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Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company?
v1x writes "I have had an account with my current web hosting company for a few years, with 3 domains being hosted there (using Linux/PHP/MySQL). Recently, all three of these websites stopped functioning, and upon checking the site, all my directory structures were intact, whereas all of the files were gone. Upon contacting their technical support, I was given the run-around, and later informed by one of their administrators that none of the files could be restored. Needless to say that I am looking for a different web hosting company at this point, but I would like to make a more informed choice than I did with the current company. I have read a similar Slashdot article (from 2005) on the topic, but the questions posed there were slightly different."
Reader mrstrano has a similar question: "I am developing a web application and, after registering the domain, I am now looking for a suitable web hosting provider.
It should be cheap enough so I can start small, but should allow me to scale up if the web site is successful (as I hope).
The idea is simple enough so I do not need other investors to implement it. This also means that I don't have a lot of money to put on it
at the moment.
Users of the website will post their pictures (no, it's not going to be a porn website), so scalability might be an issue even with a moderately high
number of users.
I would like to find a good web hosting provider from day one, so I don't have to go through the pain of a data migration.
Which web host would you choose?"
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases, email accounts, FTP accounts - multiple user accounts I can lock down to one domain or folder for these because I might want to job out management for a domain or subdomain. Because I never know today what I'm going to be using it for, and this is a long term relationship that's challenging to get out of.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
I like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them but they've been making me happy for quite a while.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're going to run a *chan site..
100X better than simply web hosting... Linode
I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.
Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
I currently use 2 hosting companies for various things:
1st - BlueHost.com
I have the best things to say about BlueHost.com
No affiliation, other than very happy with the service and support.
2nd - Tech.coop
Unlimited!
The last one I want to mention is:
PriorityColo.com
http://prioritycolo.com/
Why? Because they have the balls to tell "big shot lawyer companies" to STFU when they send shaky take-down notices.
Hope that helps! =)
It probably doesn't apply to either of your projects, but if you're starting from scratch, Google App Engine might be a good candidate. Advantages: Starts out free, and it's by Google, so yes, it scales. When you have to start paying, it's pay-as-you-go like Amazon, but only for the cycles you actually use, since it's an entirely managed solution.
Like I said -- probably doesn't apply. It won't run PHP (that I know of), and mrstrano didn't specify what his shiny new app is being developed in. But if it's early enough, and if you're willing to trust Google...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Personally, I have to look for a hosting company with active public forums and public conversations between users and the staff. This makes all of the difference in the world. You don't want a company that is trying to hide from you. The more public communication and discussion the better. IRC is always a plus. Other key points: Good contact information, good references on the web... and a good web site. After all a hosting company should be web savvy enough to not be using tables and HTML 4 frames.
I have been VERY pleased with Webfaction. They are basically a bunch of geeks that make web hosting a pleasure for other geeks. Their servers have all the latest tools, dev packages, and they have an automated application install for over 20 different applications (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc etc). Their support system is fast and competent, and I've learned a ton on their community forums.
If they don't have a particular app that you want, it's not that difficult to download and install it yourself.
http://www.webfaction.com/
If you DO decide to join, don't be afraid to use me as your referrer: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=mantic
If all else fails, add another if.
LowEndBox is a great website that compares low-end virtual private server providers.
Good thing you had back ups. Right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I have had a good experience with DreamHost. Their support is snappy and helpful, and the people who work there seem generally kind. They have a fine set of dreamhost-specific howtos maintained on their wiki, and a powerful but easy to use panel for administration.
They run linux boxes with the full complement of command line tools (with compilers and everything!), and the only restriction is no persistent processes. If you want to do that, you can buy their pricier private server option which gives you your own private server instance.
They have some great terms of use (as far as storage and bandwidth are concerned), and their prices are reasonable. I got a great deal a while back on two years of hosting, and now I'm hooked on the service.
Hoo boy, the stories I could tell. Actually, I can't, because the hosting provider threatened to sue us if we named them publicly.
OK, first, if there's more than a couple of servers involved, and your business depends on it, use two or more different providers. If you only have one provider, it puts them in a position to screw you. When we terminated our relationship with our provider, they held our data hostage until we paid them an additional $15,000 to put our servers on line again long enough for us to copy our data.
