Best web hosting service?

Post Reply New Topic

TLD = Top Level Domain = the bit after the last ".", e.g com, uk, org, and so on.

http://1and1.com

As with many such companies, they offer web hosting as well, and lots of other stuff. This lot just happen to be the first bunch that I came across who offered domain names at a reasonable price. At present, they say: "Starting at $8.99/year", but they seem to be doing a deal on "com" domains at the moment. IIRC my domain originally cost £5/year, but I did have to pay two years in advance! Although... I did get a second domain, free for the first two years.

My experience with 1&1 was absolutely horrid. My site was down over 50% of the time and all they ever had to say for it was "oh here's a free day". Gee thanks. When you call, you get connected some outsourced idiot in India that doesn't have a clue what you're talking about, but it doesn't matter since you can hardly understand him anyway. I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly awful it was. Yeah you might get lucky and not have a problem but you better pray that's the case.

I have been using a small company at http://www.hostingone.ca for about 2 years now with no problems. I had three different domains with them. It's a small company with only 3-4 employees that take a genuine interest in your customer satisfaction. Their prices are great (I believe my sites are $4.99/month). I can't remember a single time in the last 2 years that any of the domains have been down. When you call, you get a guy that speaks English and often the same person the last time you called that remembers you.

http://www.hostingone.ca/aboutus.php It's a family run business in Canada. It's not uncommon for the man in charge, who I believe if Jeff, to contact you directly. Good luck even figuring out who that is at 1&1.

Ah. But I have no idea what their hosting service (in the States) is like. We were only talking about domain names. There's nothing much to have a problem with, there. The only question is who is the cheapest. Hosting at $5.99/month is more expensive than a domain at $8.99/year, and I don't see http://www.hostingone.ca offering plain domain registration/redirection as an option.

I've got through several hosting companies over the last ten years. They all give the same crap advertising quoting up times of 99.999 % of the time. In practice the figures are fantasy. I've sacked my last three hosting companies due to email problems.

The last one was A-Plus an American based company. Email went down for a week and they were not responding to fault tickets. Eventually I got a reply from an idiot saying my email wasn't working because my domain was no longer pointing to their servers. I pointed out that this was because I'd sacked them and switched to another company! Turns out they had outsourced their support to Eastern Europe and they could not handle it.

You only find out how good a hosting company is when you try contacting them for technical support or to report an outage.

Still talking about hosting, rather than plan domain registration.

My most reliable hosting service has been me, for the last year. I've been offline for a total of about 10 hours, which means I've had 99.9% uptime. Most of that 10 hours was one occasion, of 7 hours, when I had a power cut. I had just gone to sleep at the time, and hadn't configured my BIOS to auto-start after a power failure.