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Finding Trustworthy Webhosting Reviews?
Nylisk asks: "I've been searching for a new webhost for my site and upcoming sites. While searching for a host I find many webhost review sites that feel fake. They are primitive and limit themselves to a small amount of hosts to examine. They will display any where to around 30 hosts to 'review' but mostly I find sites that review only 5 or 6 hosts. When you look further you find no community on the site to provide further comment on those reviews. The site is done by a single publisher with minimal information, and most of it looks like an advertisement. There are only email links and basic submissions boxes. I was going to post example links, but why give them the publicity?
The more I snoop, the more webhosts I find that are connected. I can't say I am surprised, but to be honest its tough not to find these results from search engines. I can't seem to find anything real. Are there any websites run by a community of members who review webhosts?"
I'll host you from my home DSL connection :)
You might want to check out Webhosting Talk and ask about any hosts you are looking at, or search the forums to see what customers of the hosts are saying.
http://webhostingtalk.com/
WebHostingTalk.Com
I think classic webhosting is thing of a past. Recently I almost exclusively use dedicated servers or virtual servers. You can get one quite cheap like $20/mo. (3GB space/50GB transfer) - what you get is dedicated Linux machine (or vserver that looks and feels like dedicated machine) on which you install your distro of choice, get root on it and do whatever you wish. Also there are offers of hosting dedicated to several popular solutions - like Drupal, eZ Publish, Mambo, Zen Cart etc. - they specialize in those apps and you get installation of these with support etc. - I think that is better aproach than simply just to get an account on server and put files via FTP on it - I mean you got more in control.
I think this is the future. First of all take a look at linode.com - you will get your *own* server with full access to everything. No more waiting for ISP admin to fix that one httpd option or some permissions.
We have had no problems with them thus far, and any changes we needed to accomidate the special needs of certain sites were made in a very timely fashion, not to mention the support representatives spoke English! (I think they are based in KY)
don't know if you've got enough upload, but try http://httpd.apache.org/ I've got no problems with my DIY web hosting, but YMMV.
I was going to post example links, but why give them the publicity?
So that they get to experience the wonders of the slashdot effect?
he more I snoop, the more webhosts I find that are connected.
Yes, many webhosts are just resellers of services that they acquire from other hosting companies. Actually, many different businesses have deals like this, it is not just limited to webhosts.
Are there any websites run by a community of members who review webhosts?
There are quite a few, but they all have either too few users that they are just as bad as a single user's review, or they have so many that there are an equal number of bad and good reviews of most hosts.
Personally, I would just ask friends and local IT people how they like their providers, and what they have and what they are missing.
Video Production Support
By that I mean structure your query as problems with webhost or "webhost" dissatisfaction etc
Install, Then Run
..on Web Hosting Talk for a few weeks and it becomes obvious who the good ones are. It takes a little work, but I can think of 5 hosts right off the top of my head that have sterling reputations and aren't hard to locate.
You can usually find a number of recommendations by freelancers such as myself for hosting suggestions.
A Small Orange is really popular right now among devs. I'm setting a client up with them, myself. They apparently have superb service and reliability. Another popular one is Dreamhost. I'll be switching over to them in 6-9 months, more than likely.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ Read the FAQ for details, but the gist of it is dirt-cheap prices and enourmous flexebility.
well, in the past 6 months i've had 2 different hosts, and i have (almost) nothing but good things to say about each.
the first host i went with was dailyrazor. they provide you with a private JVM for about $20 a month, give you 10 mysql/postgresql database, a decent amount of space, unlimited subdomains, bladiblah.
good: they have excellent support. i had trouble getting hibernate working, and they were actually googling with me trying to find out what was causing my problem (the database connections would get severred it seemed and wouldn't reestablish themselves; it eventually turned out to be that hibernate's connection pooling capabilities are crap and you need to use something like c3p0).
bad: they don't support RoR. at all. i emailed them and asked them to install ruby, and they had no problem doing it. they didn't want to install rails, and said i would have to do that myself. i ended up installing rails to my home directory and using that to generate applications, and then put them in my www directory and -bam- they worked. for some reason the host didn't like this, though, and he would chown my ruby executable to root:root, which broke my application. after they did this twice, with no warning either time, and no explanation that followed their actions, i decided it was time to find a new host.
