I have a website hosted at bluehost.. I've just got a new website that I would like to host ielsewhere.
I hadn't had major problems at bluehost only that I have a coppermine gallery there and occasionally my site goes down due to CPU usage, although I removed all the fancy stuff that uses resources like random images, votes, comments, etc..
anyway, I don't think it would be a good idea to have another website with another coppermine gallery under the same account so I was looking at Downtown Host, Hostgator and Hawkhost... or any other recommended host to move my second website, I will leave the first one at bluehost
What I'm looking for is great customer support, no more than $10 a month, can handle coppermine better than bluehost, I dont need more than 200 gig of bandwith and I don't need more than 2 gb of space
Narrowed down my choices to these companies. My customers will mainly be in Asia and for that reason I am thinking of going with Sharkspace and choosing their West Coast server option.
Anyone have experience with 3inetwork? They seemed geared towards Vietnamese customers (where I am at the moment) but can't find many reviews.
ive been researching much on hosts lately, found that they are probably the cheapest host around for litespeed. share your experiences with them, and let me know if they are good.
I have been more than 1 year with DownTownHost, and although overall they are quite OK, yet I need to point out some serious flaws which no one ever mentions. This is just an honest complaint.
Namely - downtime.
There is downtime on DownTownHost which in my case lasts a few days each month. I have not been analyzing my stats closely, but when I do, I notice there is a monthly downtime...
The reason - I don't know.
The last time, I can see from AW stats that for about 48 hours there was downtime resulting in site became inaccessible, and there were ZERO visitors for 24 hours at least.
It seems towards the end of the month, there will be downtime...of some kind. Around 27/28/29 of the month. Visitor levels will show a drop for a few days during this period.
Or if not the end of the month, then in the middle of the month....
But last month was bad....1 whole day my blog was not available. Zero visitors recorded.
I just want to know if anyone experienced this also or not.
My server is server 20.
DTH is OK in most things....but downtime is something I really don't tolerate....
Maybe there is an explanation for this, but if these continue, I will look for another host.
I am with DTH for almost 4 months and has been very satisfied. So, I thought I'd post a review here.
I am on their blog package, 1GB of space and 50GB of bandwidth at $5.99. I have to say their support teams are wonderful as they managed to solved every single problem I had every time, literally. Also, I love their 'Live Chat' on their website, once you click it, a conversation with them will start, the only bad thing is sometimes it takes longer than 2minutes which is acceptable
Can anyone suggest which VPS provider to choose for between the two?
HawkHost's 40% off is really cool and offers lot more than knownhost. However, I really do not want it to be a decision factor and need a quality VPS with least problems and downtime.
I just signed on with HawkHost.com on a three-month trial basis, with their Basic shared hosting account. I'm so impressed so far that I think they deserve a review. Obviously I only just joined today, but I've had enough interaction to write a very preliminary review, which I'll update in the future (probably around the three-month mark, and perhaps thereafter if anything changes).
First off, Tony Baird, CEO of HH, answered my pre-sale questions promptly before I pulled the trigger. I was impressed with the HH site itself, which has the nice touch of actually listing each individual server they own--its specs and what purpose it serves in their company (hosting, VPS, etc). This, in combination with the other good reviews I read online, led me to believe I'd have a good experience here. (the only thing I didn't like about their site is that it's a bit obscure to navigate--for instance, it took me a little bit of time to poke around enough to find their AUP and TOS, but that's just because of the way their HTML menu is designed--once I found it, I realized it was easily accessible all along, I just hadn't poked around in the right place).
So I signed up. Amazingly inexpensive, if I'm not mistaken--the three month trial, with a coupon listed on their site, was a little over $9 USD (!). I won't go into detail about what that gives you, for fear of sounding like an ad--you can go look it all up on their website. Suffice to say it buys you quite a bit if your needs are relatively modest like mine.
A nice plus when signing up--you get the choice of picking where you want your server account to reside, Dallas or Washington, D.C. I'm not sure if other hosts do this--perhaps this is more common than I'm aware of, but it was a nice surprise for me. In any case it doesn't matter a whole lot since both locations, from what I read on their company forum as posted by their users, seem equally fast.
