Anyone try webhostingbuzz advertised on sitepoint?
It seemed too good to be true. I found it a bit slow. My big problem was that it had memory errors every time I tried to do various word press plugins. I found it was no usable for word press so I had to cancel and it ended up costing me to do so.
I am interested to hear if anyone had better luck or better recommendations.
This review was posted around March 09, however due to the unfortunate circumstances it was lost when WHT was compromised. This may seem very evil having to repost this, however my original thread didnt last very long before it was lost. I thought long and hard whether to repost this again or not and have finally decided to post this again purely for the benefit of the community. I have no personal vendetta against WHB its just a review to help others make a concise and wise decision if they ever come to considering WHB as their webhost.
This is very different from any other review that you may have read on WHT. This review will take you 20-60 mins to read. I suggest you are sitting down comfortably, this is also my first ever review on a web hosting company.
Some of you may find the latter part of my experience with Web Hosting Buzz and my review interesting.
Before i write a very detailed review of WHB - Web Hosting Buzz i would like to make a few things clear first of all.
This review contains my experience dealing with WHB, it contains extracts from actuall tickets and quotes from forums keeping all WHB staff anonymous.
I am a former customer of WHB, my contract as a reseller was from November, 2007 to November, 2008. Only been a few months since my contract expired.
This is my personal and honest experience with Web Hosting Buzz and also a review about WHB.
Why am i writing a review now? I think the length of it explains why im writing it now.
I have been busy lately and i know writing this will be time consuming and needs to be in detail. So it was important i take time and write it as accurately and as honestly as possible. I have had such a bad time with WHB which deserves a detailed analysis from all my tickets and correspondence that i have had with WHB.
To give WHB some benefit of the doubt - things may have changed since i last was with them. But i doubt that after my years of experience.
November - Mid February:
When i first joined WHB in November i was extremely happy with them. They were no doubt value for money and very cheap, they were much cheaper and much more value for money than my previous host.
For two and a half months things have been good then it got so bad it was unbearable for me or my clients who were being hosted on WHB.
Mid February:
By mid february i was getting MySQL errors and connection outages. I reported the problem via ticket and i was told the following by WHB:
"The server you're hosted on had some load problems related to wrong web statistics update settings. In fact this brought the server into suboptimal condition, and naturally MySQL performance was affected too. That's why you could experience some outages or query delays."
Problems still persisted and i kept reporting the errors. I was told it was fixed again, then suddenly i was told the issue was with me?
"Dear Customer,
The problems that you experience with MySQL are caused by the fact that your forum is based on the vBulletin and it overloads MySQL, because your forum is frequently visited. The configuration and the limits that are set for MySQL on shared servers do not allow so many connections and some problems appear during the work of your forum because it does not have enough free connections to MySQL. The best choice for you would be the upgrade to the dedicated plan."
The forum he was referring to has only a few members online at any one time the most would be 10 users online with a very few visitors. I was suprised how they began to make their customers doubt themselves and later use dirty tactics on getting their customers to go and sign up to a Dedicated plan? That particular website has been running since 2004 and has been through 3 hosts which has been on a shared plan ever since, and still is on a shared plan today. For the first few months with WHB my website has been the same in terms of traffic and users which i had no problems with.
But now theres sudden problems with the server, first im told
"load problems related to wrong web statistics update settings"
But just because i kept on pursuing them about the server load they decided to shut me up by putting blame on me about the issues. They suggested i take my small forum with very little users onto a dedicated plan? (This is not the first instance they were quick to suggest a dedicated plan, - read on.)
Late February - Early March:
Problems and more outages kept on arising, a WHB server side 404 page kept coming up across all my reseller sites. Which clearly had WHB companies name and address written on it. This caused further concerns, as if it was seen by a client then theres no point in me being a reseller if they could see who i was hiring the service from. Later WHB heeded my concerns and deleted their server side 404 page which kept on showing up when the server was down.
Early March:
Problems were still thriving with socket errors, all my clients websites were getting this issue which brings back our discussion about the problem being isolated to me only? (Remember when I was suggested to upgrade to a dedicated box?)
