So much for 24 hour chat support at pdthosts.com. I waited 3 hours and still nobody answered my chat. I guess they stay online to appear available even though nobody is there to answer the chat.
I've attached a photo of my chat window.
Has anybody else had bad experiences with them?
I was in the market for a new dedicated server after a couple of years with my previous provider. The previous provider did nothing wrong but they were no longer competitive when it came to CPU and memory.
I moved first to geekrack. And I left them after a week and a half as they never were able to get my rDNS records setup.
I found Universal Hosts on this forum and gave them a shot. I had asked for an operating system that they didn't offer normally (Debian 64 bit) and they said that they could do it. However, when my server was setup it was 32 bit Debian instead. They apologized and had Debian 64 bit setup less than 24 hours later.
When I asked them to get rDNS records setup it took a few hours but they were setup correctly and they worked.
Universal Hosts is also a BurstNet reseller but compared to my other attempt at using a BurstNet reseller they are fantastic. While the initial config was incorrect they worked quickly to fix it and were very professional about it.
So after two weeks - so far so good. Keep up the good work UniHosts!
With all the web hosts out there people must be like "Which is best?" Well here is a review of some of the big names out there in web hosting.
GoDaddy.com:
GoDaddy’s web hosting packages come loaded with features. GoDaddy is proud of their world class data center and physical services, and reasonably so. GoDaddy actually owns their hosting facilities, which feature state of the art security and advanced backup technology for complete and competent network servers.
Each GoDaddy hosting plan comes with web site statistic tools to help you keep an eye on how your hosted page is performing. Setup is absolutely free, and includes access to the GoDaddy.com Hosting Connection, where you can interact with other GoDaddy users and find free applications to use on your web site.
Each GoDaddy hosting plan also comes with a variety of free software and credits to help you get the word out on your site. The Deluxe plan that we reviewed includes a $25 Google AdWord credit, a $50 Microsoft adCenter credit, and a $50 Facebook credit.
GoDaddy provides other tools as well for further adding function to your site. You can host forums on your GoDaddy website, start a blog, and show off your photos. And while GoDaddy doesn’t include a free shopping cart, they do have e-commerce solutions available, including merchant accounts and the Quick Shopping Cart.
Customer Service:
GoDaddy has a variety of help and support options available, and they’re accessible all of the time. The online support forum and FAQs section are well organized and contain a wealth of knowledge for beginners and advanced users alike.
GoDaddy service representatives can also be contacted on the phone, or through email. GoDaddy is a large company with several users, so personal help would be expectedly slower than others. However, GoDaddy’s support team is quick to respond, and the expected response time for emails has significantly decreased since our last review. The 10 to 12 hour response time has been cut down to 1.
Control Panel:
GoDaddy helps beginners easily set up their site, and includes additional tools for advanced developers to work with. GoDaddy also offers a variety of professional site building services and designs for additional fees. Regardless, all GoDaddy solutions support several programming languages. The deluxe plan we reviewed supports CGI (Python and Ruby), PHP, Perl, ASP, MySQL, ColdFusion, and FrontPage extensions.
Most functions within the Account Management tool are similar to other control panels. In addition, with GoDaddy.com you can perform account management tasks, email management, web security, database setup and management, and manage statistic tools.
Summary:
GoDaddy is a worthy competitor and worthwhile web hosting service. They provide all the essentials and then some, complete with secure facilities. The setup process is straightforward, and GoDaddy has an option for all levels of management, from beginner to expert. Though not as complete as a couple of our other reviewed web hosting services, GoDaddy has what it takes, and is definitely a great option.
Article from here
HostGator:
Hostgator, founded in 2002 is one of top shared hosting companies, ranking consistently among the best by most of the review sites. What makes hostgator stand out from the crowd is their excellent support and customer friendliness. If you are not satisfied with the support, you could even get hostgator president Brent Oxley to personally take a look at your problem.