Setup went smoothly, payment and DNS redirection went smoothly as well. Within two hours everything was set and I was up and running. I checked my website (www.infinitives.ca) and it seems fast enough for me. Unlike my last provider, they are running the latest version of cPanel.
I was able to restore my cPanel backup from my previous provider with no problem. However there did seem to be a glitch when trying to restore my email forwarding and filters. I think this wasn't due to HawkHost--almost certainly this had to do with the cPanel version discrepancy, or perhaps the initial backup at my other provider went awry and I wasn't aware of it. In any case, it was an exceedingly minor problem, but it led to my next nice surprise--the level of support.
I submitted a ticket, and almost IMMEDIATELY, Cody (their tech officer) responded with an offer of help. I couldn't believe it. With my old provider, it'd take me sometimes over a day to get a response to an email (and there was no ticket-opening system with them either). Cody was helpful, patient, and is obviously on the ball.
I have a feeling HH is one of those "Goldilocks" hosts....not so big that they're ginormous behemoths with overcrowded servers, and not so small that you feel like they're running a hosting company of their laptop. They seem just about the right size.
By the way, forgot--another nice touch is their level of communication with users. They use their forum (which I already mentioned) to communicate outages and maintenance and such, with notifications saying when things are going down, how long they're anticipated to be down, and then notifications when they actually go down and come back up. Cody and Tony also both seem to be highly active in that forum in terms of responding to user questions. This level of communication is incredibly refreshing to see.
So there you have it--initial impressions overwhelmingly positive. I'd score a 9.5 out of 10. I'm hoping the rest of my stay is as pleasant as Day One.
I've been with HawkHost for about 2 months now, and have not had a single issue to speak of. Extremely knowledgeable support staff, very friendly and personable in answering questions, and they certainly don't make you feel 'stupid' for asking about whatever issues you're having.
They give ample warning for maintenance, and I've had no downtime outside of specified maintenance windows.
Very competitive on price and services offered as well. Though I've only purchased their basic package, it looks like they can cater to all needs
Anyone looking for a good, reliable host, give Tony and the guys at HawkHost a shout.
I have been with Hawkhost for around a year now and they are by far the best web host that I have ever had. There support is by far the best that I have ever talk with. They go the extra step, I have used the there live support over 20 times with questions and comments. Every time they answer quickly and if they did not know the answer they would do there research. They even knowingly helped troubleshoot one of my gaming servers that is hosted on another provider. If there live support is off line, I send them a email and it usually gets back to me in less then 10 mins.
I wrote an initial setup experience review of downtown host including support w/ transferring my sites a few months ago. Now I am going to extend the review with reliability, speed and performance.
So far, the support and helpfulness has been the same. Rarely does support wait longer than 10 min to respond to questions. They are always responded with a great attitude.
Reliability of all my sites has been 100%. I have seen no downtime at all since I got my account. Truly fabulous. The only time a site has gone down was not their fault...it was my fault...for messing up the database they restored it within minutes after I sent a high priority technical support ticket too.
Speed and performance go hand in hand. Sites are quick and responsive. Just as responsive as a content management system on any dedicated in my opinion. Download speeds are always the same. Never does the download or upload speed fluctuate by more than 10 kbps up or down from the average (totally unlike dreamhost where it would fluctuate as much as 400-500 kbps depending on the day).
All scripts I have used have responded very quickly without any problems that I would encounter with dreamhost (like cut off scripts due to time it took the servers to run through them).
I've recently had some issues with a script I wrote and I contacted support about it. Three techs assisted me with it, but could not resolve it. I later found the problem was with my outputting text when there should be no output at all. I closed the ticket and thanked the techs for their work.
This is just one of the many examples I have of how they are willing to work with the customer, even if it is not their fault. They will do what it takes to keep the customer happy, except fixing the customers' code. Jedito and his team really strive at providing superb support for their customers.
I have a few domains hosted with them and also have pointed others to their services. I currently use two of their servers, one is production and the other is staging. They are quick to get services setup and ready to go, as well as providing quick support through their ticket system. Their live chat doesn't always reach people (when it says it is online), but they respond to tickets within a few hours, sometimes within a few minutes.
