Hosting Providers

I'm currently paying for a VPS over at DreamHost, and have experienced three major downtime issues since September 4th. We're way under our allocated resources.

The appeal of DH is that it's cheap, but obviously it comes with a hidden price. I'm considering moving to a different and more reliable host. I currently host my personal website at A Small Orange, but their prices for larger sites and VPS goes up considerably... as a college student with loans, I'd rather not spent more than I have to.

Any recommendations?

 

'Souls has been hosted with Surpass (disclaimer: this is a referral link; if you sign up after clicking through it, I get credit) since...2007? We're on shared hosting and have had relatively few issues (especially compared to the various hosts we had prior to that)... one downside of shared hosting is being affected by others on the server, of course, including maxing out database connections now and again , but for the most part, it's not that big a deal. We've kind of considered getting a VPS a few times, but I don't feel that the costs are justified at the moment.

Surpass's server status page is good about letting you know if the server you're on is being slow or having issues. There are bouts of slowness every now and again, but they typically resolve by themselves in 15 minutes or less. They don't have phone support, but their chat and email support is good, prompt, helpful, and understanding, and that's one of the reasons I've stuck with them so long. We've had to contact them about random downtime, database issues, and server upgrade/specific requests over the years, and they've always been pretty helpful.

So yeah! :O

 

I recently dumped Surpass in favor of Greengeeks.

When Surpass dropped phone support and then slowly got worse and worse with response time (At one time it was 2-3 hours, and last year before I switched they were taking 12-24 hours to get back to me)and more and more frequent with lag and outages I decided a change to a company that's actually got the Datacenters in the great lakes region where I live (and was cheaper to boot, and has better autoinstaller options). Probobly the only advantage IMO of Surpass is that they let you pay month to month rather than requiring a large lump to get the best price. I spent something like 4 years with Surpass. They're not bad, but I've been happier since I went to Greengeeks.

I do shared with Greengeeks, and aside from one incident in which the server got hijacked by a hacker (since resolved) and a couple of updates to the technology, we haven't had any issues.

 

I am very much in favour of local hosting. We host our sites on shared hosting in The Netherlands, I could literally take a train and visit the servers if I wanted to. Nice guys, skilled people, I trust them. Not too costlty, but not so cheap that they can't maintain things or provide help.

In the US, I would probably also look to local hosting. Same city, or at least state. (States usually being bigger than my own country, so I'd really stick to city and closest cities). I just do not like big nameless faceless companies, no matter how good the deal may seem.

 

In the US there are many areas that simply won't have same city options. But if for no other reason that it keeps your funding in your region, getting as close to home as possible is a good thing. It also then means that the humans at the data-center will share work hours with you.

 

Hm, interesting! I've never actually known anyone else hosted with Surpass since they seem relatively unknown, so it's neat to see another perspective. I don't remember a time when Surpass had phone support, but I guess I almost always go for chat support first anyway (especially when I lived with roommates, calling support at 4am, which seems to always be the time I need them, is inconvenient). The last two times I dealt with Surpass support was in March of this year (chat only, immediate response) and October of last year (ticket/email, 1-2 hour response).

One thing that's kind of nice about Surpass too is that they let you authorize additional users to deal with specific issues on your account/support tickets, which can be useful if you have co-admin.

 

Surpass dropped phone support something like 4 or 5 years ago. They only had it the first few years I hosted with them. Every time I dealt with Chat Support I got nowhere unless it was between 9-5 where their datacenter was. I had HUGE trouble with nighttime help needs and the overseas techs they use at night. It was like surpass slacked off with my support more and more the longer I was with them. It's amazing how different two people's experience with the same company can be.

 

Personally, I've hosted with HostGator for years now and have nothing bad to say about them. Good prices (not the best, mind you), quick replies to problems and inquiries, and I think my site went down twice in the last few years but one was due to a server upgrade. If you don't mind dealing with 'faceless corporations', I recommend giving them a look.

 

I host with A Small Orange, not VPS, but I'm looking to upgrade for maybe a little cheaper than 20$ a month. I can't handle that and I feel weird asking members of my site to donate towards it. Maybe I could switch but I'm hesitant to do so especially since my game is just getting off the ground.

I used tone with Arvixe but they steadily got worse and worse, both with support and server a Stability and just... I got tired of putting up with them.

 

We were on Bluehost for ages, but it just stopped being able to handle how awesome we were or something. They support got worse and worse. So on a recommendation we tried TSOHost and we're pretty satisfied now. Performance is better and service is through the roof. They also have room to grow, which Bluehost did not.

 

It took me a long time to realize this, but the secret to webhosting is that there is no such thing as perfect. There is only 'average' to use as a benchmark for comparisons.

Hostgator: negative
I loathe hostgator will all my soul. I hate the non-standard cpanel replacement they made that rarely works, the filebrowser that never works, and the company as a whole. I feel hostgator has the usual uptime for websites but their services (like FTP, etc) are down much more than average. I have never hosted with them but I have been strong-armed into using their services by default of working with folks who use them.