Which brings us to: DO YOUR OWN BACKUPS. Service providers either don't do them, or they don't do them right. The world is full of horror stories of customers paying the data center extra for backups, and then finding the backups were never actually done. And even if they do do backups, they maintain control of them, which puts them in a good position to extort you.
Remember, the practice of holding your data hostage goes back a long way. Happened to my father's company back in the 70's mainframe days. It still happens.
Most important of all: have a professional go over your data center contract with a fine-tooth comb. The default contract they'll give you (or at least the one they gave us) is highly abusive.
For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling. There is no early termination. If you so much as upgrade a single disk drive, the contract is automatically renewed for another 18 months.
Here's a doozy: our contract specified that if a server went down, they would either fix or replace it within two hours of determining the problem. The catch: they merely have to say that they haven't determined the problem yet, and then they don't have to replace anything. Our main server was kept off-line for a month this way.
No matter which provider you choose, never depend on them for backups. Keep your originals locally and copy them to the webserver. Rsync is a great, effortless tool for this kind of synchronization. If you're maintaining SQL databases on the webserver, back them up at least daily with cron and download the backups. A few simple scripts will work wonders for your protection and your sanity.
I like slicehost for a number of reasons, but you have to be willing to use a command line because there is no GUI unless you install one (because you're getting a virtual server with full root access).
Though they do not offer cpanel or anything like that, they do have a minimal admin panel that you can use to configure DNS, MX and set up your server (as well as automate backups, which start at like 5 a month or so).
For 20 a month, you get a 256mb ram virtual slice and around a dozen linux distros you can select from with their admin panel for the slice. If you dont like any of the ones they provide (very unlikely) you can opt to install your own with a set of directions they provide on their wiki (the wiki is also very helpful when setting up your server for whatever you might want to do).
Whenever I need help with a server issue, they email fairly quick (same day) or they have a chat room with people who actually speak English as their first language (or know it well enough you would assume they do). Generally, the people helping you are the same ones who maintain their website or their servers as well, not outsourced help.
Some dont like that they dont have any sort of guaranteed uptime, but eh, I've never really had any servers I have go down for more than an hour or so and it's generally sometime at night if they do. The downtime is generally planned or even if its an emergency, they notify with enough time you can migrate files to another server.
For 20 a month and the freedom of having full server access to install what you want, I'd gladly pay. I still loath when I have some clients who only want to pay 3-5 or whatever a month at some lame shared hosting site and have to deal with cpanel or whatever else, because once you've used the command line and had full control on a remote server it's hard to go back to the panel interface, lol.
Things to avoid tend to be better indicators than things to go for. I'd avoid:
* Companies that aren't open about issues. If there isn't a public forum, status RSS feed, status twitter account, etc. BAD NEWS
* Companies that offer unlimited anything. By definition, unlimited means that they are overselling and while things may be great now, they'll suffer in the long run
* Linux hosts that don't give you SSH access. CPanel/Fantastico/Whatever do plenty of things, but there is no substitute for having shell access
* Anything at all that makes you feel funny. There are _plenty_ of options out there and if something doesn't feel right, you're better off going somewhere else.
* Companies that won't respond to you personally for pre-sales questions. When I was looking for colo space, this turned out to be the most important factor. The better they communicate with you before they have any of your money, the better off things will be in the long run.
* Anything that seems to be too good to be true. i.e. If you have a need for a lot of disk/bandwidth/cpu, and "unlimited" is $5/month, BAD NEWS
I run ithought dot org and host a reasonable number of sites, and try to adhere to all of the above. One thing you won't be able to find out easily with hosts is something I do: I won't accept customers that seem like they aren't a fit for the hardware I have. Shared hosting is what it is and if a customer is going to drive up the load on servers such that it affects other customers, but doesn't want to pay for dedicated hardware or a VM, their actions shouldn't hurt other shared hosting customers that are only using a very small amount of resources.
Most of the cloud stuff is plenty nice if you want to manage it (S3, SliceHost, etc) but don't underestimate what is involved with keeping server OSs up to date, tuned, and monitored. If you're core competency isn't tweaking server software you should let someone else worry about that for you until it makes sense for you to hire an Operations person/team.
I usually check out webhostingtalk.com to find reviews of web hosts, offers, and more. I would definitely suggest you check them out. I personally chose mddhosting.com for my website.
Some other things to keep in mind: you get what you pay for... So unlimited of something means they are skimping elseware. Also remember to always keep your own backups. Even if your host does keep them, which they probably don't, it is a pain to get files restored for you. It also is nice to be able to leave without begging for your files.