I have the Silver plan with them, and I think they recently changed the amount of disk space available from 7GB to 14GB because that's what I now have available. I did not know they were planning that, but it was a pleasant surprise when I logged in to cPanel.
I can't think of any problems I have had with Downtownhost in these two years of experience with them, though I have had problems with my scripts and code. If they make a mistake, they admit it and are quick to fix it. I might have had a little bit of downtime over a year ago, but I think the server went down briefly. The uptime has been superb and the services have been wonderful.
To anyone who is in search of a good web host, Downtownhost is the way to go for shared hosting. I have not tried their other services (well, I am using blogging on the staging server), so I do not know what they are like. I have been with my share of web hosts and I have not found one that is better than Downtownhost.
I have narrowed it down to DowntownHost SharkSpace and StableHost.
Here's how they compare (Well they almost have all the same features so I'll jus compare space and bw
DowntownHost SILVER: 14 GB / 300 GB With 25% off coupon: 5.27777777777$/month
StableHost PLUS: 15 GB / 300 GB With 50% off coupon AND Free domain :3.64$/month
SharkSpace HAMMERHEAD: 20 GB / 500 GB With 50% off coupon: 3.975$/month
DowntownHost has a 99% off coupon.. but I dont understand and sounds a little bit sketchy. Would be like 12 cents per month.
So in terms of reliability, and SPEED, speed is important to me, which do you suggest. Downtownhost: Chicago Stablehost: Dallas Sharkspace North Carolina and Kansas.
I've been with Downtownhost for a little more than a year now, and figured I would share my experiences with others.
When I first signed up with Downtownhost, everything was great. Transferring my sites went super smooth: my server was very fast and support was amazing (got replies in under a minute!). Unfortunately, as time has gone on, I've seen a dramatic drop in server stability and support.
My first major issue with Downtownhost happened in March of this year, when my server was constantly being brought offline with DDoS attacks. I requested that they switch me to a different server, hopefully with less DDoS attacks. Downtownhost gave me a date and time when they would switch my account to a new server. That day and time went, with no word from anyone at Downtownhost. I sent an email to Downtownhost asking if my account had been moved, but apparently they had forgotten to switch me. Jorge was very quick to switch me once I asked to be moved again.
Everything was smooth on the new server until April, when it went down for periods of at least 6 hours or more on several different occasions (at least 3). These extremely long periods of downtime were very angering.
Everything has been fairly stable up until these last few weeks. I recently registered a new domain and went to add it to my cPanel account as an addon domain. Something screwed up within cPanel, so I was unable to add my new domain to cPanel. This issue took over 5 hours to even get a response from Downtownhost (which used to be very unusual). Eventually, the issue was resolved.
Now, my server is timing out several times per day, and my email has now stopped working.
On top of the increasingly longer support response times, nobody *ever* answers me on their live support feature, which is a big downside for me. I'm not sure what has caused this dramatic drop in quality from Downtownhost, but it's not looking like I will be renewing my contract with them
Well, before jumping to Downtownhost.com (aka DTH), I will like to give a bit background story on why I went to DTH at first place. (It's going to be a detailed review, so if you don't have time, just skip first 5 paragraphs)
My first ever host was Startlogic.com (I was a noob back then). Getting my first site online was a big achievement for me. Startlogic worked for me for about a year until my site started getting some traffic. After that, it was nothing but a big trouble and headache to be there. I reviewed them Here (Infect that was my first thread here at WHT )
After this bad experience, I moved to HostingZoom (aka HZ) failover hosting. After few days, my site started getting problem there. I was told that it was causing more than 110% CPU usage. I was never able to backup or restore a mere 7MB database with them. In short, their Failover hosting proved to be "failing over & over hosting" for me in just one month. I was recommended to move to VPS or dedicated server by HZ. My review of HostingZoom is Here.
After being let down by HZ, I looked for my options and decided to go with DTH. Amazingly, the site that took more than 110% CPU at HZ was running without a glitch. I repeatedly asked DTH for server load, so that I wouldn't get any trouble and every time I was told that it was "below normal". I was so happy with DTH that I even got a reseller account and started hosting my friend's sites.