Arvixie : average
Arvixie has more downtime than usual and they are pricier, but it is the best ASP.NET hosting I've found. For websites they're a little worse than average.

Bluehost: positive
I also have Bluehost. They have speeds and reliability and uptime a little better than average. They don't care if you host dirty fiction, they only care if the images are of adult content.

Dreamhost: negative
I have never had dreamhost hosting but I have played at sites that did. A while back there was a huge, huge outage. Information was not relayed well and no one was compensated. I still hold a grudge.

 

In the past year or so, I've used Digital Ocean for my hosting needs. It is different from the other providers listed above in that you're not being given just a space on a shared server, you're being given a server that you yourself need to set up. I wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't really comfortable with that type of stuff, but it's like having a VPS from DreamHost or somewhere else that is really yours to control. Downtime with them has been very rare, and because of their backup systems, I'm never worried about losing my data. The pricing is incredibly reasonable too, and is far cheaper than anything else I've found that offers the same level of support and control.

 

Time to update my listings.

Hostgator: negative
I loathe hostgator. I hate the non-standard cpanel replacement they made that rarely works, the filebrowser that never works, and the company as a whole. I feel hostgator has the usual uptime for websites but their services (like FTP, etc) are down much more than average. I have a site hosted with them and they brought down my website once for an infraction that was already fixed.

Arvixie : horrendous
I had great experiences with their sales but their customer support is abysmal. I would spend an hour waiting for an online chat rep to "look up my case" before being disconnected. Over the phone, their single solitary goal was to get me to hang up. One had a personal agenda of making people cry just for the hell of it. Another rep agreed I had a serious issue, got me to hang up, and did nothing. I played ring-around-the-tickets for a week before saying a magical word that had nothing to do with my case and being transferred to the right person. It was completely their fault, affected multiple accounts, and somehow no one had complained for a month.

Bluehost: positive
I also have Bluehost. They have speeds and reliability and uptime a little better than average. They don't care if you host dirty fiction, they only care if the images are of adult content.I've been with them now for four? years now and still love them.

Dreamhost: negative
I have never had dreamhost hosting but I have played at sites that did. A while back there was a huge, huge outage. Information was not relayed well and no one was compensated. I still hold a grudge.

 

Free Web Hosting with PHP, MySQL, Email Sending, No Ads | AwardSpace are really great, i have been with them for a while. No ads, great up time, very helpful support and great features for free or paid accounts. I would highly recommend.

 

I'm with Arvixe. In the past, 4 months I've experience several downtime, and a DoS attack which was resolved rather quickly. They're ticket support is pretty good, getting back with me in a few hours.

 

I host through x10vps. While they are more expensive than others I've seen, I've found that support tickets are answered by knowledgeable people who aren't reading from a script. (Rare these days, I know) That alone has made me hesitant to switch. I have tried a few others, including ChicagoVPS, and I would not recommend them. Their relatively cheap prices seems to also mean that they overload their servers. I consistently have to tell the one VPS I manage there to start/restart 4-5 times on average before I get confirmation that it's doing it (a problem I do not have with x10). Recently I've tried a cheap server over at RamNode. I haven't done a lot with it, but despite the small size of the one I have, I haven't experienced any real issues and it seems to be running smoothly.

 

My husband uses Linode for work related things, Minecraft, and other websites as well as my dinky little RP game. So far, so good.

 

I've been using Dreamhost VPS and they've been mostly good. My only complaint so far is that their support doesn't respond promptly even when you use higher-level support tickets. I guess Dreamhost thinks you're using their DNS servers but I was using Cloudflare and they changed the IPV6 routing somehow and my site went down until I dropped and added a new IPV6 address (weird). Anyway during that outage I sent a request for help and I had already figured it out myself and fixed it by the time they responded, which was like a day later. But as far as reliability I haven't run into any issues. I've been there since August 2013. Also they use all SSDs now.

Prior to Dreamhost, I was with StartLogic, which was much, much worse. Numerous outages on my VPS and incompetent support. One time when my site got slammed by Bing (there was a period in 2011 where their robot would make way too many requests in too short of a timespan) and was using a lot of resources generating PHP pages for the spider. A technician there helping me find the cause of high load looked at the logs and somehow concluded that "MSNbot" was a malicious program on my server (?!?!) and proceeded to wipe my server, causing me to have to rebuild my entire website from backups. I would stay far, far away from any host that's associated with EIG.

 

I use Machighway. I love them. Never had an issue with downtime and I can get a person on the phone 24-7 for technical issues, or they have helped me when I majorly F-ed some code. I can't say enough good things about them. They are pretty cheap as far as cost goes in my opinion you get the most bang for your buck doing their tri-annual renewal for the sites. It's like 100 bucks vs 60 a year. Saves you a lot of money in the long run. They are not Mac support only by the way, anyone can use them. It's just hard to find a host that WILL support you as a Mac user.