our VPS hosting company did an upgrade the other day and now something is wrong with our home page, it takes about 30sec to load. They keep saying its a php problem, but the scripting is fine, the engine is fine and the only thing that changed is that they did an upgrade.
They don't seem to be able to grasp the problem, and it is making my boss go nuts. A web guy a know said it definately had to be something at their end, and everyone else is at a loss.
I'd like to start an ongoing thread here listing the 'Good Hosters with Good TELEPHONE tech support'. In other words, out of the 1,000s of host companies, this may cut it down to less than a dozen.
( And for all you Hosters out there who really want your company to grow, and want to know how, - it's easy: just read here.)
Good telephone support is the #1 ultimate requirement, because:
-It's a lot faster and easier for both the user and the host company, because you can state and answer all questions and clarifications on the spot, you don't need to continually pass new emails with new questions and clarifications, back and forth for days on end, until the issue is solved. It saves tech time and user's time. And saves a lot of nerves.
- It's the best way to sort the good guys from the bad. A bad company isn't going to bother to answer the phone, - or will make you wait way too long, - because they are likely getting endless complaints. The good guys are always ready to answer the phones, with a friendly voice, - because they really WANT to please the customer.
- If a company can't be bothered to pick up the phone, we can't be bothered to even consider them. They're a joke, and so won't be listed here on this thread. (So, before adding or listing any Hosters here, please verfify that they do have Good, quick, friendly, telephone support,; ideally 24/7, but 9am to 10pm might be acceptable, if it was supplemented by some emergency contact. AND:
- Hoster ALSO needs good EMAIL support (and preferably, Chat online, extended hour availability). (I spend a lot of time overseas). It sems all emails should get a non-automated response within about an hour, - and then support should jump on fixing any problem.
I only need support a few times a year. To answer some questions, or fix a problem, or do an install. That's lesss than 1 hour total, so any company paying maybe $18/hour tech support should be able to handle this. It IS reasonable to charge a custm for extended calls, beyond say, 90minutes a year, IF you don't count the 80%? Of times an issue is the Hoster;s fault of stmg gone wrong, and don't count the 'hold' times.
ALSO IMPORTANT: - Uptime - site Speeds - Monthly plans, no contract (Only a dishonest host will try to force you into a contract, where they can then ignore you.) - Reasonable price. (? Maybe $12 to $18/month for a basic business site. We don't need massive bandwitdths, - we all know that's an overselling scam, and can't ever be delivered.) - a good upgrade plan of bigger options. Maybe even VPS. - Dedicated IP, and availbility of SSL -PHP 5, mysql, phpMyAdmin, etc - cPanel ( Some Hosts are using problematic panels, like Hsphere, which are slow to load, slow in operation, require many more clicks, have too many options, spread apart on many separate pages. Time is money, and this really slows down the ability of a small business to manage his own site in effective time. For example, one WHT user wrote somewhere: "I don't feel that HSphere's interface is nice at all, although I have worked with cPanel and DA all my life... I just found it to include un-necessary features or split features up in to different hard to find pages, such as backups - mysql backups you had to find on a completely different page than file backups, and then there were options to have it in the home directory or server-end backup, in which then you had to wait a good 10 minutes before it was ready. cPanel, just hit backup and hit download and instantly it does everything you need...".
I have used several hosters. Currently on Aplus.net and Godad, which have phone support, and mediocre service.
My LIST So Far: - Liquidweb: a very impressive company with good, 24 hour support. But to get dedicated IP, you need to go with their $25/month plan. Yikes! - NewIdeaHosting.com. A very small company. My call was returned, and the owner chatted with me for an hour on the phone! Plans have small bandwidth, but promises No overselling, and personalized attention. Extra $5 for dedi IP. He specializes in Small business sites, and small eCommerce sites. He has only 250 accounts, on 3 servers. He rents servers from the Equinox data center of Chicago. Seems exceptionaly honest. - MegaHosters. Excellent phone support and WHT reviews. But company was taken over by another company, and so may well go downhill in future. Another problem: uses Hsphere. - Steadfast. Has a good rep on WHT, and seems impressive. Tech answered the phone immediately, but they say they prefer emails. Sales phone has limited hours. Good price on $20 SSL. But, uses Hshhere. - JodoHost 24 hour phone. But, uses Hsphere. An Indian company with office in Florida, and good rep. I like the idea of outsourcing phone support, if it makes it more available and affordable. But, the accent on the phone was very hard for me to understand, so maybe this might not work..... - Hostgator. Yes, it's a big overseller, but seems to get good reviews/results anyway, and good phone support. - ? ThePrimeHost ?? Mostly good WHT reviews; some dissenters. Site says 24hour phone, but when I called on several nights, no one ever answered... - Can anyone add to this list? Please list only hosts that meet the above minimum requirements of phone support, etc. Especially useful is hosters you've tried. TO AVOID: - Avoid Arvixe. I had a horrid experience with them, here: [WHT forum]:/showthread.php?p=5097822#post5097822 - Avoid WebHostingBuzz. This company never returned my phone msessage inquiries.