During that time, I also had an account with Hosgator (aka HG) for about 4 months that I used for hosting one blog. It was end of year 2007 when my blog started getting heavy traffic. Unfortunately, that was more than what HG servers were built to handle. After few back and forth tickets, I was told to move to a dedicated server as my blog was not only exceeding their "shared hosting" limit but also causing issue for other clients. (Note: The blog was using "WP Cache" when hosted with HG)
And guess what, I moved that site to DTH reseller account and it worked there without an issue. Although, initially (without WP Cache) the CPU usage was as high as 20%-25%, my site worked without an error. Jedito was kind enough to let me tweak few things without shutting down the site. And when I was finally able to implement Cache, the CPU usage/load became 3.5%. So the site that required a Dedicated Server as per HostGator support was working absolutely fine with DTH Shared/Reseller account. (Amazing, isn't it )
Now, my complete analysis of (DTH) after being with them for over 1.8 Year:
Hardware: I am with DTH since August 2007 and so far other than two major issues, I haven't seen any other problem with them. One in January 2009, when there was a DDOS attack on the server and I experienced connectivity issue; and one in March209, when there was some server problem. I am happy that they were able to sort it out quickly. DTH score: (9/10)
Support: That's where DTH beats any other host any time of the day. Sometimes, I get the feeling that I am not using support desk but chatting with them. The shortest reply I got was in less than 1 minute. And it's not just one time; most of my tickets were responded in less than 10-15 minuets. I wouldn't say that ALL of my tickets were answered within minute. The longest response I got was in 4 hours. But I am still happy because instead of getting reply like "We will update you shortly"... I got the reply "It's done". Whenever I needed them, they were there to help out. For me, it's the best support I ever got. DTH score: (11/10)
Billing/Sales/Customer Service: With DTH, I always felt that I am a special customer rather than "just another customer" feeling. Whenever I asked for a "little" favor from billing/sales, I got more than I ever wished. I have never seen such a friendly host (and I have been with more than 8 hosts now). DTH score: (12/10)
So I am going to say it again... and again.... and again..... Shared hosting can't get any better than what you get with DowntownHost. DownTownHost is not just one of the best hosts, they are simply THE BEST.
I am sorry if you think unnecessary details were included. Feel free to ask me any question.
Downtownhost is amazing. I have never been so fond of a host before. Yes, I've only been doing websites since 1999, but still, they are excellent.
I have been working on a site for a client since December and it was on server28 until tonight. I went on the online chat, and after about 35 seconds, Diego came online and told me about a server in Washington, server32. Since the future web viewers of this site will be in California, I think Washington would be a much better server location than Texas. I put in a ticket, and four minutes later, Diego had it moved, database and all.
My site on server20 has been up since June 2007, going down only for a little bit when there was a server problem. Overall, the service has been great and the support is phenomenal. I currently recommend only Downtownhost to my web clients because of their excellent support.
When I setup that site in December on server28, my client didn't enter a phone number where he was currently, and that was when they decided to call to activate the account.
When Sebastian saw my email address as the referral, he immediately approved it.
Sebastian has helped me more than Jorge and Diego, but all three of them provide excellent, quick support through chat and tickets. I don't think I've put in a ticket that has stayed open for more than a day. They are fast and efficient.
Some sites I have with them... server20: scec.com server26: bethanyjanewilson.com * I don't want to include all of them, just a little bit.
As of this review, I have setup 7 accounts on 6 servers since June of 2007. I plan on getting more people to this host.
Back in winter 2006 I visited this very forum asking for advice on where to find a reliable and friendly host. I was shown downtownhost by several people on this forum and I was initally impressed when I saw them.
I've posted up two reviews so far of them in this forum, both of which were very positive.
Over the past year I have been on the smallest semi-dedicated hosting plan which I believe is around $60 a month which I'm happy with.
Until that time I was on their shared hosting which was too excellent.
At first if I had a few problems the three guys (there was only 2 at first I think) were on the support desk to help me out.
Speed and reliability are as good as I can hope for. I never have any problems any more so haven't had a chat with the guys on the support desk in ages but I'm sure they'd respond better than ever.
