Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: craig16229 on March 29, 2009, 09:47:16 am
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I've been putting up with my host for too long, and I need to take action and get the move done. Suggestions?
I don't need any development tools or assistance; I just want a new reliable home. I'm not doing any e-commerce, though I want to keep options open. I saw these suggestions in an older post:
Pair
GoDaddy
Bluehost
Fatcow
Things change fast, especially in this economy, so are they still solid? Any additional comments on them? Any other suggestions?
Obviously we all want maximum uptime. That's a given. My site is largely Flash based, so reasonably fast load times are key.
TIA,
Craig
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com (http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com)
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My wife maintains several web sites on hostway.com. Not the cheapest buy very realiable with attentive technical support and excellent ecommerce features. No significant problems.
I tried godaddy for about a year, worst experience ever. They organize everything sort of a la carte and they have a special divine dispensation to make arbitrary charges to your credit credit so long as they feel it is good for you. And they make marketing telephone calls to you.
If you need relatively little tech assistance ace-host.net is at least as reliable as anybody deserves for something like $70 a year. They have Cpanel for stats, although typically their https security certificate there is expired. Email based support is OK and have only had 1 or 2 minor problems in my 4 years with them. Have never seen my site down or had complaints of such.
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I like bluehost. But for a professional site I would suggest Pair. They don't offer as much and cost more but they deliver.
I would not recommend Dreamhost.
Who are you using now?
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I tried godaddy for about a year, worst experience ever. They organize everything sort of a la carte and they have a special divine dispensation to make arbitrary charges to your credit credit so long as they feel it is good for you. And they make marketing telephone calls to you.
This is a polar opposite of my experience with them going back over two years. Sure, they do try to sell you extras at every opportunity, but they are often closely related to the stuff you're already buying with discounts, so you might end up saving some. Or just ignore them. When you buy a domain name, for example, they ask whether you would like hosting. If you buy hosting, they ask whether you would like a shopping cart. I like that since I'm still a bit unsure of all the hosting choices - but YMMV.
I've called their customer support a few times (how to set up domain forwarding or whatever it is called, changing account status), and every single time they have been freakishly cordial, fast and knowledgeable. By far the best customer service I have ever experienced, and this is for their basic hosting service, not some corporate 99.999% guaranteed uptime service.
Never had wrong charges from them - in fact I've received money from them for unused months of service I didn't need anymore when I upgraded. Money, not credits. Never had them call me, but I live in Europe...
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Thank you very much, Bill T and Dark Penguin.
@ Dark Penguin: I am currently hosted at 1and1.com. In my (web) pavement pounding this morning visiting various hosts, I liked what I saw at Bluehost. Would you mind saying a little bit more on what you have experienced with them since you favor Pair?
Thanks so much,
Craig
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com (http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com)
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Thank you very much, Bill T and Dark Penguin.
@ Dark Penguin: I am currently hosted at 1and1.com. In my (web) pavement pounding this morning visiting various hosts, I liked what I saw at Bluehost. Would you mind saying a little bit more on what you have experienced with them since you favor Pair?
Thanks so much,
Craig
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com (http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com)
A friend of mine uses pair. He has had no issues. Bluehost has had a few email issues. Nothing I've actually noticed but E*Trade keeps sending me letters saying they couldn't email me. I've had no one I know tell me they couldn't email me, however.
And based on my experience with E*Trade I can easily believe it is their issue. If I need reliable email I use gmail these days. Everything works just fine. (Presumably because google is an NSA front operation and they know what they are doing.)
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I've been putting up with my host for too long, and I need to take action and get the move done. Suggestions?
I don't need any development tools or assistance; I just want a new reliable home. I'm not doing any e-commerce, though I want to keep options open. I saw these suggestions in an older post:
Pair
GoDaddy
Bluehost
Fatcow
Things change fast, especially in this economy, so are they still solid? Any additional comments on them? Any other suggestions?
Obviously we all want maximum uptime. That's a given. My site is largely Flash based, so reasonably fast load times are key.
TIA,
Craig
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com (http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com)
I have used 1and1.com for several sites for quite a few years with almost 100% satisfaction. They have Windows and Linux hosting, various levels of features/price, and - the few times I have had to call - very good tech support.
Peter
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I have used 1and1.com for several sites for quite a few years with almost 100% satisfaction. They have Windows and Linux hosting, various levels of features/price, and - the few times I have had to call - very good tech support.
