Hosting

terra_ferma

I use vidahost for my new webstore, and I'm really impressed with them.
I'm not an expert, but from doing a lot of research I would make two (no, actually three...) recommendations:

-be wary of recommendations you get online or in forums (including mine obviously), as many people will not be ordinary users but have a vested interested in what they recommend. Treat them more like a directory of companies.
It's very hard to find unbiased information about the net on the net....

-many hosting companies offer 'unlimited' packages, but what it actually means is that if you are a heavy users you can be booted off or asked to pay more money. There is normally something in their t&c that will explain what they would do if you go over.
That's why I went with vidahost instead of hostgator (us based).

-try to find out the set up of the hosting company, for example someone recommended a company to me that turned out to be a one-man-band reseller of another service, not even a proper company, their name hidden even on whois, and no telephone contact details on their website.




HTH

texranger

terra_ferma wrote: »

someone recommended a company to me that turned out to be a one-man-band reseller of another service, not even a proper company, their name hidden even on whois, and no telephone contact details on their website.

HTH

yes their are a lot out their like this.

companies that offer unlimited space will most likely be resellers and oversell the servers which they have no control over.

also dont take what you read on review sites as gospel as most reviews are made by those with gripes which are not always true, not that many review sites are used by those that are happy with services.

firionicable

check out hostgator or justhost they are good ones
about five bucks per month to pay.

FelishaWoodson

firionicable wrote: »

check out hostgator or justhost they are good ones
about five bucks per month to pay.

It is $7.16/mo, not 5:eek:

patman99

Signed-up with Unlimitedwebhosting. They resell opensrs (Tucows), but have 24/7 tech support. I registered a '.it' domain through them, and they really got on the Italian domain controllers backs when they took more than 24 hours to complete the process.

Cost £30 p/a or pay monthly.

paddyrg

Terra_firma is bang on right about taking reviews at face value. Most users are not expert or experienced enough to know when to be impressed, it is true! It is when something goes wrong you value the quality of your host. A few posts up above I mentioned eukhost and as chance would have it, today I had an alert email from them that the website hosted with them (I have several hosts dotted around) was over its data allowance. I started by using their 'live chat' tech support (several companies offer this, it is a great plus) who bounced the problem to their email support team. They investigated and removed the constraint. On asking them what had caused it, they identified an unused flawed component bundled with dotnetnuke which had been used to upload a bit of malware, and advised how to disable it. I wasn't near a PC so asked if they could disable it on my behalf, and they did. The service I have had from them has always gone beyond the minimum required to be excellent, intelligent, responsive, and genuinely helpful, which is why I recommend them. But as TF says, be wary of resellers and one-man-bands which whilst they have some great upsides, may be less responsive if there is an issue, or less able to service extended requests beyond the usual!

InsideInsurance

There is truly no such thing as "unlimited". Ultimately the company offering that service will have a finite number of servers each with a finite number of hard drives installed each which have a finite capacity.

Companies that offer an "unlimited" service work on an assumption, that they average user has Xmb of webspace they need and Ymb of bandwidth per day. So to take a simple example of a company that assumes the average site uses 100mb of traffic a day and its servers have 100gb of traffic it will therefore place 1000 websites on that server.

Firstly, no server should have that many websites on it. Secondly, what happens if your "unlucky" and get a server that has a couple of really popular sites on them? You can suddenly find all your traffic is throttled because the server is going beyond the limit they are paying for. Of cause they could add another server and redistribute the sites but firstly this isnt that simple to do and secondly it increases their costs without additional revenue.

A good host instead has a server with 100gb of bandwidth and sells hosting with 1gb of traffic therefore will only sell 100 sites on that server. If someone goes over the limit, only their site needs to be throttled plus the host can buy additional bandwidth because that site that is exceeding its limit is being charged for it so additional revenue.

patman99

A lot of hosts now use cloud based hosting. This, from what the IT gurus at my current agency assignment inform me, spreads the load across any spare server space that any company may make available.

For instance, if a company called 'bogstandard sanitationware' upgraded to a server with 100T/b of storage, but only needed say, 55T/b, they would rent-out a portion of the remaining space to be used by hosting companies. This generates an income from the spare capacity that would otherwise be sitting there unused for a few years as the company grows.