Hostgator offers linux hosting only(even though they are expected to start windows hosting in the near future). All their packages come with all the features needed for a serious website. Baby and Swamp packages allow unlimited domains(add on), which makes a lot of sense if you have multiple websites. They use cPanel, which is the best control panel around. You get Fantastico script installer which will install most of the popular open source scripts with few clicks.
They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for others).
We started realtime testing of hostgator uptime on Feb 2008. The test is done on a site hosted with hostgator, using a third party uptime monitor service. Overall, hostgator had been the best performing host from all the hosts monitored. They provided consistently high uptime, month after month. There has never been a single case of site being down for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. Hostgator indeed lived up to their reputation.
They have three hosting packages starting from Hatchling ($6.95 pm) to Swamp ($14.95 pm). The price is reasonable for the features and space/bandwidth provided. Recently Hostgator increased the space and bandwidth to unimaginable levels. They also reduced the price of all plans, by introducing 24 and 34 month pre-payment options. The monthly payment now have a small set up charge and is costlier than 12 month rates. Our advice - don't get excited by the unlimited space and bandwidth. They do have limits on file numbers(inodes) and CPU usage to make sure that only reasonable sized accounts remains in the shared servers. But for any site with a reasonable traffic, hostgator plans are more than sufficient. You obviously can not expect a site with few million page views a month to run on a shared host, no matter what bandwidth they offer.
I hate to give reviews before trying out the servers and all related issues such as support and network but what i have faced so far really pissed me off and left me with no choice but to write down my review.
They Confirmed all dedicated servers will be delivered 72-96 hours upon purchase.
First: I have ordered one of their dedicated server on the 4'th of July, i expected not to get any response due to the holiday.
Second: 7'th of July, still no reply to my ticket, another ticket opened and still no reply.
Third: 9'th of July...Finally a reply from their support telling that my server is finished but they need to install the modules i asked for. SO i expected an extra few hours to get my server.
Fourth: 10'th of July..Nothing so far, i have emailed them and complaining the delay and not having any response from their side, they replied and confirmed that i will get my server later today so i had to wait.
Fifth: 11'th of July ..NOTHING delivered, i opened another ticket asking for a refund but NOTHING so far...
it has been 7 days since i paid and received NOTHING but promises, they told me at the beginning that my problem is related to hardware failure but give me a break you are a hosting provider and should always have a replacement.
ANYWAY, i don't know what to expect when i get my server, hope what i have faced is just a delay no more BUT 7 Days really is a big time.
WHT has been a useful resource for me when looking for hosting, so I figure I'd contribute back. I am including every detail that I can remember from my interactions with uni-hosts. Hopefully this will help some people looking for VPS.
I signed up for uni-hosts Xen VPS (512 MB memory, 50 GB disk, 500GB bandwidth @ $32/mo) in late March. The server was set up to my satisfaction (just plain CentOS) in 30-40 hours, well within their quoted 24-72 hour setup time. I opened a low-priority RDNS ticket, which was closed in 60 minutes, and the DNS entries finished propagating in the next day or two, as expected.
The next day, I installed SELinux on my CentOS VPS since their installation didn't come with it. I forgot to relabel the filesystem before rebooting, so I locked myself out (/bin/bash wasn't labeled as a shell). It took uni-hosts 11h 15m to respond, which I think is pretty good because it was my fault anyways, I was only paying $32/mo, and fixing it required access to the console (since I broke SSH). The fix, which I provided them, was just two commands (touch /.autorelabel; reboot), which it seems they did run, but somehow they screwed up all the system binaries in the process. Almost any command would just freeze (yum, rpm, top, ...) no matter what parameters I gave them. They reinstalled the OS for me two hours later -- pretty quick. Later that day, after setting up SELinux again, I configured iptables. I accidentally applied the policy too soon, and dropped my SSH connection. I opened a ticket for them to run "/etc/init.d/iptables stop", which they did in a fairly prompt 70 minutes. This concluded the initial setup of my server.