Peter
LOL. I am actually with 1and1.com now. I am glad to hear you have had a good experience with them; I certainly have not.
Craig
http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com (http://www.craigwasselphotoart.com)
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Am with 3ix and they are excellent
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Never used them, but I have heard many good thingd about http://mediatemple.net/ (http://mediatemple.net/)
Cheers,
Bernard
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Craig, I've used a number of hosting agencies over the past 15 or so years for several different domains. One domain, peakinfosystems.com, until this past December was a shareware site with fairly heavy traffic. I still have four active domains, all with www.inmotionhosting.com. That's the best outfit I've ever dealt with. Their tech support is outstanding. If you have a problem, they're on it in a flash.
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I have tried Dreamhost and Media Temple.
Media Temple is much better than Dreamhost in term of reliability and customer service.
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I use sites from a number of providers. One of my favorites is from a provider called Infinity Internet. I pay I think it’s around $90 per year, have been using this one for a number of purposes for around 12 years. They have been very reliable. If there is a problem they are quick to resolve it. Networksolutions also offers a good package but it is just a tad higher price.
There is a lot of competition in the web space rental arena. In general costs are trivial unless an unwary renter falls into the hands of a predatory vendor. The key details for a novice are the speed they provide the visitor to the site, if the vendor provides a backup service, how difficult it is to reach tech support, and the overall ability of the vendor to be reliable. If you’re comfortable writing backup scripts then the vendor doesn’t need to provide this.
Then of course there is the need to find a vendor that offers the back end services that you want. Items such as sql, php, flash, secure shopping carts, and on and on. Most vendors everything but you definitely want to check first.
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Craig, I've used a number of hosting agencies over the past 15 or so years for several different domains. One domain, peakinfosystems.com, until this past December was a shareware site with fairly heavy traffic. I still have four active domains, all with www.inmotionhosting.com. That's the best outfit I've ever dealt with. Their tech support is outstanding. If you have a problem, they're on it in a flash.
Another vote for inmotion. Been with them for about 6 months now and I'm very happy and they offer great support, at least thats been my experience. I switched after 2 years with network solutions.
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GoDaddy has been great for me. Very simple to get up and running and they are always on top of things.
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I use eleven2 and have been happy. Recently though - i have been hearing a lot about squarespace. Check them out - they do more than just hosting...they have a fancy interface for hosting photography sites.
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tigertech.net - Mention that you were referred by me and we'll both be happy. Reasonable & never down.
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I am currently using 1and1, Godaddy and www.canishosting.com - by FAR canis is heads and shoulders above, particularly in speed. Uploading to my site is 5-10x faster on canis, and the pages are served very noticeably faster even on my 15 cable.
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I can recommend Lunarpages (http://www.lunarpages.com/id/grafphoto) - have been with them for years. They always seem to be upgrading and expanding - so a good business sign. Their tech support has always been helpful for me, and they have a very active forum community for help also. They give you advance notice of server moves or any possible interruptions to your site. They have been recommended on webmasters forums for quite awhile now. Right now they are only $6.95 USD a month, but sometimes run $4.95 / month specials.
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Wasn't the issue with lunarpages that they would put you on one of their short bus servers if you used too many resources?
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I have found http://www.webfaction.com/ (http://www.webfaction.com/) to be excellent over the last couple of years.
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I can recommend Lunarpages (http://www.lunarpages.com/id/grafphoto) - have been with them for years. They always seem to be upgrading and expanding - so a good business sign. Their tech support has always been helpful for me, and they have a very active forum community for help also. They give you advance notice of server moves or any possible interruptions to your site. They have been recommended on webmasters forums for quite awhile now. Right now they are only $6.95 USD a month, but sometimes run $4.95 / month specials.
Mark,
I currently have one domain hosted on LunarPages. It's been there for several years. They're not bad, but nowhere near as good as Inmotionhosting.
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GoDaddy has been great for me. Very simple to get up and running and they are always on top of things.
If you're interested I can tell you a real horror story about GoDaddy. As long as everything's swimming along they're fine, but don't let anything go wrong.
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Wasn't the issue with lunarpages that they would put you on one of their short bus servers if you used too many resources?
That did happen to me once a couple years ago. And it turned out it was some oddball search engine spiders pinging my PHP files like crazy - driving up resource usage. So I blocked some IP's and updated my robots.txt file and all was well again. It did take me some time to get through to a tech that could help me resolve the issue other than just blankly say "reduce your resources usage."