As for custom infrastructure and scaling... Chances are that most hosts put you on a typical shared cpanel box and anything special is going to require you to get a VPS or dedi server and set it up and manage everything yourself. It just isn't realistic to add features or special software for a single user. And that doesn't even get into having to support this new stuff, or deal with the security implications.
Scott Swezey
Rarely do I go negative on the Internet. Things said on the internet stick with you forever, but maybe just a warning.
The company 1 and 1 seems to be using a collection agency to leverage money out of previous customers. While they may not be breaking any laws, but they are definitely taking advantage of their customers.
Google: "1 and 1" nco
There are pages of people who have fallen victim to this company.
A good narrative that describes almost exactly what happened to me...
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/1-amp-1-internet-inc-c161434.html
Sorry to post anonymously, I'm not really a coward, but with a company like this, you just cannot be too careful.
For small LAMP sites (less than 10K visits per month)
Bluehost, ($7 per month)
For Medium LAMP sites (20K-50K visits per month
Media Temple Cloud ($20 or more per month)
For Bigger LAMP Sites (50k+ visits per month)
Rackspace Cloud ($150 per month)
The last two have their issues at times, but they are way better than managing your own server. If you like sysadmin work (and I don't) get a Rackspace cloud server or Media temple DV server, but I like the cloud and grid options. They scale automatically.
I was a system admin for a while at a web hosting company, though I left in December for another company in a different sector. Quite frankly, the experience of the OP isn't that unusual. Hell, some of people on my team would accidentally nuke fully-dedicated servers and then tell the customer that it was "russian hackers" or a "raid failure" instead of just owning up to it. More often than not, I was the one getting stuck taking the call and trying to make things right, which is one of the reasons I got out of there.
We all know shit happens, and accidents can occur. That doesn't excuse not owning up to it when they do. In the case of the russian hacker excuse, the admin who came up with that gem tried to tell the senior admin that's what happened, too. When he found out that he was lied to, he pretty much went ballistic.
That said, check the following stuff:
1) if they are advertising "unlimited bandwidth," what's the actual throughput that they're allowing -- especially if they phrase the actual offer as "unlimited data transfer." Bandwidth usage is tied to memory usage, especially in the monitoring tools that come on cPanel-enabled servers, and so if you're pushing a lot of data it can spike your memory usage and
2) if they'd advertising "unlimited disk space," what are the limits at which their backups stop, if any? whats the amount of disk space? if you're doing shared hosting, which hopefully you're not, then that affects whether or not your account ends up getting moved, at least where I worked, a lot of the job on overnight rotations was moving accounts for disk space management.
3) what are their resource policies? On shared servers, we'd kick people for using more than 1% of CPU, generally. On a VPS, it could get a little higher.
4) if you're looking for a VPS, check what platform they're using for hosting, whether its Xen, VZ, etc. VZ doesn't track memory internal to the container, or really allow for swap space, etc. So, if you were buying a 256M plan from us, you'd really get 1024M memory segmentation which was the "burstable," but memcached would leak out and suck up RAM from the whole server if it weren't installed right (and a lot of people in my department didn't know this or didn't care). If you plan on using something like memcached, you'll want a hardware dedicated server, or a sufficiently large Xen container.
5) super-double check backup policy. We wouldn't back up dedicated servers, for instance. Backups could be configured to push to our array for a fee, or we could turn on local cpanel backups on the server, but if the disks really did go bad then you'd still be fucked if you weren't snapping copies back to yourself via FTP and keeping them local. If you're looking for a VPS or shared hosting, then make sure you know the backup rules -- how much data, and how it gets backed up. For instance, our setup used rsync over an NFS mount, which meant that we'd have a copy of the latest of everything that was there when the backup ran, but if something was corrupted before the backup, we'd have a backup of a broken file.
Some recommendations of companies other than the one I worked for, which I've used for various things and liked well enough are Slicehost and RootBSD. They're both Xen-based, allow a really high level of autonomy, etc. Slicehost pretty much lets you do everything yourself. You can go from no server to vps with root in about 5 minutes with no human interaction. RootBSD takes a bit longer to get set up, but their support people were always really helpful to me, and the added benefit of not being Linux-based, but using FreeBSD though OpenBSD is also a custom option as well.