Mid March:
Server is still giving problems and was heavily loaded, which literally grinded my website and my clients websites and mail to a hault. Users were being kicked off and the server kept on restarting. They tell me that they had addressed the issue but the problem still persisted. They didnt know what else to say to me as it was clearly a problem on their end. They obviously wanted to keep me busy and gave me instructions to troubleshoot on my connection locally. When it was evident not only me but my clients were facing the same issue.
There was also no "Webalizer" available in cPanel which i found strange as other shared hosts that ive been with had it, even the one im with now has it. I use to check my statistics with it. I was told "Webalizer" was disabled from cPanel on WHB to reduce load issues on the server. - Load issues? So i see "desperate measures"were taken to substitute an important feature that customers use in place of poor server hardware/connection that cannot maintain server load.
Things have been running ok for a few weeks when i thought the storm had passed but no, not quite.
Mid April
More load issues, users being kicked off. Problem being persistent on websites with MySQL and PHP. It had a few good days when things were actually working.
Early May - Mid May
I was showing a client around and had told him he could check some of his statistics in Awstats, but guess what - there was no Awstats either, how embarrasing!? It was disabled assuming it was disabled for the very same reasons as to why "Webalizer" was disabled as i had mentioned earlier. But a support ticket later got staff to re-enable this feature for me after i had emphasised how important it was and stressed the word "client".
I was told to request this feature for each domain i had wanted it on. What a bummer!?
From early May to mid May there was more load upon more load issues. The senior technician then got back to me with
"It wasn't a networking issue today, RS9 was heavily overloaded (exactly when you and ***** were talking in chat). I've tuned some kernel options, but I suspect HDD cooling problems."
So again it boils down to the poor hardware that they are using on their servers.
Mid May:
Things got really bad, i was really frustrated. Pages were taking 35 seconds to load. I opened yet another ticket and this time the staff member agrees that the server was rather slow.
I was told that the scripts on my server was causing the problem, they were
/usr/bin/php /forum/forumdisplay.php
So they were blaming PHP and the vbulletin software? I am no vbulletin coder and have been using the "off the shelf" premium script for years which i have had no problems with and now its the script?
I asked them why does there seem to be a problem suddenly with the script as i had not changed or altered anything since i joined WHB some months ago - why now?
I was told
"During last several days there were some problems with load there were load leaps on the server and we were working on it contantly and today server is stable.
There are no problems with the server.
Now your site is being processed quickly. If you are still experiencing problems please provide us with full URLs you have problems with and will check once again."
So whats happened to the accusations that i was causing the problems?
I was even threatened with suspension twice!
"Advise you to check your site and scripts, i.e. during intensive attendence of your site it may cause our server overload and your account will be suspended."
Heres a funny story, the first few months with WHB was great so i recommended a family member to join WHB. He has a forum with a few more people online. I showed WHB staff that website and told them to compare it with mine as they wanted to suspend me on because i was causing the load. I asked them why the other website had more member and was working fine without any problems and i am having to deal with such accusations with very few or no users online at all?
I was really angry and had explained for the last several days and weeks the server had been slow. They kept on blaming me for the issue which again i repeatedly asked them to identify exactly what part of the script was giving problems and demanded that more senior staff take a look at the entire ticket.
I later received an apology from a senior technician:
"Please accept our sincere apologize for our previous post with misunderstanding. Yes, it was our server issue and no way with your script. Certainly it's up to you to decide what to do with your scripts. PLease let us know if we can be of any help to you at any time."
And another from the initial technician that i was talking to:
"There was a misunderstanding and we're really sorry for it. We really had some problems with rs*, but they're resolved now. If you have any problems - feel free to contact us anytime."
I was pleased that they atleast understood me if not fix the issue. I really sometimes could not understand what they were saying, it brought some glimmer of hope when there was some understanding between us.
Now for the really bad experience with Web Hosting Buzz.
Still Mid May - Websites hacked across my entire resellers package.
Now this is really getting interesting now. My websites and clients websites were hacked across the server. From standard pages to premium forums like vBulletin.