I have been with DMEhosting for all of 4 days now. I got one of their dedicated servers with the Smart Tools Bundle for windows server. I bought it on saturday. The server was setup on tuesday. Without the Smart Tools Bundle. I noticed this on april 2nd and i open a support ticket that morning. Two days my support ticket sat their with no response. I have lost all faith in this company and i am now just wanting out. I do not care about the month i have paid to them. I have informed them as of today that they can cancel my server.
We've got a discounted Quad dedi box from Ecatel.net about a week ago. Their network and prices are really good, sure. But we still have problems with start up because the second hdd isn't mounted or installed properly. The support team has answers about 1-2 times per day only so this question is in progress already for days.. The helpdesk is locked somehow from todays morning (I see our account is present but there's no way to log in) and we are still waiting for replys from day-before-yesterday requests...
I wouldn't like to be some kind of sharp under any circumstances and I respect every business but this is probably too long so we have to pay now just for waiting to get a server ready with no start yet.
Does somebody work with them? Is it normal situation? We still have some boxes in Layeredtech and would like to move to European DC (these boxes are middle-ended so we need more power now). There were no such problems in LT. Never. The maximum response time to such kind of questions was 2-5 hours (15 minutes in general), maybe a bit more (for hardware setup requests), but not days and nights with no progress indicator.
Maybe that is a European DC highlight strategy to have such delays with tickets response, isn't it? Coz the European market is new for us, anyway, we've never had boxes there before but would like to.
we are thinking of moving to rackedge, as we need an nl server and they offers are pretty good, but we don't know how good support is, has anyone used them? what's your experience? if it was bad, have you found something better?
It's imperative for you to know that web host features does not just stop with Unilimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. There are other very salient features to which some people looking for a host provider have ignore, it is CUSTOMER SUPPORT.
You will not value the importance of a good customer support until you start having problems which you want resolved in the shortest possible time. For some host providers this is like telling them to do the impossible.
It is sad that some of the so-called reputable host don't even have a ticket system not to talk of an on-line chat system where you can ask questions and receive answers in real time.
So, for those of you that are new to hosting or want to change your host, then you had better look for a host that offers good customer support either by Chat, ticket system or forum.
I decided to go for a budget dedicated server because the shared hosting I was using was grinding to a halt several times a week.
I haven't used a dedicated server before, and wasn't 100% sure what I needed, so after lot's of going round in circles, I found the 123-reg £49.99 server and unlimited bandwidth, so I ordered it....and waited, and waited. Not so much as an order confirmation, or reply to my emails asking what was going on. Not a great start, so I cancelled the order.
OK, I have a budget of around £60 a month.
I need the server to be able to do mod_rewrites.
Unlimited, or a generous amount of bandwidth per month is important.
Good service if it all goes wrong is essential.
Preferably UK based, but will consider other countries if contacting them isn't a problem.
I need some kind of control panel as well.
i will be running a Vbulletin + VBSEO (hence the mod_rewrites) installation and a joomnla installation with lots of large images if that makes any difference.
There are a lot of people whether their web hosting providers are good or not. After months of purchasing their web hosting account they might discover that their web hosting providers are so bad. Therefore, you’d better checking your web hosting provider.
One of the most important parts related to web hosting is the supporting services. So when you purchase a new web hosting account, try to check their supporting services. Try to ask them a few technical questions even you don’t have a problem. It just tests their supporting quality. How do they answer your questions quickly? Ask yourself this question. If they spend a lot of time “two or three days”, it might be poor service. For this situation, my advice is to cancel your account. The most of web hosting companies offer 30 days money back and try another web hosting company.
There are many supports kinds:
* HelpDesk * Live chat * Supporting via Phone * Supporting forum * And so on
This is all about the supporting part for your web hosting provider. So this is very important to check this service.
I have servers with softlayer current paying $2000 a month for 3 dedicated servers. THey are set up and work perfectly.