... unless you know you're going to be using them to operate a website that isn't ever going to see real traffic and will never have critical uptime needs.
Here's why: DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. That's right, they oversell. On purpose. They know it, and they admit it, and they have their little rationale as to why it isn't a problem, but it is.
Here's an example: their "unlimited" storage offer. They make this kind of offer betting that most people can't even come up with a use for half that (or, more accurate, courting the segment of the market that won't). They're right in that the vast majority of websites will never have more than tens of gigabytes of contents, and they *say* they're willing to put up with the hassle of the few that do.
But the problem is, if you offer a service, eventually, some significant number of people will find a way to use it. I noticed, for example, that their storage offer (a mere 200GB three years ago) essentially made them the cheapest game in town for backing up a lot of data to a remote location, as well as being a pretty good web hosting deal, so I decided to move some of my hosting over, and take advantage of the space for backup. Gradually other people noticed this to, and so over time, people were actually starting to use what DreamHost sold them. When you oversell, this obviously becomes a problem.
So, what did they do? They imposed new rules: you had to pay extra (3-4 times extra) to use that amount of space if the files stored weren't part of a website. That's right: different prices for different bits on the same disk.
Since I found the distinction pretty arbitrary and annoying, I decided to see what would happen if I did a bit of coding and essentially produced a simple web interface for what became a personal backup website. I'd pretty clearly met the letter of the law. DreamHost didn't agree, and said it didn't matter whether or not I had because my intent was clearly just to get around their restriction. They didn't back down; I paid their additional fees, but after a few months, found it irksome enough that I left.
I'm fairly lucky, because I had plenty of time to take my ball and go home. There are some people out there who have found their accounts suspended and even deactivated because of spiking demand -- not even demand that actually saturates a pipe or otherwise exceeds any of the limits they tell you about when they're selling, mostly just enough demand on shared boxes that causes Apache to crash or lock up. These people have essentially had to suddenly migrate under conditions where their access had been cut off.
And this is all before you get to general uptime and systems health. I don't know what it is, but they had a lot of hiccups in the time that I was with them. Some of the explanations really did sound like things beyond their control, and if I hadn't experienced better, I would assume that this just happens sometimes. Their connectivity got cut off, their email servers fail, they change their subdomain host naming system without telling you... no, uptime and predictability were not their strong points.
But the bottom line for me comes back to the first thing I said. Because they oversell, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. If you cross the later line -- even well before you get to the former -- it's pretty clear they will not only accept your departure but in some cases they will actively throw you over the side of the boat. This is an annoying but possibly acceptable state of affairs for a limited hobby website, but if you count on someone like this for a business or client website, I think it's likely that you or the client will eventually regret it rather strongly.
If you want someone rock solid reliable, I've had an account with Hurricane Electric for 12 years. They e
Tweet, tweet.
When you're going to get a new host, and it's not a name company (hostgator, dreamhost, etc.) do your research. There are a ton of resellers selling stuff from other resellers. It's like the Amway of the Internet. Look at the whois for your new host. If it's hidden behind one of those obfuscation services, it's a red flag. Look at the name servers. If it's the same as the host (ns1.host.com) it's a plus. If it's something else, go look at the website of the name service...you'll probably find it's where they're re-reselling hostspace. Try to get upline as much as possible, since if one of those people forgets to pay the bill, you're screwed with no (worthwhile) recourse.
I would suggest not going with IXWebhosting. They've been hit with injection attacks for over two years on an almost daily basis. I was with them for years until they were compromised. They will also blame you, saying your website was insecure...except I had fifteen domains that were parked with a single HTML page that just said "go away" hacked.
Make sure they're available 24/7, and that they answer the phones. My current VPS host (InMotionHosting) answered the phone at 1am and placed my order.
Watch out for all the "review" sites. Do a whois and you'll find many are owned by the hosts that get top billing. At the very least, every host review should have some negative hits from a disgruntled webmaster. Look for the ones that lay it all out, warts and all.
Never ever expect your host to back up your website. If it's not in your possession, it doesn't exist, unless you're lucky. Cron jobs are nice for dumping databases to a backup.
I personally like dedicated IPs. Since it seems you're multi-hosting, see if shared or individual IPs are available. Also, check to see if wildcard or sub-domains (space.host.com) are available.