As some had vBulletin installed on them i gave WHB some benefit of the doubt. vBulletin release patches from time to time to patch certain exploits. Exploits dont always mean websites get defaced very easily. Exploits allow only certain things to happen abnormally or create different avenues of attack if they are not properly patched.
However what happened to the hacked websites and forums was more than a petty exploit, luckyly this gave WHB the benefit of the doubt.
The damage that was caused was different, and it was quite evident that an exploit could not have done so much. It was more sinister. Before you know it, another website on my resellers was hacked and defaced and the two websites were no way related to one another. The only relation i could see was that they were sitting on the same server until a third website also got hacked!
I was doubting vbulletin and thought it could have been something new that they had not discovered. However if it was just a vBulletin problem then the problem would have stayed with vBulletin only. But no it had caused problem on a root level, html pages were deleted and replaced with the hackers message.
Anyways i contacted vbulletin and various senior technicians had taken a closer look at the websites affected. I gave vbulletin staff root access to all the websites affected and also gave them shell, ftp, cpanel access to find what was wrong. By chance i already had an up to date forum installed, that was also hacked and defaced along with other root files. This eliminates that it had nothing to do with patching vbulletin or running the latest version, as the latest version along with other things inside that domain was hacked.
Even after restoring the websites with the latest updates they were still being hacked and defaced across my entire resellers account.
WHB thought my passwords were weak or there was something on my end locally, a key logger or a spyware maybe etc. But no that was not the case, as i am behind a very good firewall and security and never ever had a virus on my computer. I also dont access client websites only when i set them up which was also defaced.
Later staff from WHB carried out a scan and found that when the hackers attacked they were able to leave files in my root for an easier entry the next time they attack.
WHB was persistent that it was a flaw with vBulletin when it was not.
vBulletin was adament that it was a flaw with WHB servers. They had carried out extensive research and examination on the many websites that were defaced including their premium software. The only possible route left was the servers.
WHB staff argued why it had not happened to others on the server yet? Well that was their word against mine, who knows maybe it did happen to somebody else giving me the benefit of the doubt?
Still not convinced?
The hackers had left a few files inside my root which they had forgotten to delete. They didnt leave anything behind on the other domains they had attacked, but on this particular one they had left everything. There was this file called get.php i was able to see peoples database passwords inside their configs etc along with some usernames when i executed the script. I am so lucky not to have lost any databases.
Take a read at this old thread i had made around that time about this very same issue with WebHostingBuzz:
Web Hosts being Hacked using PHP? - Web Hosting Talk - The largest, most influential web hosting community on the Internet
As you can see many have already identified the security flaws, it being with the servers on WHB. I also showed the same outcome to the staff members at vBulletin. If i was able to see everyone whos hosted on the same server dont you think there could have been somebody on the same server helping a hacker or the hacker himself running the script obtaining passwords of other accounts?
Does this not already represent a flaw with the services that are being run on WHB servers? I did not even get a thank you for bringing this to the attention of the CEO and their Operations Manager for identifying this problem. All i got was that they would look into the problem. Eventually this was resolved and patched on the server.
I remember WebHostingBuzz itself was also hacked, this was earlier on and i have the screenshots for that too. This was quite late at night and i dont think many were online to see. I had spoken to a senior staff member about this and his response was:
"Hi
If you can wait for a few days you would notice our press release in the news rooms around the internet. (I did not see any) This was actually caused due to a hole in the blackberry service by vodafone. Very high fi group of hackers hacked into the vulnerable blackberry software linked to one of the directories in the main webhostingbuzz list of folders and tried to take down the website. Never the less it was detected well in time (within 15 to 30 minutes) by our top admins. We are planning to sue Vodafone Europe for about $120,000 lost during the downtime caused by them.
Well all of this is confidential and I would appreciate if you could keep it yourself while we release more details officially in the due time.
Cheers"
I understand that this may seem confidential, but i have been searching the internet high and low till this day for a year now and have not found a single article about Vodafones relation with WHB and WHB suing Vodafone.
So this leads me to believe what i was told was not the truth and was merely said to boost my confidence in WHB? Maybe im being very cynical here, but the way that message was written and the words used was as if it was addressed to a kid on false pretence?
