Summary
In my search for faster web site performance, I have encountered web hosting companies which range from incompetent and/or fraudulent to quite excellent.
Remcom.Net, up through October 2007
I had been several years with Remly Communications, http://www.remcom.net/, who took over my prior account by purchasing http://ecphosting.net. I had a “reseller” package but used it only for my several domains. Reliable and fast FTP uploads became a repeating issue, so I sought elsewhere. They might have upgraded systems since October 2007.
Note that numerous other hosting companies allow more than one domain on the base plan, whether or not they offer reseller packages. That certainly is easier to manage, as well as cheaper, than the one domain per account I had used before. Free market competition helps achieve marvelous things.
Hostmonster.Com 9/29/07 - 10/12/07
I tried http://hostmonster.com, due to favorable reviews, before I realized that some of those glowing recommendations were written or sponsored by them. During 5 days of work in Sep.-Oct. 2007, I transferred my domains to their servers, and had them dropped three times while installing them. “Support” never responded, nor did Billing when I demanded a refund, so I had VISA roll back my payment. AVOID HOSTMONSTER.
Westhost.Com 10/2/07 5/8/08
I successfully transferred my domains to http://www.westhost.com. Their support system assigns ticket numbers, but does not let customer view ticket histories. Phone support is an option. Speed has been an issue, especially for CubeCart store with about 3000 antique print reproductions. Therefore, I tried another host for a new domain.
One thing I have not seen elsewhere is that creating email users results in same user connecting to every domain on host account. Then one must wrestle a bit with a Virtual-User-Table file to delete those not wanted and to make the rest into form “user.domain” instead of the more usual “user@domain” or “user+domain” expected my email clients.
Dreamhost.Com 2/29/08 - 5/8/08
My new host account was opened Feb 29 with http://dreamhost.com/. Their support tickets are viewable, and they usually answer fast, but the solutions are sometimes very slow. I have effectively lost most of two work months, because they had major network and server disasters when trying to upgrade cluster. I suspect they bought economy servers. Now that they have fixed that server cluster, I still have administrative problems, such as changing my own logon password, and slow response with such things as store script and Wordpress blog. Support says my logon password has changed, but I still must logon with the prior one. Funny thing is that my FTP password changed with no problems.
Refund issued.
Resume Search
What blogs should be like for FAST posting, editing, and browsing can be seen at zimbio.com; just open a free account. Zimbio appeared to be about ten times as fast as my blog at Dreamhost.
On May 2, 2008, I resumed my search for an affordable host which is fast, easy to use, and has high percentage of uptime.
Phpwebhosting.Com No answer
Before finding 2mhost.com (next), I saw that http://www.phpwebhosting.com expresses a friendly philosophy, very relaxed limits on diskspace and bandwidth, but they had not answered my pre-sales questions in more than the time that 2mhost.com both answered and signed me up. Interesting feature: “Your own cgi-bin directory and ability to run your own scripts from any directory (not just inside of cgi-bin).” I never understood why my scripts had to be all in one location. [More than 6 days later, I have only received an initial autoresponse from them that said my query was received.]
2mhost.Com May 2-3, 2008
The next candidate, http://2mhost.com/, has a new criterion for selection, namely that hosts which rent hardware, instead of owning, can make frequent upgrades if their fees give enough income. “Recently, we upgraded our entire fleet of servers to quad processors with quad cores (a whopping 16 physical processors in each server).” “We host no more than 200 websites on Dual processor Quad core intel servers, this is less than 25% of what most hosts load in such servers.” Their “mission-critical-web-hosting” package says “100% web hosting uptime guaranteed.” That plan starts at $7.50 per month, with incremental fees for added services. For example, rather than shop for plans that allow the number of domains I want, they simply add domains at $0.80 per month, no setup fees. Their base limits of diskspace and bandwidth are generous and upgradeable. It should be noted that the payment options are for 6, 12, 24 months and not these monthly amounts.
Now the fly in the ointment. My order was acknowledged by 2mhost.com in about a minute, but payment not approved by their processing company (plimus.com) for over five hours, then the logon data were generated more than 14 hours after order, in the wee hours of the next day. This wasted a half work day for me. I CANCELED account.
Whreviews.Com
Excellent article can be found at http://whreviews.com/the-uptime-guarantee.htm, what appears to be an honest review of hosting companies, i.e., not fakes sponsored by hosting companies. Good recommendations as well as “My worst experience“.
Hostgator.Com 5/3/8 to present
Decided to try recommended http://www.hostgator.com. Coupons are available on the web for discounts of 20 to 99 percent of first month. UNLIMITED domains, subdomains, emails, et cetera, on “baby gator” plan, list $9.95 per month but cheaper with 2 and 3 year contracts. Code “404PAGE” might still be valid for 1 cent first month signup.
After I had filled out the order page, I got confirmation within 1 minute, and logon info in 5 minutes more. This is more like one should expect with electronic purchases.
Because I wanted to test my migrated setups before changing DNS name servers, I could view my site as http://assignedIP/~accountID, and similar for their FileManager, but did not have FTP access for bulk uploading. Found some document files at http://support.hostgator.com/ which told me browser FTP is ftp://username:password@serverIPaddress/, so I tried those data in FileZilla and observed fast uploads as well as fast initial connection.
By the way, HG offers reseller accounts starting at about 3 times the individual mid-range account price. Also, they offer Windows servers as well as the Linux I prefer.
There was a problem with HG, however. The morning after I opened my account, I found that HostGator had suspended it, for payment verification. Then it took support, sales, and admin over 3 hours to get that cleared up. Their excuse was that I was randomly selected for verification. Needless to say, I told them there are much better ways to handle such, including contacting Visa for its password enabled verification from my email account. Sales said they are in a massive upgrade of practices.
I did get to run some speed tests with this blog. On Hostgator, it paged about 5 times as fast as on Dreamhost at the same time. A migrated large store, http://oldcolorprint.com, clearly is faster than on Westhost. Two other stores, http://softwareprogs.com/store/ and http://easyhealthdiet.com needed for me to set MySQL correctly with a bit more effort on the changed user and db names, resulting from differences in cPanel structure.
Tests so far show HG to be the fastest host I have yet used. Support has been good, except for that “verification” boo-boo.
Legal Observation
Criticism is not “libel” when it is (a) factual, and (b) documented, such as with screen captures, et cetera.
Conclusion
For anyone running a website, or thinking about it, I recommend a visit to http://whreviews.com/, then to http://www.hostgator.com.
Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.
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