Best of luck to you.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Dreamhost was pretty good for most of the time I used them (~5 years) and I liked some of the extras they provided, like XMPP hosting for your domains. I wasn't as happy with the excessive Google integration toward the end of my use, but it was optional, so it was not a deal breaker. Unscheduled downtimes happened occasionally but were dealt with promptly. SSH access was nice, and they didn't mind http-related cron jobs (if I remember correctly).
However, be wary of their referral program. I got a few referral kickbacks and the support quality seemed to degrade, ending with mistaken termination of service and a tech support brick wall when I tried to resolve it. Either they frown upon you actually using the referral kickbacks they offer, or I had horrible luck; I'd guess the former. They do everything via email and support tickets, so there's no telephone contact; if you do have a problem with support, you're going to have trouble getting around it.
In summary: pretty good hosting and value, but think twice about using the referrals and make sure you keep frequent backups in case things go sour.
---
Sorry I'm posting this AC; I haven't logged in to Slashdot in many years and I can't remember my password. I should probably make a new account (don't have the same email address, so password recovery is not an option), but I'm not ready to give up on my 90k ID just yet.
The one company that I recommend to everyone when it comes to shared hosting is ICDSOFT.com It will be extremely hard for you to find a bad review on the Internet, simply because their service is impecable...
I've used them for a year until I switched to a dedicated server and each time I had a question their tech support answered within 5 minutes with precise answers.
The main think about them is that they're not oversold - each account can hold only one website, you get only about 100-500 GB of bandwidth, 10-50 GB of disk space and several databases and free webmail/pop3/smtp with limited number of email accounts, and each server had their own RAID 5 setup. When I had the website hosted there my server had about 120 websites hosted on it.
This is actually great especially when you start your website as you'll know the server won't be overloaded, you won't have 10.000 websites on the server with all files being retrieved from a NAS (as Dreamhost does) and you won't have the accounts of 400-1000 people who abuse the "unlimited bandwidth and space" feature and stream music to their office from the hosting account or basically people that have Youtube clones on shared hosting accounts (as it happens on Dreamhost)
Most people when they see they get only a few hundred GB of bandwidth they go on looking for hosting companies with unlimited bandwidth, but in reality for a startup website on a sharing account even 100 GB of bandwidth is enough. If your website becomes popular enough to go over 100 GB of bandwidth used, you'll afford to get a 60$ a month server with 2 TB of bandwidth and 200 GB of disk space.
I've also used Dreamhost.com and Site5.com for a while, between ICDSoft and my own dedicated server, mainly because it was a good deal - used coupons to get one year for something like 10$. Site5.com was just slow, the control panel sucked....
Dreamhost was slowish, overloaded (the server I was on had about 12000 websites on it), the quality of the websites is lower (blogs which are not optimized therefore abusing PHP and MySQL servers) and the NAS where this web server was retrieving from was shared between about 5-6 web servers so you can imagine a 1gbps link from a NAS was used by about 100.000 websites. Also, their servers and hardware have issues all the time - there's no single day where one of their NAS would not crash, or one of their websites would die or the email server shared between 20-30 web servers would fail and so on... you can check dreamhoststatus.com to see how often they fail.
So many buzzwords. What's wrong with just putting up a Geocities page like everyone else?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
1) Failures will happen. Design for them. Have at least two hosts, in significantly different physical locations. If a host gets hacked, if their backups were silently failing, if they go out of business without warning like RedONE did, if they get hit by natural disaster, et cetera; there just isn't anything you can do to isolate from that. Redundancy is key.
2) Ask hosts about their backup policy and strategy, as well as their redundant disk setup, before you get started. It's not a perfect answer, but it gives you a decent sense of how on the ball they are - if they're spending for the extra disk space, then they're probably not cheaping out other places either.
3) A week or two in, request a backup restore. You don't have to make up a failure or anything; just say you've had problems with hosts lying about backups in the past, and you want to make sure you're on good ground. Make some changes to your setup beforehand every 10 minutes on a cron, so you know how old the backup is when it's restored.
4) Ask about gotcha policies like how they handle over-bandwidth (free day, shutoff, charge per unit, etc) and so forth. That'll give you a sense of how they'll behave if/when problems happen.
5) Expect problems to happen. The engineering overhead of replication isn't that big these days, and the cost of not having it is immense. Furthermore, in addition to replication, which secures against failure, also have backup, which secures against attack. Backup can be by FTP to one of those cheapo shared hosts that don't care about disk space, but it needs to be at a distinct third location.