I can now see why reseller hosting is cheap. No doubt i really did get my moneys worth. $57 = £30 for the whole year.
Early June - Early July
As the server loads were getting really bad my emails and client emails halted and were not functioning at all. It just continued!
Mid July - More websites defaced
We thought our problems were over? No - websites were still hacked and defaced it was time i had to do something about it.
I was kept being told that the servers were fine, a senior member of staff told me they had the best server security and firewall. Clearly after what i have outlined above they dont!
Again i allowed senior vBulletin staff to be in my shoes, i gave them ftp, shell, cpanel access etc vBulletin staff had carried out extensive research over the weeks and finally reached a unanimous decision among them. The result concluded that the server was the only thing to blame. Read on to see how they reached their conclusion.
Late July
WHB servers were compromised yet again one way or another. Like all the staff at vBulletin Mike Sullivan was the one who had helped me the most and had spent hours communicating with me to get to the bottom of what i was facing. I have sought permission from Mike Sullivan to mention him from vBulletin for this review.
Here is an extract from our ticket:
Mike Sullivan - "Hi,
I have focused on **********.co.uk and that seemed to turn up something interesting. In the logs, I found this line:
[url] 3A209.51.154.100+powered+by+3.6&go=&form=QBRE" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ar; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16"
This is about 40 minutes before the deface happened. The interesting part is the referrer:
[url]
This is a search for all sites on a particular IP (209.51.54.100), with "powered by 3.6" on them. Your sites are the top 2 results.
While this means that they were targeting vB specifically,
by limiting it to an IP, that indicates that they already had access to that server and were using a separate search to help them find more things to deface.
Between this entry in the log and when the defacement happened, there were 2 hits to /forum/ and absolutely nothing else.
That just has to point to the server being compromised.
The does look pretty definitive to me this time. I think it's time to change hosts. Perhaps look at a VPS, where you're not paying for an entire server, but you are completely segregated from the other people on it.
Please let me know if you require any further assistance.
Mike Sullivan Developer Team, vBulletin"
So i had presented this to WHB and told them about the particular search query the hackers were attempting. WHB were telling me nobody else on the server was hacked or defaced other than me. I told them that the search query presented to me by Mike from vBulletin displays my websites at the top only, the hackers already had access to the server hence the reasons I was the only victim so far.
(Remember this was last year, i have moved now so the search query will display different results.)
I found this very ingenious of the hackers.
WHB had wrote lengthy messages to me trying explain and reassure me it was not their servers. A senior technician even told me he use to work for a "goverment" before WHB, notice he spelt government wrong. I knew right away what kind of government he worked for. But to reassure me with personal experience was a good attempt on his behalf.
So for a brief moment WHB decided to talk to vB, me being the messenger ofcourse they wanted hints from vb .
WHB Senior Technician - "Can you please ask VB techs for some assumptions about how exactly these sites might be hacked using server-side security flaws? I don't see any reasonable way to do it. Possibly some specific PHP settings might create VB security issue, or something like that? Either VB guys meant something certain they know about, or they just said "this is not our product's vulnerability because this can not be our product's vulnerability". We'd really appreciate some hints from them."
vBulletin - "Hacked passwords are by far the most common method of compromising a server. However there are literally hundreds of other possibilities due to the wide range of applications on a server and the need to constantly monitor them all and keep them up-to-date.
In short this appears to be a brush-off. You host knows very well the multitude of ways a server or account on a server can be compromised. Or at least they should.
Please see this thread on how to make your vBulletin more secure:
How To Make My Forums More Secure - vBulletin Community Forum
If you are still being hacked after doing all of this, then they are most likely doing this by accessing your server or account on the server. There are currently no known exploits in the latest unmodified version of vB.
Best regards, Steve Machol Customer Support Manager, vBulletin"
After that last response, WHB did not reply to the ticket.
There were still major load on the servers and i was already looking for a new host. I was then suprised to see a comment from a support staff.
"Small server overload has been in process all day long due to server security maintenance."
