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Identifying and Avoiding Dishonest Hosting Providers?
An anonymous reader asks: "Recently I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with the buyout and resulting problems problems of Managed.com by WebHostPlus, Alphared (aka Orangefiber) being dishonest about backup facilities (no power backups and not multi-homed), and CalPop overselling bandwidth. What can we do to protect us from these companies, they all seem to be have web sites and be real companies, but we seem to get scammed by them. The dishonest ones look a lot like the honest ones. We can't afford the attorney's fees or to build a data-center, and that is why we pay the monthly fee to host a server, but the companies do not have what they claim to, nor do they care about the customers. We contacted two attorneys in the United States and they said that the companies didn't have any assets worth going after. What does Slashdot think of these problems and what can we do to avoid them?"
Swing by http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and check them out before putting money down. A really solid community, where SOMEONE will have experiance with any given provider. And many of the members are more on the profesional side of thigns, not what another comment here refered to as "the clueless PHB set".
I don't know what your exact requirements are, but http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ is the best hosting provider I have ever stumbled across.
They charge *only* what you use, and I havent had any problem with my webstie. Even when once they reported some sort of attack, nothing seemed particulary at issue in any of the sites they host.
You can also host anything you want.
Check them out.
-AC
For the most, it will be hard to avoid, especially when another company aquires your former host. I ran into this recently when WHP (yep, the same company in the OP) bought out Netbunch. It went from a crown jewel of a hosting company into a nightmare almost overnight.
Blotched migrations (why keep the nice shiny fast servers, when we can move you to our own slow oversold ones?), horrible support (tickets unanswered for weeks or closed without reply), constant downtimes (usually 2-6 hours / day for weeks on end), and completely incompetent techs (Can even follow simple instructions it seems).
WHP doesn't seem to have a grasp on how to handle migrations, nor cares to learn from their mistakes. Just google them to see their handy work all over the place. Which leads to the best advice anyone can probably give, research the host fully first. A hosting provider not showing up in any of the webhosting forums is not always a bad thing, as it seems to be human nature to complain 10x as much as praise. Along as the host isn't "new" then you should have plenty to go off of.
Also, find out when they were started, and be sure to google the whois address and the support's telephone number to see if you get any hits. A lot of bad hosting providers have multiple sites under different company names, but ofcourse have the same main office and the same support hotline.
Yea.. I am not quite sure what this guys is trying to host (single site/server or more) but if he is talking about law peps I would assume it is something large.. so take this little bit I do
before I host anything any where (now note I get hosting for 2-24u at a time) I ask for tour of the NOC.. I want to see where I will be at - this is where I look at what is around that - most people and NOC's label peoples servers very noticeably and you can see what other companies host there at that exact place.. when I have a list and I get home.. I call and ask them, if you can get a hold of the person that is in charge of it they will give you honest answers..
the hosting company will tell you everything you want to hear. their clients (and not the ones on the list the company gives you) will tell you what they wanted to hear before they started hosting there.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
http://www.dreamhost-sucks.com/
Dreamhost is nice for a small site, but there is an unpublished CPU limitation that you can't go over, meaning that unless you're serving a few large static files, you're going to hit that cap before you ever hit their oversold promises. I use dreamhost, and they're OK, but you should know their limitations.
By the way, if you DO decide to use dreamhost, use the MAX97 code instead... the parent's code gives them $90 and you $7. MAX97 takes the entire referral fee off your bill.
Especially at the low end, you have to do a bit of searching on sites like SitePoint forums or WebHostingTalk. Keep in mind, almost every large web host will get a bad review now and then; however, as long as there doesn't seem to be a large number of complaints, you're off to a good start. Unfortunately, with hosting, it is possible to offer pretty decent basic hosting packages at very low prices. If the host is good everything is automated, hardware is cheap (for everyone), and bandwidth at a datacenter is cheap. So it's not safe to assume that you get what you pay for.
The best thing to do IMHO, is to get a personal reference from either a comparable website to yours or a friend who actually uses the product. For instance, when I was looking at VPS's about two years ago, it was very reassuring to find out that Damn Small Linux was hosted with the provider that I had short-listed (and eventually chose).
But it is like you pay more than if you go to the site and sign up with the MAX97 referral code, which saves you a whopping $97 rather than the paltry $7 you're offering...