Basically, don't try to find a host that won't have problems. You'll find Santa Claus sooner. Parts fail, people make errors, people do shady things, attacks are made, natural disasters and backhoes happen, et cetera.
Just have a contingency plan in place. If you can handle a failure, it's no longer a critical problem. It's usually cheaper to have three normal hosts than one super duper bullet proof host. Leverage economy. The internet is designed for handling the failure of cheap parts through massive redundancy.
Leverage that. It's the smartest thing in network history.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Tell your stories as anonymous coward. The company can't prove it was you. And besides, if what you're saying is true, then they can't sue you for libel. If you could be sued for printing the truth, more reporters and news channels would be in courts.
I hate companies that are incompetent and try to cover it up with lawsuit threats.
It will help all of us to get honest feedback from customers.
I use HostGator to host Headphone Reviews, which gets 1M+ hits a month, 300K+ of those require 2-3 MySQL hits to create the page. I host another dozen or so domains too, total monthly hits 2M+, for about $10. Uptime's great, performance is great, and the technical support is amazing - their tech support knows far far more than me, which is fairly impressive.
I've had great luck with Dreamhost after I switched to them from 1 and 1 (god they sucked)
Dreamhost is based in Southern California and even better, their tech support is based in Southern California. They're also an employee owned company.
They offer a pretty wide range of services from shared hosting on up to your own servers. Their tech support is fantastic... once when I had a problem with my shared hosting account, their tech support person emailed me back about the problem BEFORE I received the automated "someone from tech support will get back to you as soon as possible" email. (the automated email came about 15 minutes after I submitted the ticket.)
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
Nearlyfreespeech is not for everybody. I used to recommend them, but not anymore.
Here are the advantages:
* low cost, especially for tiny sites
* SSH included, no bullshit regarding that
Disadvantages:
* php and mysql performance is very slow. the servers are overloaded
* ssh is very slow. there is lag between every command. This is especially noticeable when using sshfs
* sometimes there is lag for simple page loads
* no cron, no https, several little things you may have come to expect from a host are not provided by NFSN
* reliability: a couple of times a year, NFSN will make some arbitrary change that may cause your sites to go down. The first time, the permissions on all of my files changed in such a way that the web server could not access them, and I had to manually change them back. The last time, symlinks stopped working, and I had to find every one, delete it, and recreate it.
* reliability: I don't think NFSN even has 2 9's. (ie less than 99% uptime). When NFSN is down, they still charge you for storage, but not bandwidth. This is fine for them, but might not be for you.
* NFSN is a one-man LLC, named Jeffrey Wheelhouse. If you ever need to deal with support, you will notice that this guy is a self-righteous asshole. Just look at the forums, and his responses. I wouldn't usually consider this a problem, but because NFSN is so buggy, you will have to deal with this man eventually.
Shared hosting is like like living in a small house with fifty strangers. All of you have a job that requires you to go in and out all the time. And there is only one door.
Go for a cheap dedicated and unmanaged server and carefully manage your own backups. Watch out for 95% billing if you have any real traffic needs. Look for reviews in forums like webhostingtalk, not review sites. As recommended by an earlier commenter, look at the nameservers and make sure you are buying from the actual provider and not a reseller. Look at the upstream providers of your selected server provider, tier-1 ISPs are good, as well as lots of bandwidth between your chosen ISP and the internet, and a good SLA. Avoid "shared 100mbps". Look for extra costs you may have to pay before actually making a contract - For example, many providers will charge ridiculous amounts of money for extra IP addresses or extra domains in some stupid exclusive control panel (*cough*Plesk*cough*). A good domain name registrar is name.com. A bad domain name registrar is godaddy. Buying your domain name from your server host is unthinkably stupid.
Long story short - If the data is critical - trust no-one - use multiple different sources which you control for the data!
I'm with Powweb.com too, and I'm not terribly thrilled with them either. When I migrated from my old host, they were the best I found, but even then, I rated them only a B. Now, more like a C+, on a good day.
You get what you pay for. If you want total control, man up and take it! Get a VPS from Linode or Slicehost and configure the server exactly how you want. They offer similar service for similar prices. To get you started, Linode has a LAMP StackScript available that can have you up and running in about 2 minutes. From there, configure Apache for multiple vhosts and you're all set.