Suprise Suprise!
Later i had posted on the vbulletin forums and this was the response i had got from vb staff:
"Steve Machol: If you are still being hacked after doing all of this, then they are most likely doing this by accessing your server. You need to contact your host about this.
Me: Hi Steve, Mike and I also came to the same conclusion. If you look at ticket number (Ticketid: 824317). You will see what Mike has to say and that there is sufficient evidence to say that it was the server that was compromised afterall.
A vbulletin. 3.7.2 (latest version was defaced), 3.7.1 and also a 3.6.8
I am in the process of changing hosts, however my current host fails to understand what i am trying to say to them and they are persistent that it is vbulletin's fault.
This is what they had to say.
WHB: Dear .......,
I totally comprehend you but it is a matter only of your vbulletin's security which is not being guaranteed and provided by you i.e. it is not updated at all. Please be so kind to contact vbulletin's developers/support and install the LATEST version and ALL patches and updates! Keeping all these rules will make your forums safe for sure!
If you have any further questions just let us know. We'll be happy to help.
Me: How can i make them understand that 3 different domains on the server were defaced which were not linked with one another and that 2 out of the 3 were fully updated versions of vbulletin?
Mike had also showed me the process of where the hackers traced the forum boards with msn search targeting the particular server which the hackers know well there was a way in.
I really would appreciate a reply which i can pose to my current host including any technical terms which they may understand.
Thanks
Steve Machol: Unfortunately you cannot make a host like that understand. If they are not even willing to investigate a possible security breach on their servers, then the only viable option is to get away from them as fast as you can."
Another response for the above from Steve:
Mike Sullivan Aug 01st '08 11:29am
"Hi,
I suppose you can use my name and try to explain what I showed. I'm just a bit wary that it looks like a vB staff member just saying it's not our fault. I'm really not trying to do that.
As for your host, I doubt you'll be able to convince them of much. Especially if it's from things I say. It's "he said, she said" really. In a weird sense, I wish I could find a whole in vB (or some other software) when I do these searches. It would actually provide some closue to the issue!
I don't really know what I can say technically, unfortunately. Looking at the logs, I could see when the pages started returning a particular page size; that indicated when it got hacked. I saw no accesses in your logs between the last good access and the first bad access that had anything weird about them (they were just /forums/).
The search enginer referrer is probably the clearest thing. Did my explanation of that make sense?
While I know that there is no such thing as guaranteed safety, your host's response just says "upgrade to the latest version and you'll be fine"... But as you said, you're already on the latest version. I don't know how they'd respond to you telling them that.
Hopefully you can get away from them. Glad to hear that you were looking into some VPS options, though you're right they might require more management. It depends if you're interested in getting into that. Frankly, just getting to another host might make the problems go away.
However, some of these problems are (somewhat) intrinsic to shared hosting. Only so much can be done to prevent 2 people with full access to the server (via Apache) from interacting with each other.
All I can say is: Good luck!
Mike Sullivan Developer Team, vBulletin
(Mike mentioned going with another host could solve the problem, guess what? Im with a new host and no problems what so ever! - Read on.)
Early August
Problems still remained with regards to server overload, other users were also facing the same issues as this was evident on WHB forums. I was fed up and was in the process of moving but it was a very hard one.
I found communicating with WHB support staff very difficult. My first language is not english either nor am i perfect. However there always has been some misunderstanding and i have continually had to repeat myself so many times so that the support staff is able to understand me. There has been times where ive tried explaining simple things to them which they wouldnt simply understand. I have also had to break down my english just so that they could understand me, that experience was very frustrating.
I remember a time i had highlighted a ticket as urgent when my website was hacked across my reseller, support staff had demoted it "Low Priority" which made me even more upset with them.
There was a point i had an urgent ticket, it was responded to after 29 hours. Usually staff reply within a few hours, however in my case it took staff to respond to one of my urgent tickets 29 hours when the subject of the ticket header read: "3 websites hacked".
However they changed my ticket status cheekly from "Urgent" to a "Normal" one. I give them credit for doing that as they came very close to replying to my ticket, but atleast they tried and gave me a sign that they had read it.