Four days later, I noticed that the clock was wrong. They fixed this 8 hours later. (Why couldn't I set the date myself? Xen guests have their clocks pegged to the host clock by default, so date -s has no effect in the guest. Never having used Xen before, I didn't find out until later that you can echo something into /proc to unpeg the clock. Last I checked, their host clock is in the year 2003 again...)
Pretty good up to this point.
Three days after that (1 week after I signed up) there was an outage. I got a response to my ticket in 1 minute (!) telling me I'd get an update shortly. I don't know when the outage began, but it ended 35 minutes after I first noticed it, and when it came back up my VPS had been rebooted (bad -- I had some files open). Note that they claim 99.9% uptime -- that's 44 minutes of allowed downtime per month.
One day later, there was another outage. I don't know when it began because my VPS wasn't responding when I woke up that morning. I filed a ticket and received no response, not even information about what was going on, until the issue was resolved.
Uni-hosts was not responding to pings during all of that time; I received the first ping response 10h 54m after I noticed the outage.
The network was up most of the morning after the 11-hour outage, with some intermittent brief downtime. However, that afternoon, an 11h 29m outage ensued. Shortly after connectivity was restored, I received an email from them telling me where I could direct any credit requests (I did not ask for this; they offered voluntarily). I canceled service and got my refund in a prompt two days.
It might be helpful to note that they told me this was a "hard drive and network" issue. Even if multiple concurrent failures took down their RAID, it shouldn't take two days to get the server back up.
In summary, I feel like this is a you-get-what-you-pay-for host. They are pretty cheap compared to some of the other ones out there, and their hardware and infrastructure seem to show it. However, the impression that I get from the support staff is that they do try their best to satisfy the customer, though their expertise may be lacking in some areas. I have been impressed with their support staff and think that they did a good job, especially at their prices.
One word of caution -- they claim live chat and phone support, but those don't exist.
You can only open email tickets. Also, they claim 99.9% reliability but there isn't an SLA or other agreement, so there's no way of enforcing this. Caveat emptor, but they're not out to screw you or anything like that.
I bought a server from them
[url]
1. Uptime:
They guarantee 99.9% uptime. The uptime was great till Feb(100%), but they've had a power failure in February...causing about 2 hours of downtime. However, I'm happy with that as well because they offered me $50 credit I expect they could have my server pulled down every month for 4 hours(so that i get a free server ...lol jk)
2. Support:
There isn't a response guarantee. Sometimes "replies" are made within minute, sometimes it could take "much" longer. though, there are only 3 people for support as I can see, but the resolution time is EXCELLENT. They've a priority support, for reboots only, which is excellent when you're in hunt for a reboot. Though, I have my server with a remote reboot port, so I never needed anything else.
I'm not sure if they do this all the times, but they've installed few 3rd party scripts for me as well.
3. Hardware:
Only 2 months to tell. But I never had anything with hardware, neither major nor minor.
4. Network:
I was willing to get 1 Gbit port, but it is "very expensive". My suggestion is to lower the prices, or you won't be having any one with 1 Gbit port
The bad part....have your website updated...regularly. Even your website presently doesn't show up the latest deals you've been doing.
LiveChat and an Emergency phone number is a plus...Great work guys...Keep it up!
I hope I can have similar deal now you gave me a couple of months ago :p
I'm interested in creating a small website exposing the biggest overselling companies, and how their overselling practices are false marketing.
Simply put, I want to benchmark each host with exact tests for accuracy. Any idea how I can fairly test each host, e.g. benchmark?
After the tests have been performed, I will explain which are the worst hosts (e.g. the first to give me the boot due to some TOS clause, e.g. cpu usage), etc.
Also, would anyone like to help out with this project? I'll be putting some nice marketing into it.