I shall await your comments.....and the monthly hosting invoice that arrives in my inbox tomorrow
For APPROXIMATELY the same price range downtown host offers 5 GB Disk Space and 100 GB Bandwidth and unlimited domains, while medialayer offers only 500 MB space, 10GB Bandwidth and only 3 domains.
Question: Is downtownhost OVERSELLING(maybe it is doable) or is Medialayer providing much less VALUE for MONEY.
I am hosting my sites with DownTownHost since July 08 and i must say i am really impressed with their quality of service, uptime and site speed. I haven't experienced any major issue yet accept some server modules were not upgraded and were vulnerable so i reported them. Everything is fine now. I am thinking to get a reseller account with them but their plans are too expensive for me. Saving money these days so that i could start my own web hosting business in partnership with them.
(I don't want to disclose my domains, but if required i may pm them to moderators.)
I've just realized that it's been over a year since i've started doing business with downtownhost. I thought it's time to write a review.
Hosting (Plans/Servers/etc.): Their plans are affordable, servers are uncrowded (at least it seems so), everything is working as it should be. Over 1 year, none of my sites gone down. (at least i haven't seen it or received any complaints).
Support: Downtownhost has great support. They are quick and reliable. They even helped me with issues which are not even their responsibility. Example: I'm a little bit obsessed with little things. Last month, i just wanted to change my account name, main domain, some other little things which doesn't matter, but are important for me (and takes time). They didn't even ask a single question, they just did it, because i wanted it. That is a big, very big plus for me. This is not the only example, they helped me with several other problems throughout a year.
If you are thinking about signing up with downtownhost, don't think twice about it.
I've been hosted on Hawkhost since last year (exactly as it will be expiring on October) and they have been great. I don't regularly check my own website but everytime I do, it's up and running. They were so good I never even had to contact them (only in the beginning because of site transfer). I even forgot what I was hosted on because the whole year just went by so smoothly.
This is only a small review of me for hawkhost.com. I had used their Standard VPS for 4 months.
I ordered a vps and got my vps after a hour. Good for me.
First ticket, i asked them for setup lxadmin/kloxo for me and they did it in next two hours. Good for me.
Second ticket, i asked them for setup some php modules for me. They didn't do it for me, but they teach me how to setup it, and everything done. Not bad for me.
This month i had some attack in my site, and i asked them to buy some traffic, and i paid $24 for 200GB ( i think their BW is not cheap ), but addition 200GB is not enough for me, this time are days end of invoice, i asked them to give me 20GB BW free, and they accept. Good for me.
Downtime : I don't get any downtime in 4 month. Excellent
At this time, i've request them for refund because i'm no longer use my vps. I ask them today and my current invoice will expire tomorrow. They accept and they give me refund $18 to my paypal account. Good for me.
As some of you may have noticed I have just signed up with Hawk Host. I had a question about the way the name your home directory. Lets say my full name is Chad Hawk. They have named my home directory /home/chadhaw . Is it normal for them to leave out the last letter of my last name or is that a typo. Or for that matter does it matter at all.
I currently got signed up with Hawkhost and I love the interface so far. I bought all my domain names through Name Cheap. I wanted to see what you guys thought would be the best set up...
I would like to use Google Apps to host my email and not hawkhost.
I have two options: I can have hawkhost host my DNS or NameCheap. Do you guys think it would be better to let Namecheap host my DNS and just point the www record to my website?
Just curious what your guys were on letting the webhost host the DNS and if there were any cons with that.
I'm sure hawkhost is reliable, but I just don't like putting all my eggs in one basket and would prefer to have Google host my email...
i will be hosting a portfolio website so i need a lot of diskspace for photos, videos, and other files of the sort. i think bandwidth is pretty important as far as video watching goes, and i would like to have fast upload speeds.
So, I switched off of one of my providers for my website about a month and a half ago (I won't mention their name). From my previous host I switched to HawkHost.