The downside is that ultimately, yo're responsible. The upside is that they don't touch your stuff and are expandable nearly instantly
I second that. It was not that they intentionally fubarred them, but rather there were some configuration misunderstandings/differences that got in the way. And switch off mySql's auto-key reuse setting.
Table-ized A.I.
Sounds like something AffordableColo / DTI would do when I worked for them (by them I mean him, the one guy who ran it and would _unplug_ servers just to reap fees for "rebooting crashed servers".) I quit after less than two months working for Mr. Charles Baker, and I've offered to testify in the class-action, should it come to fruition. Search webhostingtalk.com for cbaker17 if you really want to see how many customers he abused this way before the company folded.
Always research your hosting company before you do business with them. Always.
That being said, I'm hosting on Slicehost and have loved it since day one.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
I DEFINITELY recommend linode.com which gives you root and your own distro. They have kept expanding your hard disk etc. for free periodically for years, and keep developing new things for its users. You ssh in and can install anything you want, and can organize disk images, reboots and dns from dashboard.
However you wouldn't want to host a simple very high volume site there, so I have hostgator as well. I haven't pushed it, but their baby account seems quite good. It is the opposite of linode, being high capacity and lower functionality but even then it has quite a lot of good stuff. Cpanel based but with ssh too.
At one end of extremes, we have VPS / Cloud providers, Collocation.
At the other extreme we have providers who design your site and handle all the administration for you, editing, domain registration, e-mail servers, DNS management, Backups, etc.
Full service with control panel for everything VS administer-it-yourself using standard OS tools, Linux command line, etc.
Shared VS Virtually-Dedicated VS Dedicated.
You should expect to pay a good bit for every single service that you want done well and that you care about.
If you are paying $10/month and expect your hosting provider to do everything for you perfectly, then we have a problem of ridiculously high expectations.
$10/month shared hosting is just great for a personal web site. Hosting an e-commerce site on such a host, I regard as lunacy.
You should expect to pay for:
[For $10/month, probably it is reasonable to expect UPS protection on a shared server, not much more than that]
Security cannot be understated. If your web site exists on a shared server, you are at greater risk. Your site will be more secure if a dedicated server is used, and physical safeguards are required to gain access to the rack your server is hosted in.
We offer centralized storage to faculty, staff and students. It is highly fast and reliable. We've got a couple of NetApp 2020s that have multiple disk redundancy, will e-mail NetApp to have a disk overnighted if one fails, and take snapshots every couple hours. That is then backed up to a tape library nightly, which has its tapes rotated out to an offsite location. The idea being we can survive some heavy shit and get your data, including you doing something like deleting it (hence the snapshots).
However, we run in to problems with research groups and such who want a ton of space. We are happy to give it to them, for a price. Well they go and look at a harddrive on Newegg and say "But a 1TB harddrive is only $90! I shouldn't have to pay any more than that!" They can't seem to understand the idea of reliability in storage. Of course then when information stored only on a cheap desktop drive fails, they come crying about how critical it is and how we have to recover it for them.
I just wish everyone would remember that when you store data on a single, consumer drive, you are counting on luck to keep it from going away. You may well get lucky, and not have a failure. Many people are lucky in that regard. However it is purely luck. If the drive fails, you are SOL in many cases. If your data really matters, you'll have it backed up. The more important the data, the more aggressive the backup system.
Yes, this is going to cost more. Deal with it. The idea is more or less to say "Even if X happens, I still want my data, and I want access to it on a certain timeline." You determine what X is, and what timeline you need, and then design a solution that'll work.
That the good ones have higher prices. Yes, Pair is expensive. You can literally find companies that'll give you a year of hosting for what they charge for a month... Think there might be a reason for that?
I've also used them for a long time, and there's a reason I keep paying their prices. They are solid, fast, and they don't get hacked. Getting hacked is something many people don't think about but I've had problems on other hosts. A site gets owned because the hosting company didn't keep their servers up to date.
In my case, Pair actually did have an outage. The server I was on had a hardware failure... Site was back up in less than 20 minutes. That is a real measure of good support. When a problem does happen, they have a system in place to fix it fast.
At any rate, hosting is like so many things in life in that you get what you pay for. If you look for a "unlimited" plan (which are never truly unlimited) for bottom dollar, you'll get bottom quality. If you are willing to pay more, you get better quality. Pair is my favourite, but there are other quality choices too. Just be aware that they are going to cost money.