I am running Apache2.2, PHP5.I have been running with virtual hosts on a Windows 7 environment fine for a couple of years successfully, but have just had to move to a Windows 8 environment.It looks like Apache and PHP have installed and are working fine, but my Virtual hosts are now not being recognised. From what I can tell, it is the Windows 8 hosts file that is having a problem, as it looks as though it is now just setup to Block websites.
If I make the host file just have the one line127.0.0.1 localhost entry, then the very first Virtual Host from my apache config file will come up, but the rest are not found.If I put the usual 127.0.0.1 mywebsite.name aliasname is appears as though my website works momentarily and then is blocked..
Recently I stumbled along a host on here with a good rep and that uses direct admin.
Because they were very nice on the live support I signed up to see what direct admin was like.
Its very diferent from cpanel. Some parts seem to be harder to use like the phpmyadmin requires the username and password to the database you created not the control panel username and password like cpanel. Although I guess that could be a good security feature just in case some one gets into the control panel they can not get into the phpmyadmin, then again if they are smart and were able to get into the control panel they could get into ftp and look what the username and password is on the config file for the script you are using.
The bandwidth meter seems to be better in direct admin although I think its acting up for me as its putting yesterdays bandwidth on todays. I was told by the host that it updates every 2 hours and at first it did but now its gone to every day. Oh and unlike cpanel this bandwidth meter includes bandwith used by the control panel.
Niether one from what I can tell counts sftp though at least for the hosts I have right now.
I currently have an Apple computer and am looking for a webhost. looked at hostgator but when i tried to view sample website builder i was unable because i have a mac. Are there any webhosts that fully support mac's?
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have a few questions about hosts.allow
1) There are 2 IPs in this file. I did not put them there. This is a dedicated machine. The IPs go to a Canadian hosting company. I am not in Canada and those are not my IPs.
2) Does my provider have the right to add IPs to this file without my consent?
3) I have already commented them out, of course, but I am concerned.
As some of you may know I have about 4 different webhosts.
the problem is thats to many and I want to maybe cut it down to 2 but not sure which 2 and thats my delema or jam.
Downtownhost is one of the 4 hosts and I have been with them for over 2 years now and its great and support it top notch. So would hate to leave them.
Everity is another one and they are great as well and very honest, which still impresses me today and I have not yet been with them a year but it will be this December. They were able to run my biggest site with out any issues and that was nice then again so was downtownhost able to well to a point until the space the site was using got to big for downtownhost which is why I got everity in the first place.
Hostsimplex is a new one I got to see what directadmin is like and wow direct admin is awesome and almost I want to move all my site to this host. They are also very nice/ friendly and support is also honest and gee a few times while opening up the live support for a question or a problem figiruing some thign out in direct admin I have gotten into long friendly convos with them. Kind of feel bad about that though as I would hate to take the support staff away from other customers. I do like also how they have free remote back up, which is nice but I still will make my own back ups locally just in case. Any way this host is still new for me so I am not sure how good or bad they are but so far its good.
The forth one is liquid webs as as of right now my main and largest site it on it. This hosting is not one I own but a friend/client. I am not even paying for it which is nice. How ever I have little to no support as I have to rely on my friend and he is not always on when I have an issue. Do to that this might be the first one I drop.
Although it it rare that I have issues and I do not have to worry about the cpu ussage, bandwitdth, diskspace because he said I could use what ever i want. He also said the server has a 500gb hard drive and not even 10% is being used.
Any way thats the issue I am having so which do you think I should drop or should I just keep them all as I do have an active site on each one.
if there's a list out there of the "trendy" web hosts; where it's cool to be hosted, etc.
For example:
Joyent
A Small Orange
Maybe these are niche hosts, etc. but it seems people talk about them in the blogosphere.
I signed up to Uni-Hosts (Universal Hosts) a couple of days ago after seeinf one of they're deals in the Deals Forum and I'm still waiting for activation.
Is there anyone here with Uni-Hosts or had experience with them?
I was initially impressed with the deal but I'm getting unimpressed very quickly with they're setup times.