now i'm with asmallorange and, though their java support isn't nearly as good as dailyrazor's (they use resin instead of tomcat, which is really only a problem for me because i don't know resin at all), they have excellent support for rails and fastcgi. i rewrote my weblog in rails because it was easier to do that than to figure out how to change my java-weblog to work with resin.
anyways, i'd recommend asmallorange because they're cheap, have lots of capabilities (php, rails, java, perl), don't put arbitrary limits on things (unlimited mysql databases, subdomains, etc), and have pretty good support 24/7. their support isn't as good as dailyrazor's, but it's pretty close.
feel free to email me (you can go to my website and use the email) if you have any questions about either of these hosts.
hope that helps!
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
2ADV.net have some insanely powerful deals from around 12$ a month, to their 300$ a month dedicated server. They run both types of server (Linux/Windows) and the site and company was created by 2ADV.com, a successful webdesign team.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
From the Slashdot story: "The site is done by a single publisher with minimal information, and most of it looks like an advertisement."
I've found that also. Most "reviews" of ISPs are actually advertisements, and the reviewers, because they represent differently, are lying. Therefore you cannot trust them.
I have no relationship to these sites other than being a former or current customer, but:
.02 cents... BEWARE if you get on a bad one and plan to use it for anything semi-critical.
I just switch from vizaweb.com (TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE - stay far away)
to
intervantage.com - GREAT, GREAT reliable with GREAT Support.
Just my
http://www.modevia.com/ I've been using them for the longest time and i can't say how awesome their support is.
One thing i've found about web hosts through trial and error: it's hard to find a good host with awesome tech support.
I've had 3 hosts in my years that respond within "48 hours". Modevia usually responds within 2-3! Not only that but i'm truly amazed by how they are willing to help their users... just the other day i had one of my sites defaced because of my stupidity. Modevia hopped right in and help me track down how it happend and gave me some ip's of the defacers and even offered to help me switch to a app that they make sure is updated at the server level. They are not the cheapest but it has been well worth it in my eyes.
Good tech support is a must! Some advice when looking for new hosts is to e-mail the hosts support before you decided to go with them. See how long they take to respond. That will give you a good indication of what it would be like to be a customer.
Layeredtech are very professional, seem well organized, and respond quickly to any problems I have. That said, the server I rent from them runs nothing special (debian stable), and seems to hang pretty often (a few times a week), which seems really wrong:-(
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Other than by talking with friends (which isn't very scalable), it's hard to know who's good, and who is just some random loser thinking he's going to make a buck. It's really easy to put up a fancy site, even answer the phone professionally, but you only learn they're no good when your server dies on Friday evening and no one can fix it untill Monday!
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Gotta agree about Dreamhost and not just because I want the referrals. ;-)
-- Boycott Shell
I use 1and1.com myself, they seem to be quiet affordible, and have a nice linux servers to host on, besides me my borther and cousin had had good expeinces with them.
I have had dedicated servers at the following places:
NDCHost (ndchost.com)
The Planet (theplanet.com)
EV1 (ev1servers.net)
Server Central (servercentral.net)
ServerPronto (serverpronto.com)
The Planet was easily the best followed by Server Central. The Planet has mostly competent techs, good quality equipment, great network/power uptime and decent prices. The worst (and I will never work with them again) was ServerPronto. From top to bottom, the ServerPronto people were completely incompetent.
i did follow a link from someone's sig here for www.dreamhost.com and found them to be a good deal. i read a lot of good reviews about them when googling them directly and the price is good.
i've found them to be pretty relaible, a touch slow on creation of new databases, but that's more an issue with dns than anything else. what you get for the money is good.
philo
i'm not going to pimp myself out for them directly by spamming my user id here, but if you do decide to sign up for an account there they'll give some cash to whoever refered you. my journal has further info.
Hostgator , Thats all I need to say. They host my site; they called me and verified I was me after setting up the site. I had a question about JAVA and MySQL; they went out of there way to fix it.
