, it never tries to reconnect (like an idiot) and you have to restart the Chili!Soft ASP daemon.

  10. Good NT company by avandesande · · Score: 1

    I have had excellent service from www.dn.net, where they have dedicated servers for reasonable prices. And don't listen to the rest of the people here about reliability, if you have considerable investment in ASP, it is cheaper for you to set up an AT job that reboots the server once a week than to recode it in PHP. Our local ISP monmouth.com supposedly has good NT services as well. Good Luck!

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  11. Whatever you do... by nootrop · · Score: 1

    I can't recommend a good NT host (never found one), but I will tell you that you should stay away from Interland like the plague (I can't even bring myself to make their name a link). I've seen C64's stay up longer than them. Daily support calls for weeks on end, terrible customer service and problem resolution, along with many levels of incompetence. I eventually ported any scripts/programs I had and moved to Unix based hosting. Although that may not be an option for you.

  12. Cheap Plug (TM) by MikeSweetser · · Score: 1
    I'm biased, but I suggest Cyber World Internet Services We run on some pretty beefy Windows 2000 servers off a T-1, and support ASP. We also have a dedicated SQL Server (v7.0, free to Enterprise customers). $9.95/month.

    http://www.cwiservices.com

    Mike

  13. Make That A *Dual* T-1 by MikeSweetser · · Score: 1

    I mistyped - Cyber World runs off a dual T-1, soon to be upgraded to at least a T-3, if not more. Oopsie. :) Mike