How many different web hosts have you used? Why did you change? What host are you using now?
View 19 Replies View RelatedI have been reading up on VPS solutions recently.
I am very interested by the other thread in this forum about Xen vs Virtuozzo.
I don't need a high spec VPS, just something to run a my personal web, mail, DNS etc. servers. I currently run these on an old dedicated server with 256MB RAM with no problems or slowness (I will be keeping this btw). So I have been looking at 256MB VPS plans.
The discussion in the thread above seems to talk about memory management being an untrue reflection of your actual use. I haven't looked into this in enough detail yet but I think the basic idea is that with Xen you get a dedicated amount of RAM (which can't be oversold) and a properly isolated OS. Xen looks much better to me...
For Xen hosts, I have come across the following
slicehost.com
easyvps.co.uk
a2b2.com
slicehost.com looks fantastic although every one of the sites they list as hosted on their servers (on their wiki page) is slow at loading for me. Anyone else notice this? They also provide servers as x86_64. Has this caused anyone problems? Any other comments on them?
The VPS must has a 100MB network connection. Unmanaged is fine.
Is Godaddy cool for the casino review/sports betting review site?i searched a lot and submit Godaddy a ticket,still dont dig out.
View 5 Replies View RelatedOut of the three websites that were hacked the hacker left a get.php file in the root and i decided to see what it was and i ran it. To my shock and horror it gave me all the different types of people hosted on the server and it also gave me their database passwords etc...
Now each time i ran it, it gave me different results of different users on the server each time with a long never ending list. I just couldnt believe my eyes a simple short written php script showed me a lot.
Now im not a PHP guru but this is quite serious and ive notified my web host showing them my findings. I was quite astonished it showed me passwords in peoples configs.
Now my question is... is this something new or old and that my web hosts forgot to look into that area...? I mean its a php script thats all.
How many % of hosts have Zip support in PHP?
If you (the replyer) are a web host, tell me if you are supporting. (yes/no)
Is there a list somewhere of windows hosts using dotnetpanel?
I've looked at the offers forum but only found about 3 of them!
Sure, there must be many others...
I'm interested in a windows host with dotnetpanel and smartermail or mailenable...
are there really hosts that do not oversell? if yes, i need suggestions but i would prefer a host that is not overpriced. I dont have budget in mind but i would want to gather the list of hosts that do not oversell and i can go over them one by one.
View 14 Replies View RelatedI just had a thought. If I am moving from one host to the other, the old host would still have my files. Whats stopping them from just using the files to copy my site. Basically is there an easy way to delete my files from my old host?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI bought a subscription to a host called "godaddy" and I have no idea how I can "run it" like actually upload script files I want to run, it seems you need to define a "domain" for the host,
View 1 Replies View RelatedJust wanted to share this with you all... I run a hosting company of my own, yes, but I choose to host my corporate site elsewhere (for some seemingly obvious reasons).
This company is just a group of maybe 4 people that colocates servers to companies all around the world, which basically makes them the middle man. So I'm paying someone more to do half-a**ed work, when I could just pay the same, or maybe more (with better support) to have it done right.
Quote:
Initially when I signed up a few years ago with [url] their support and uptime was good, not great, but good. Over the years it's gone way downhill. From responses like "idk" instead of I don't know, or just halfway done work, work not done when it was said to be done, major screw ups like accounts being removed, and other issues causing downtime, as well as just a general bad uptime. Surely not 99.9% as promised.
The company does not manage their own datacenter. They just colocate a few servers around the world, which just makes them the middle man. So anything that a Noc would need to look at, just takes that much longer.
Ticket response time is alright, but a lot of times the issue is not solved on the first ticket, and management either does not respond, doesn't respond for a long time, or doesn't seem to genuinely care. They don't care when you threaten to leave their company and host elsewhere, and when I explained to them how horrible their support, uptime and service is, I got a response from (I think the owner, Nick Hudson) saying "we are canceling your account in 24 hours, I suggest you remove all of your data from our network asap." I guess they don't need customers?
