What Are the Best Web and Email Hosts?

GreyPoopon asks: "My wife has been running a small business for a couple years now. She is currently paying for web hosting services for a domain, but has elected not to put up a web site (she doesn't need more business), instead using the service only for sending and receiving email. Recently, the hosting service has become less and less responsive, and attempts to switch monthly bills to a different credit card have been completely ignored, and she's now looking for a new provider. She's interested in both hosting service providers as well as email-only providers that will allow her to use her existing domain name with up to five mailboxes. What are the best choices, these days?"

Comments

Re:My personal experience from hosting multiple si

[fm6]

I'm also a (mostly) satisfied DreamHost customer. I do wish they would try harder to keep their software up to date. (They're still on Perl 5.6.1, which is not only ancient, but which has severe taint mode issues.) And they do dumb stuff like serve their knowledge base over SSL. That said, I have to commend them for a really good control panel system, responsive suport, and extremely good uptime.

The problem with rating hosting providers is that there are so many of them. There are hundreds that consist of a couple of people and a single server. They might start out giving good service, but flake out when their business grows beyond their ability to manage it.

Another problem is that many providers sell a good product -- if your needs happen to match the way they do business. I used to work for a hosting provider that did by people who liked having 24/7 phone support, edit-it-yourself zone files, and other geek friendly features. But they basically screwed over customers who needed a simple "it just works" solutions for web, email, shopping carts, etc. I had some frustating experiences trying to give decent support to this kind of customer, always wishing I could say, "Look, you really need to switch to a more newbie-friendly provider."

Dreamhost.com

[Ramses0]

Dreamhost (or their comparison chart). 'nuff said.

I'm on their "level 3" plan, $20/mo, great email support, 3 real live telephone callbacks PER MONTH (never had to use it), great web panel, web email, etc. Full shell, ssh (passwordless!), mysql, php, c-compilers, etc. Really well run shop. 8gb storage, 200gb transfer, 15 domains, 75 subdomains, countably infinite # of email addresses, etc, etc, etc.

I really can't emphasize enough the type of support they give. They got my issues with crontab sorted out (some unix-y crontab guy sent me some tips), passwordless SSH issues (permissions problem), checked their mailqueues when I was experiencing slow delivery, answered my questions about changing the default mailing list configurations, responded to questions about a (rare) database outage, fixed dollar amount ordering on user-contribution pages, fixed initial setup issues that I had in the first day (and more importantly, updated their scripts so future setups wouldn't cause problems). Really first-class support, usually less than 24 hour email turnaround service and you get in touch with "the right person" and I always feel like they've done the best they can do to resolve the issues. (Thank you all dreamhost employees, especially ops and support!)

If you're feeling generous, go ahead and click my referral link before you sign up, I think I'll get some money from that if you sign up (at least it's not a free iPod ;^)

--Robert