I'll recomend them to anyone
You should check out getting a serious upgrade (for less money!) to the current CodeMonster promotion: 1 free domain registration, 15 full domains, 75 subdomains, 7680 MB Disk, 192 GB Transfer, 3000 Mailboxes, 375 Users, MIVA merchant E-Commerce, etc. for 16/mo if you pay 2 years in advance, 20/month if you pay 1 year.
PHP4/5, RoR, CVS, anon FTP server, etc. -- I've been looking around for shared hosting for all of my "little" sites to live on, and this is now it (I signed up about 10 minutes ago). If you're signing up and feeling generous you can say "jtheory" referred you... thanks.
BTW, no Java/JSP support (for those making assumptions based on my username...), but I only use Java for larger sites anyway.
For that I'm getting a little fed up with my current (little & local) host, and thinking of moving to RimuHosting.com - I can get a decent VPS for a good rate, and they have Java experience. Anyone have any experience with them?
Either online, or in RL. Talk to people, ask them which hosting company they use, if they are happy with it and why. Read the blogs of people of people you know, trust or who are into similar things as you. Jump on usenet, go to teh forums at places like webhostingtalk or at the actual hosting service itself and read what people are saying.
Ignore articles published by news sites, magazines and the like. They are out to make money and hence are biased. You cannot get a feel for how good a hosting service is, or how reliable it is, or how good their support is by playing with the hosting service's web interface for 5 minutes or by comparing feature lists, which is exactly what the journalist that wrote the article did.
I was looking for a hosting service a few weeks ago and I immediately thought of two: bytemark.co.uk and Linode. Why? Because a know a few people who use bytemark.co.uk and are happy with it and I have aread a lot about about Linode being good on places like Planet Gnome. So I compared the cost features of the two and chose the one that looked the best.
The information is out there, you just need to use it.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
If you're searching for a hosting provider, Netcraft has a rather nice table that displays server uptimes, % failed requests & other ancillary information for a large sample of hosting companies. An example of one row in the aforementioned table would be as follows:
Hosting provider = www.valueweb.net
OS = Linux
Outage hh:mm:ss = 0:00:00
Failed Req% = 0.00
DNS (Time taken for the DNS lookup of the hostname) = 0.181
Connect (first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is setup to the remote server) = 0.105
First byte (time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received) = 0.211
Total (This is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte of data is received) = 0.211
Kb/s = -
Size (K) = 0
The table displays the top 50 hosting providers with respect to failed requests, so, personally, I restricted my search to all the hosting providers that had a Linux OS (for script compatibility), and a failed request percentage below 3.0%. Given these performance constraints, I subsequently chose the cheapest suitable plan offered by a hosting company in this sample set, based on my bandwidth/disk space criteria.
I know it sounds like a /. cliche, a guy on slashdot saying you should see who supports open source, and go with that provider. But that's what I'm going to say.
Not so much because they support open source, but more because if an OSS project is hosted there, it's probably there because of the quality, not just because of the sponsorship. OSS projects are run by savvy people who know how to not stay stuck on a bad host.
If you look around at where various respected OSS sites are hosted, a few big names keep popping up. pair.com and he.net, for example. No referral links here.
But do your own research. I could not recommend the sites I use (the above two) to you without knowing your needs. If you need hand holding, go with someone else. If you want a nice clean toolbox, they are OK. If you want a company that answers the phone with a human on the third ring 24x7, he.net is good, if a little stingy with the disk space and transfer allocation.
I've been using t35.net a year and a half, they're cheap, reliable, have generous space and download limits, provide full cPanel admin backend and allow as many domain names and subdomains as you want.
Overall I would give them 10/10 every time.
I hosted with JohnCompanies and they were great! Linux and FreeBSD only, either virtual private servers or dedicated boxes, or colo your own, and real Unix admins for support if you need it.
They also offer discounts if you're hosting an open source-related, non-profit, or educational site!
The only reason I left them is that a client allows me to colocate my own servers in his cage for free... if that deal ever goes away, I'm switching back to JohnCompanies in a heartbeat.
I use Bihira.com. It's a bit slow at times. (nothing noticable on fast connections), but has a ton of features, unlimited MySQL DBs, PGQL DBs, unlimited subdomains, the whole works. VERY cheap too, $2.50 a month for the smallest package. All packages have the same features, only space and bandwidth vary. Comes with cPanel too.