I'm stuck between these three hosts:
servint.net < They've been around sing 95 and appear to have a rock solid reputation.
knownhost.com < A newer company, their uptime appears to be fantastic.
futurehosting.com < Have heard these guys are pretty good. The Seattle Data center is closest to my location.
I've been trying to make up my mind for sometime now. I'm simply stuck between these three companies. I've read the reviews for all these companies and they all seem very solid. I don't know what else to say I'm just plain stuck right now.
Could anyone who's been with any of these companies chime in?
I run a small vb forum that is quickly expanding beyond the shared hosting plan we currently have with GoDaddy. So far we have been looking at VPS as a solution that would allow us to grow as we grow.
I hope I'm allowed to ask this, but I am looking for examples of vb forums that have about 100 concurrently logged in members and examples of vb forums with 200 members concurrently logged in and are running on either KnownHost or WiredTree (or an alternative service).
Please provide a link to your forum, the name of the host, and the VPS package you currently have. Finally, please let me know if you are utilizing Litespeed.
I'm hoping this will become a great resource for growing community owners looking to take the next step.
Link:
Provider:
VPS Package:
I have a website that supports a community organization. Fairly simple: Drupal, forum, photo gallery. The site on its own occupies less than a gig.
However, we keep an archive of all photos taken at our events, in full quality. The photo gallery gets reduced quality versions of these photos, but people can get the full-quality ones via ftp if they want them.
Unfortunately, these photos come out to many gigbytes, which means if I'm to use one host, I'm basically stuck with one of the "over-sellers".
I was thinking of separating my website and storage needs between two different providers: one for the php/mysql hosting, and the other just for plain file storage.
I offer web hosting services to a few customers, but I'm not satisfied with the way I provide them with their mailboxes.
I'm looking for an e-mail service provider that I can use as a backend, and resell their services to my customer as my own service. So I'm trying to find a way to host my mail (POP, SMTP) servers elsewhere. You could look at it as me being a reseller of their e-mail services.
My need is that I'd want to be able to add mailboxes for my clients myself, or make them interface with the e-mail service through my implementation of the e-mail services provider API.
I came across mailtrust.com, but they require 150$ per month expenditure minimum to become a reseller. I only have 20 customers, and I'm not planning to grow much bigger.
It's really just a simple service for customers I personally know.
If anybody thinks I should instead pay a sysadmin to setup a mail server + spamassassin for me, and still host in on my own machine, please let me know.
Any guidance, links to e-mail services resellers,
I've been using dot5hosting for about 2 years now and they have been alight. The thing is, for the last two years I have only been hosting a basic html/css website which is never to much stress on the servers. I don't get a huge amount of visitors on my site, but its a decent amount.
Just recently I have added a forum and blog on my site. For the forum I use Invision Power Board 2.3 and for my blog I use Wordpress 2.7. This is where the trouble begins.
Both the forum and the blog work fine, but they just take ages to load. If I had over 100 user on the blog and forum at one moment I would understand, but I haven't released the blog and forum to the public yet, as I'm trying to optimize them. The forum takes abou 10 seconds to load completely, while the blog takes over 15 seconds. I have tried everything with wordpress like cache etc..
So, I come here to ask what host you guys recommend for me. I've been looking over at HostGator and they seem to be what I need. I was also looking at MediaTemple Grid but form what I've read the Grid Service is very slow, and expensive. I just need a host that can run anything related to PHP and MySQl fast (like Wordpress and IPB)
Just a general question here but does it put you off signing up with a host if their HQ's are not based in the US or UK?
For example, would you always choose a host based in the US or UK over a host based in India, China or the Phillippines (i.e. English not being their first language as per communication with techs/sales staff)?
who are some of the largest, most well known or oldest running DirectAdmin hosts?
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