Good Shared Hosts
Hosting is a important part of your sites sucess. Hosting with a place that oversell their servers, or loads them as full as they can with customers can be disasterous to your site. We’ve had the wonderful experience of trying a ton of different hosts on the shared level, and a few at the VPS level, and only one at the dedicated server level. But we’re going to share with you shared hosting advice today.
When searching for your host, make sure to do research, a few good sites to gather this information are WebHostingTalk.com, DigitalPoint and vBulletinSetup. We’ve got loads of experience, and we’re going to share with you our hosting experiences.
Site5 - This was one of the worst experiences we’ve ever had. Their customer support was lacking, their “support forums” were regularly moderated so that you couldn’t post any actual problems there. Their servers were loaded full, constant down time, and to top that off, one day we logged in to our sites, and they had been erased. Two thumbs down!
DreamHost - These guys are the classic oversellers, they just do it better then anyone else. We don’t have anything bad to say about them support wise, as they always were very helpful. The actually let us fill the promised amount of space up we were told we could have (300GB at that time), the problem there was with resource usages, we could barely transfer any of that 300GB back, without pushing our resource limit. Decent host, over sells, be cautious.
1and1 - This place was a joke from start to finish. Avoid them at all costs. Two thumbs down
ASmallOrange - These guys are by far the best hosting experience we’ve had. Their support team is awesome, downtime is minimal, and close to 0 every month, and they even gave us a coupon for everyone to use if they sign up there. SEOVB15 will get you 15% off your order, and SEOVB will get you $5 off any order. Awesome host, awesome support. Two thumbs up
Yahoo Webhosting - They should stick to the search engine/portal business. Their customer support regularly takes 24-48hrs for just a response, their packages are over priced, and their configuration/control panel is funny. Two thumbs down.
GoDaddy - A decent host as long as you aren’t running a internet forum. Their servers are some what slow, and their support has a hard time with english. Decent host, but you should know what you’re doing first.
If you have any experiences with these companies, we’d love to hear your comments. Or if you’ve got a good/bad hosting experience with one not listed here, we’d love to hear from you too!
HostGator - I’m currently on a shared hosting plan with Hostgator.com. They have been brilliant right from the word GO! I had initial problems getting vBulletin to connect to the database and one of their Live Helpdesk techs sorted me out within 15 minutes. Any time I’ve had a question, they’ve returned a prompt and acturate answer. A reverse DNS check on my ip says there are 140+ other sites on my ip, I’m not sure if this is a lot or a normal figure but my site is never slow. So I would highly recomment them and they’re are cheap too.