As others have said, WHT is probably your best bet for reviews.
One thing to note about WHT though is that there is a "WHT Level Host" and that level is quite low - what I mean is that a lot of the time WHT attracts those $1/month overselling fly-by-night teenage (or less) managed "hosts" (who are almost certainly kids who bought a $1/month mammothly oversold reseller account) that will ignore support requests when they go on summer holidays with thier parents. Unfortunatly these hosts start out well, and they often get good reviews (probably tooting thier own horn), but very quickly they will die off.
Also make sure you know exactly what you want, ask questions. You're posting here so I'll assume that things like SSH access are important, and if you're using PHP you probably don't want anywhere that has safe_mode restrictions (and probably not open_basedir), you might also want to avoid hosts that run php as suPHP (basically cgi-mode php in a wrapper).
In short, take your time, choose wisely.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I am a novice in this. But what about geocities.com. Are they not a good one?
Bytemark.co.uk offers virtual machines using User-Mode Linux. This gives you total flexibility with the software you run, but you do need to know what you're doing. I think that the UML website links to other people offering similar things. The virtual machines have good performance, though one of my sites suffers because the disk IO bandwidth is rather less than a "real" machine. Support is good and friendly, though not perfect. They are also "free software friendly", i.e. they give cash and/or cheap hosting to free software projects. I give them 8/10.
With www.hoogetech.com and www.yupapa.com Both are fairly small, Hoogetech being the smallest, and yupapa being a tad bigger, but still small and true to their customers. I dont like going with huge hosters, from the experience I have learned. I have been w/Yupapa for about 2 years with one of my sites and w/Hoogetech for about 1 and a half, both with minimal downtime (not sure if I can ever remember any on either), great speeds, and support that should be awarded.
I use PowWeb for the Mystery Studio site (see sig), $7.77 a month, 3000 GB/month, no big problems in the 2.5 years I'm hosted with them. http://www.powweb.com./ No, I don't work for them, and I won't get a comission.
My website
Webhosting is a lot like selling used cars, or amway or other MLM pyramid schemes. There are always new players doing what they can to look like a serious business, and when they get bored or broke they sell what customers they have to the next guy as a starter kit. Those that are slightly successful get other idiots to resell their crap, in the hopes of spreading the responsibility and risk around.
I work around a number of bandwidth resellers. Their most numerous customers are little webhosting companies, quite often dozens in the same data centre. Typically a web hosting or dedicated server company is a teenager, or some young guy starting university, who has heard about how much money is to be made in buying a bunch of cheap servers, renting a rack and some bandwidth. When they go broke, usually towards the end of the school year, they sell the servers and customers on to the next sucker. Often, it is a group of very young guys using many different names for their companies, so as one name gets tarnished, they migrate to the next. When you work in the data centres, you'll see racks stuffed full of mini-PCs, and the name on the rack changes every month or two, but its the same guys and the same equipment. The worst ones have such low margins, their entire network is run from a single linux box which does it all, quagga for routing, web server, DNS (two different IP addresses on the same NIC to pretend they have 2 servers), and when the cheap-o power supply or no-name 10baseT hub fails their whole service is offline until they notice and come out to fix it. They marvel at other companies who can afford a used cisco router or two, but to them its just a luxury they can't afford.
There are a few usenet newsgroups where people discuss that industry, quite a bit of astroturfing goes on, but its usually easy enough to filter out. Some deja-googling can give you an idea if your server hosting company has been around for a while, and how they respond to problems. Other than working in the hosting industry for a while and picking up the trade gossip, there really isn't much honest information out there.
If you are in the region where the hosting company operates, ask to see their setup. If they have 75 machines crammed into a 42U rack with some cheap-ass no-name switches wedged in the sides, you'll have nothing but problems. If they have real networking equipment and a staffed NOC, you'll probably be a lot happier. Check their website, real companies have real no problem showing off the structure of their network, real-time traffic graphs, status reports and notices of planned work, and forums where customers can discuss problems. Companies you want to avoid have just a few static pages with an email address, bonus points if its a hotmail account.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
OC Host Review
This site was created to provide an impartial, unbiased system for users of OcUK Forumsto share experiences with different webhosts (both positive and negative) and for people who perhaps have never bought webhosting before to have a reliable source of information.