I suppose they were able to buy enough time to give me a flawed response 29 hours later.
I thought resellers would have been taken somewhat seriously as they also have clients to manage and look after. Clearly they were not interested and i was merely another drop in the sea.
Their servers have been overloaded for a long time, on and off they were blaming it on the mail and then they tell me some clients were using up a lot of resources on their servers.
Every time i had approached them i was told they were taking down the sites that were abusing the server. - For that long!? I dont think they will have many clients left.
They were clearly under some sort of attack. The hackers were also searching sites on the particular server i was on by a the "specific IP address" search which Mike from vBulletin had demonstrated above.
I felt really ashamed after a few months as i had been promoting WHB as being a reliable and a good host. I had also introduced a family member to WHB, he was doing well on a different server on WHB until it suddenly had server issues.
I paid for a years hosting and so did he. He was told by WHB to Upgrade to a dedicated plan.. only after hes being with them for a few months which is when he started experiencing problems.
Does it not seem strange WHB had also told me the same thing? Why do they take every server load as an opportunity to sell their clients dedicated hosting? WHB was asking us to upgrade to a dedicated server initially just because we were experiencing load issues.
WHB is clearly just interested in how to get your money fast as cheap as it may seem. Im not suprised they must enjoy putting load on their servers and get customers coming up to them omplaining about load issues, they will then be very quick to suggest a dedicated plan. Talk about dirty tactics, they must be doing very well by now.
I found a new host around mid August which left me over 3 months to sacrifice. However my family relative has had to move after being with WHB for around 5 months so hes had to sacrifice a lot more months.
I am having no problems with my current new host even though i am paying a little bit more than what i use to with WHB. I have had:
no server issues, no hacking attempts, no script issues, no MySQL errors and no down time, staff also know what their talking about.
Its been over 6 months and no problems at all, so what does this say about WebHostingBuzz hosting? I'll leave that for you to decide.
I'm configuring a website for a client who has moved their web hosting to downtownhost, but is keeping their email hosting with their current provider. They do not want to configure an MX entry on DTH to autoforward email back to their current provider because they don't want their email to pass through DTH.
In order to do this, do I keep the nameserver entries on the current provider the same, and configure an http redirect to point to DTH? Or is there something else I should configure on the current provider?
I was with Blue Host and their support and service was pretty bad. Servers going down all the time, and chat support was terrible. Then I moved to Host Monster and received the same kind of service/support. I later then figured out that Blue Host and Host Monster is runned by the same people. For example, I opened up a tech support ticket with Host Monster and then they replied signing their signature with Blue Host. So I got the same service: terrible tech support and servers kept going down. Now I'm looking for a new web hosting. I a few people here gave Host Gator some good reviews. I hope Host Gator is not run be the same people that runs Blue Host and Host Monster.
with this being my first website goddady's website tonight or there blog site plan seem pretty good as I do not know how to build a professional looking website nor do I have a knowledge of HTML. Are there other hosts that offer better services such as these?
Also I would want to register with 1&1 as to register privately is free but with godaddy it costs around $15 and I've heard of godaddy stealing persons domains when they haven't even expired yet i.e. familyAlbum.com?
Is it allowed for instance to register my domain name with 1&1 and host my site with godaddy?
If you had to chose either Host Gator or Hawk Host which would you go with and why? Don't bring any other hosts into consideration just compare these two. This would be for a standard website, forum, and a few downloads if it makes a difference...nothing too fancy.
I have just made a personal website using photoshop, html, css and php. My site contains an index page, a gallery page with 8 photos, a contact page with a form and an extra page with some quotes. I am planning to use a paid host for the first time. Based on feedbacks from some of my sitepoint friends, I decided to go in for shared hosting. I thought of using Hostdogs.com as they have the option of a monthly billing cycle. I thought that I have the option of changing my host after a month if I am not happy with them. I have also read a lot about Hostgator.com. A lot of sitepoint members seem hooked to it.
1. Can anyone give an opinion as to which host I should go in for? Hostdogs also give a free domain. Is there any reason I should go in for Hostgator instead of Hostdogs?