HawkHost was amazing throughout our entire month and a half stay. When we first went to them, they converted one of our domains into a subdomain and transferred all of the files for us and did a tremendous amount of extra work they didn't have to do. They were quick at responding and their servers were blazing fast. Unfortunately, they had to pack up our stuff for us and we had to leave due to a DDoS attack. But they didn't kick us out before trying some measures first to help prevent the DDoS attack. During the attack, my website still remained online and a lot of the traffic was being thrown out by the security measures they put in place for me for free. But the attack got through those security measures after 24 hours and took down their servers. Even after we left, the IP was still getting hit and they had to null-route the IP address. We do thank HawkHost for attempting to stop it, and we do not hold any grudges, infact we're very thankful they did what they did for us!
Overall Experience with HawkHost.com: Support : 10/10 Network Speed : 10/10 Uptime (for the month and a half we were there : 10/10 Willingness to help : 10/10
Now! After HawkHost confirmed the attack has stopped, we set our website at a different host. I hope it doesn't get attacked again, because switching hosts isn't the top item on my Fun things to do this Friday. We switched to IGXHost.com
Our current experience (only been 24 hours): Great support, we ordered in the middle of the night and they transferred our account within an hour! (It's not a small account either). The staff was very helpful and quick to respond which is amazing because it was 1AM. (HawkHost answered in the middle of the night too). Not really sure about anything else except their support, I will update you guys! But so far IGXHost and HawkHost are about the same quality in support (exceptional!).
Anyways! I'll keep you guys updated.
We here at Data Host Direct would like to thank the staff at IGXHost and HawkHost.
I've just passed the 6 month mark with Hawkhost this week. I signed up with a coupon that was floating around that made the deal hard to pass up.
I have a small business shopping cart based site that receives an average of 70 visitors/day which uses 40MB bandwidth/day or roughly 1GB/month. I'm on the standard package which currently gives me 3GB/month storage and 30GB/month bandwidth. It's not a large site by any means, but I need it to be up 24/7. I also have 4 domain add-ons, but they get very little traffic. FYI, I have my domains registered with godaddy.
The first week I opened a ticket requesting that ssh be enabled. My ticket was updated with a "we're on it" response after one minute, which appeared to be from an actual human, followed by a resolution 2 minutes after the ticket was opened.
Later the same day I submitted another ticket regarding setting up email in a particular email client - that was responded to and resolved in 5 minutes.
A month later I had an email bounce issue that I needed some help investigating. Two hours later it was responded to and resolved.
Since then I haven't had to contact support. I have a monitoring alert system to notify me of any downtime. It's alerted me one time in six months and by the time I sat down at the computer to check, my site was back up. With my previous host, it happened on what seemed like a bi-weekly basis.
I just referred somebody to sign up with hawkhost today - something I'd be worried about in the past with other hosts.
I have no complaints to speak of and it's tough to beat the price/reliability ratio. Keep up the good work!
At work, at home, and a couple of associates are with Hostgator on their reseller plans.
My employer's account with Hostgator... in about two years we only ever had one major problem. We wanted to change the primary domain and so the support boys and girls at HG did that for us. We then had a huge problem with propagation, and some of the packages didn't transfer over. That saga took about five days or so to fix but was pleased with the eventual outcome.
We had a mediocre problem about a year back when all of the websites under our reseller had crappy response times for about a week... something about a dictionary attack on the server I think. After that was fixed everything was fine.
A few times Hostgator support helped me out when they didn't have to... many many times they went a little further to help me solve a problem, and a couple of times very promptly helped me fix a problem I'd created which would have got me fired had it not been done fast.
Some people complain about Hostgator response times to support tickets. I simply did not have a problem with that... they always got back to me within 2-6 hours. When I couldn't wait that long (which only happened a handful of times), I submitted a ticket by email, then got on the phone or live chat, and they very helpfully escalated the priority.
I haven't had any memorable problems with my personal reseller account with them the whole time I've been at Hostgator.
Their support is very very good... Brent seems to be the driving force behind the desire to be the best, and the fact that he's very well off yet still goes on to the support forums and is actively involved semi-frequently goes to the ethic of the company as a whole.
They DO go over and above - at least they have for me.
Recently, I was banned from their support forums permanently.. you can read about my side of the story at ryanpaul.ca.
Even after what I think was a unfair ban from their forum, I'm still perfectly happy to keep my business with them, as well as my employer's... and will still be referring people to them. Why? Because their service is undeniably splendid.