I have been with a webhosting company called http://www.cyanidehosting.net/Cyanide Hosting For quite a while now, and have very much enjoyed their services.
/Whitey
They have quite good uptime, and you can always talk to the admin on their irc network (irc.cyanide-x.net) about custom plans/setups.
mAiLtO: Admin@UberSkilled.com
Look at this excellent web hosting statistics site:
http://www.webhosting.info/
Check out the domain trend for the webhosting outfit you're thinking of using.
Check it's trending up!
Importantly, on the gain/loss analysis pages, check that your hosting outfit is both a) gaining domains, and b) not losing too many domains!
Think of some fast, stable sites you often visit, then use whois to find out who their host is. Atleast you'll be assured they have quality products, enough quality for those great sites not to drop them. Now it all comes down to plain comparison shopping. That's how I got my host; they host tomshardware.com.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I was just in the same boat. I have a small business and do very little traffic. My old provider, Dixiesys, was cheap and had value when I started, but the prices haven't changed in years, and I've found the servers to be painfully slow, especially for admin tasks.
Look at the webhosting forum links early on. I jumped in with Site5. Looked good, was easy to set up, and forums were very responsive. And with 12GB storage - enough for my personal and business data to all be stored (we're talking non-secure stuff here) on the ftp server, it gives me a remote backup. I'm hoping to get the FTP nightly synch working soon, so I'll have local physical backups and a remote virtual backup, along with all of my webserving needs covered for $16/mo.
No affiliation, just a new, happy customer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
After the 5th host I was recommending to customers provided bad service, charged credit cards incorrectly time and again, I just started my own and have never been happier.
We haven't advertized at all and I don't have to deal with some 9/hour guy that doesn't know how email works. One time I had a guy telling me my internet connection was the problem when I was online chatting with him!
No idea if you have any requirements with regards to geographical location of your hosting provider, but if not or if hosting in the Netherlands is an option for you...
I use for all my hosting needs. They are extremely well connected (being at the same location and on the same network as www.debian.org for example).
They support Linux, and as long as you know what you are doing, will also support other OSS based installations (using FreeBSD myself). Currently running on a dedicated server with a celeron 1800 with 1GB memory, 80GB SATA raid 1, 100mbit network connection and 50GB/month for the equivalent of approx $60/month and the nice side effect that part of what you pay is used for promotion and support of Open Source Software.
solidload.net has an interesting pricing scheme where you purchase exactly what you need instead of a higher-priced conventional plan. It seems very straight-forward.
Not really a review site but a good listing of personal colo sites. Personal Co-location Registry
All they care about is advertising - their supposed "ranking" is based on ad dollars not service.
I even found a couple of porn sites in their FastFind engine.
Stay away from http://www.tophosts.com/
IMHO, if possible, it's best to ask friends who have sites which have similar traffic profiles to your whom they use AND if they would recommend them to others.
If that isn't applicable to your situation, I would get a half a dozen companies that fit your criteria - price, capacity, etc. and then search the major web master hangouts like webmasterworld.com and sitepointforums.com and even google for previous posts of problems with those webhosts. E.g. "testwebhost.com problem" or "testwebhost.com downtime" or "testwebhost.com bad support".
Just remember to keep the results in perspective, every large webhost (and company in general) is going to have a few problems now and then. You want to find a webhost that has relatively few.
I'm sure that there are webhosts that charge $5/mo that are great, but more often than not, you get what you pay for.
I've used webhostingjuryto do research on different web hosts, and have been very impressed with the number of reviews they have. I used them to find ICD Soft. It turns out that their reviews were very true to reality. I've posted question to their IT People, and have gotten a reply within 2 minutes. I host my website at: DBZ Computer with ICD Soft. So overall I really reccomend webhostingjury.
I personally like epinions. http://www.epinions.com There are quite a few reviews there on some
Reviews For Web Hosting
I use the site a lot when I am looking for new appliances, furniture, just about anything I am planning on purchasing. Although it does not make the decision for me, I am able to see unbiased reviews.