Issue is i was not aware that softlayer doesnt do "managed" support, would like to know if anyone has a good third party company that works with softlayer.
the tools they have on the portal our great so really would like to find a company thatworks with them. the co that softlayer suggested doesnt do windows support go figure!
my site is terribly slow, especially if there are several users accessing it at once.
Is there a way to to find out what exactly is slow, so I know what to tackle?
Since there is no caching at the moment, I think that is a good point to start.
The reason that there is no caching, is because Internet Explorer kept showing stale content, whatever I tried. How do you make sure that IE doesn't cache the dynamic pages?
This also means that images are not cached and pages with several images, seem to load a lot slower, sometimes not even showing all images the first time the page is loaded.
Does anybody know what I can do to improve on this?
Do they do a good job of supporting OSCommerce? I want to customize stuff using OSCommerce for my site. Let me know from those who have used OSCommerce with Cirtex hosting.
I am referring a friend to JaguarPC but he wants more options so he wants me to recommend 3 different shared webhosts to him. What are two other great shared hosting providers that have as good support as JaguarPC?
I had an VPS in SLHost and experiencing fall downs and slow server... now I moved and I check that the VPS is fast and great, but my sites are loading too slow...
I mean the connect time is too long; the time between connect and sending first byte goes from 5 to 12 seconds! My provider can't find what's wrong and I'm a little lost in this
I have a website www.officegofor.ca. The site takes a very long time to load. I don't think it's because of the server's connection speed. What would be the best way to diagnose the problem? What could the problem be? I noticed that it get's slower and slower with time and when I restart apache it's faster (but still not fast enough).
I came to this site few days back only and was going through various discussions. After being on this website since last 1 week I am really impressed that members are really helpful to other members with their fair and valuable suggestions.
I do have a quick question for you and need your suggestions: Q: Which web host I should go with where I will get around 20GB of space with PHP, MySQL, FFMPEG support.
Please recommend me a host with high uptime, good http response time, and reliable to host considering a long term relationship.
i have been hosting as a reseller with gazzin.com on their windows servers for past some years and in this period i suppose they have shifted their datacenter more than twice causing a great problem to me and all my clients.
the latest period of the shift being going on currently i request you all to go through the transcript below which i had with their support center. when we talk about a refund for this downtime i suppose the owner 'PAUL' just stops responding ......
I rented a server from VD a month ago and hosted some of my websites. But I'm constantly noticing that my websites are loading very slow. How can I check if other users are experiencing the same problem, or if the problem lies with my Internet connection?
Intel Xeon-Woodcrest 5148-DualCore 3 gigs of ram 250GB Western Digital WD Cavia
I run a forum with a modest amount of traffic along with a content management system handling the other sections of the website. I'm pretty sure the forum isn't the problem though.
The server load for this machine is almost never above a 1. Right now as I type this the load is at 0.17, but it's unbearably slow! Taking up to 16 seconds to load a single page.
What could be causing this? I'm a server n00b. Is there a setting I should be doing to one of my servers configuration files to make it run faster?
My website gets 30-40,000 visitors a day and these problems always occur during peak hours. It would be easier to deal with this though if not for the fact that the server load is always so low. How is it possible for the site to get so slow while the server load is always so low?
I wanna know if upload media to server for streaming will slow your site down?
Reason is that I have a few audio books on my server for my members to listen to, and I have a feeling that my site is using more and more resources and its getting slower and slower each day.
I moved from shared host to VPS a few days back. Since the move, the site becomes slow during particular time of the day. It appeared to be an issue of cron run by their another client and after promising that they would move that client to another node (I have spent more than 25 days to follow up on this till now) they backed off from their words but informed me about an alternative. Now, they say that the cron of that client was executing many scripts and they have spaced those scripts.
I am looking for a long-term host and was wondering:
1. VPS provides a minimum guaranteed stuff so what is the use of that guarantee if one client can make the server crawl (imagine 5 minutes or more to open a site).
2. Can a host be trusted who does not honour words.
I have built a database driven site with PHP & MySQL. Pages download quicker on some connections than other (obviously), however this is not due to connection speed. The web host server seems to respond very slowly to my boss's network (which is on a proxy server). Could it be that this problem is related to the web host? i.e. could it be that the web host is unequipped to deal quickly with this type of network?
On my home connection (2Mbps), pages often download instantly, however occaisionally I have to wait 10-20 seconds to receive the page from the host.
Finally, could you recommend an excellent web host to use with our site? My boss wants to offer a professional service where server response is quick. We are based in the UK.