2. One more question, I have heard that once I have a site running, I can earn money through the advertisements placed on it? How do I place advertisements on my site?
3. One last and very important question is whether it is right to go in for shared hosting at this point of time. I just read this
Quote:
When you look for a suitable host, be sure to check out the amount of bandwidth that will be available to your site. Even a site that doesn't require a great deal of data transfer per month could run slowly if you're hosted on a shared server; particularly if you are on the same server as a more popular or bandwidth-intensive site. The more sites hosted on a server, the more likely they are to compete with each other for available resources, including bandwidth. This is why you may notice a reduction in server response times during busy periods, or during a sudden peak in traffic at a busier site on a server that you share.
This made me wonder whether I should go in for shared hosting. But then mine is a personal home page which may not have so much of traffic.
4. What does the paragraph below mean? How does one handle ones registration manually?
Self-Management (no cost) Select this option if you prefer to handle your registration manually.Your web host can establish service with any Top-Level Domain (TLD), international or domestic.
I will be setting up a site which uses ASP.NET 1.1. I know versions 3.0/3.5 are available, but they are not yet V2.0 compliant. Anyway thst is not the issue - just context.
Would like your advice as to whether it would be better to host this site with a company who looks as though they are specialising in ASP; such as DiscountASP, or Softsyhosting, or go with a general Windows hoster such as Steadfast, Fluidhosting, or 3Essentials?
I know nothing about ASP, so I don't know whether it is not at all neccessary to have a host specifically knowledgable about it, as I am unlikely to ever have problems with it, OR; I will most certainly have to address ASP issues sometime, so it would be essential to have support who really knows ASP.
I got the beta of vis studio 2005 about a month ago and happily started coding away. I recently told my host to convert to asp.net 2.0 so I could upload the stuff and have it work and he said he couldnt until the non beta comes out.
Is there anyone out there at the moment who will host asp.net 2.0?
Is there any disadvantages to hosting on a US based host? When I'm currently in the UK, I'm planning on a website with a huge amount of content, and so far only the US hosts seem to offer enough bandwidth for the price? I've checked out a lot of UK Hosts but they all seem to be considerably lower than the US bandwidths.
I have been with a lot of web hosting providers and I even gave my experiences a few days ago with heart internet, but 'JUST HOST' justhost.com rocks!! Can you imagine, I tried calling them and lines were busy, and submiitted a form online asking them to call, and I was called in under 3 minutes. The servers are fast, I uploaded my entire website in a few minutes. And what they offer for £3.95p/m is just unbelievable.They even offer a free domain, but make sure you claim it at point of buying or you cannot do this after.
I'm currently on a VPS server at JaguarPC. In 1 week time I upgraded my account from shared hosting, to semi-dedicated hosting and then to VPS because my script was affecting other users on the server. I always thought that a VPS is like a server. With this I mean that I thought that I will be the only one affected if my scripts are using too many resources. But I was just informed by JaguarPC that users on a VPS server can affect each other.
I'm currently looking around to see if there are any reliable VPS host out there where my performance is not affected by my neighbors, and the performance of my neighbors not affected be me? Are there VPS hosts like this out there?
I know this can be done because I was told that you can host yourself right from your own desktop computer. But how? I have XAMPP installed and I have my own domain name, but how do I set it all up to be accessed on the web?
after all the frustration with the previous host. time to find a new on.
i got more than 10 sites but less than 20. all in asp.net + sql, there are all online-stores. thus i do want a account which can host all my sites(domains), regarding the space, 1~5 GB total is good enough. i don't think i need those 300GB - well, if it's, why not. The host should be fast and stable...
This is a big company, that offers a lot of features for a relatively small price (with discounts readily available). They have a positive image. Customer service seems cheery. Unlimited storage and bandwidth is a definite plus. I signed up with them in November 2008, and mostly did not encounter problems with them until late July other than slow server access via my base from South America. Sign up and set up went relatively smooth. I had no major problems other than my page loading slowly, which I partly improved by making several adjustments to my Joomla site, but even after optimization the page still has its moments of slowness.
In an earlier post in this forum, I detailed the first issues. There were two main problems: one, my articles pages were showing up blank in PhP5, and two, I was unable to enter my Joomla Administrator at times. On the first issue, it turned out partly due to PhP5 not performing properly, and later, a plugin that should have been de-activated. The second issue, am still not sure, and its happening again.
One week ago, after just a few precious days of my site functioning normally, the bad luck poured on further still. I was hit this time by the NobodyCoder hacker. What an incredible coincidence of bad luck! Made me wonder, given the tone of some of my prior complaints, but then I did see that other Lunarpage customers were also hit on the same day as me, and some of them, on the same server.
Two days after the hacker struck, and no response to my emails, I finally got someone from Lunar to give me some time after I complained publicly in their forum page. A customer service supervisor took the unprecedented step of calling me.
First, though Lunarpages harps on its customers being at fault, through faulty scripts and such, I learned of some security measures that Lunarpages fails to inform its customers about that could conceivably help with such issues -- especially on shared servers -- such as the really helpful step of activating "suphp." When we were talking, the customer service rep was inside my Cpanel and I asked him if he would go ahead and make that change for me. He said he would do that, and that he was doing so while we talked. I was disappointed to see after the conversation that he had lied to me and had not make that change for me. Beyond this blatant display of dishonesty, I moreover pointed out to the customer service rep that I had read mod_security for Apache should be activated and configured -- he assured me that it was. I looked after our conversationm it in fact wasn't and that there was nothing about this to be found in their Knowledge base.
Concerning the hacker who messed up my site, it appears that multiple sites have been hit, particularly on my server. The customer service rep rightly agreed with me that this hack is obviously not targeting sites individually but sending it out en masse via a robot or program. Given that, and that many sites on my server have been hit, it would appear the hacker has found a way to exploit sites on their server (s). However, the response from Lunarpages support people again has so far has been mainly to tell people to do virus scans of their computers and change passwords, all of which helpful but likely don't do much to tackle the real issue.
The net result is that while the security issue appears to have been a broader, server wide security breakdown, the Lunarpages company has sidestepped any responsibility in the matter and done little to help customers get out of this mess. One wonders if it will happen again once my site goes back online (because of their slow server it took me about 3 days to upload the backup.) In general, though their customer service reps are generally polite, they react slowly to customer issues and often are completely ineffective.
I know that this post will get deleted like the last ones but I'm tired of getting spam from a Rackspace customer. sendemedia.com keeps claiming that I "agreed to receive information from Consumerbase and our partners". Bull. I would never sign up for intentional spam. Additionally, they're using an email address that I haven't used in literally 5 years that only gets spam any more.
But I report them every time to rackspace.com. And, apparently, given that they never do anything about it, rackspace.com is just fine with the spam.
Don't host with them! WHT will likely delete / water down this post but if you read this do not support rackspace!
i got a adult blog(wordpress),sometime i will put some torrent files on my blog,i use lunarpages share host before,recently,traffic up to 3000uv/day,share host can't hadle it,so i wanna upgrade to VPS,lunarpages ask me 39.9$/m,just wanna know is there any other choice for me.
I am looking for a host for a small business. The client has requested that the host be completely free of any adult content. I usually use DreamHost but I am not sure how to check if they host any adult sites or not.
The site will be an online catalogue with shopping cart.
I am looking for a web host. I'd like to stay away from resellers, but I'm not sure how to tell if a company is a reseller or the 'original'. How do you find out?
We are a mapping software developer that does a lot of web hosting ourselves. Our new web applications have map caches which consost of a series of "tiles" which are 512 x 512 pixel images ranging from 10 -100k in size. I am trying to find options that will be able to host about 500gb worth of these tiles and serve them very quickly. I am not sure what our options are, and whether using something liking amazon s3, or cachefly is worth the extra cost for what we are trying to do. It looks like the minimum number of tiles requested at a time would average about 1000/minute for peak usage. Would one of the cheap hosts, like dreamhost provide better performance than hosting this ourselves? I don't know if we would run into bandwidth issues with our current environment.
