Help me choose a new hosting company

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My current hosting company had my sites offline for eight hours today. Router problems, they said. Yeah, right. This is at least the fifth lengthy outage since the beginning of the year, including one all-day outage when they decided to move my sites to a new server without notifying me (and screwed everything up in the process).

So, they’re fired. Can anyone recommend a reliable hosting company?

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Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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21 thoughts on “Help me choose a new hosting company”

  1. NetBunch (www.netbunch.com) has done really well by me for the past five years or so, and they’re pretty cheap to boot. And if you want to host sites for your friends and family, you can do that too with no muss or fuss.

  2. Ed, A lot of the big time bloggers use Hosting Matters.
    I am only a small time user but they have stood the test of time.

  4. I can confidently recomend bluehost.com I’ve hosted many sites (for clients and myself) there and have never had any problems. Now, that might not sound like the best “plug” for a host, but in my experience, that’s amazing. NEVER any problems on multiple sites. Tried DreamHost n the recommendation of many people… came back to BH after multiple outages and a HORRIBLE control panel. Hope that helps. I swear I don’t work for them. lol OH, by the way, one-click WordPress2.0 installation and Ruby-on-Rails is ready to go. sweet. love your blog.

  5. I’m a fan of cheap hosting with lots so bandwidth and lots of storage space (like to run my own gallery and sites). So far the best value I have found that has decent performance is at http://ace-host.net/ (no association other then a user). I run word press 2.0 and gallery2 off of them reasonable performance. I have also used tod hosting, who can’t seem to fix gallery problems :(, and logjammer, who was great for a couple years but doesn’t scale their offering very well anymore.

  10. Depends what you want Ed – I currently like the plans that BlueHost (www.bluehost.com) have to offer and I have several sites over on their servers that seem to have great uptime and are pretty responsive (PC Doc isn’t hosted on BlueHost yet – I have that with a UK company which are pretty good). BlueHost are fast, their customer services/tech support responsive and they offer a very broad range of features. It’s also nice and easy to shift to them and you can host 6 domains on the one plan.

    If you want a detailed look at what they offer, drop me a note.

  11. I’m completely satisfied with siteground. Had one outage – less than a half hour – in the six months I’ve been hooked up. Tech support has been responsive and helpful, their rates and offerings are great, and they’re WordPress friendly.

  13. This is a great topic, one I wish I saw more of in the blogging world. I don’t have any good recommendations, but whatever you do, STEER CLEAR OF INTERLAND.

  14. As Devin recommended, I know Media Temple is pushed by a lot of blogs I read and respect. Can’t go wrong there.

    HostRocket (hostrocket.com) was very reliable while I was with them, and they have some great deals.

    1and1 (1and1.com) is supposedly the #1 host on the internet these days, and I’ve yet to have a problem with their dedicated server offerings (shared hosting may vary).

    I know a lot of people push DreamHost (dreamhost.com) these days, but to be honest, I’ve heard of numerous problems related to their recent uber-growth, so I’d stay away from them.

    I’ve also gotten some great recommendations to try out A Small Orange (asmallorange.com), but don’t have any actual experience with them either.

    HostWay (hostway.com) is also one of the big players on the ‘net, so they’ve got to be worth a look.

    43Folders (43folders.com) recommends their host – A2 (a2hosting.com). You have to figure that they’d be reputable.

    When it comes to hosting, it’s a gamble with smaller providers. I would always, always, always, go with a bigger company that has a solid reputation. They’re the ones with the money and equipment to provide quality service, even if they aren’t the cheapest. Also remember that nothing is unlimited, so take any such claims with a grain of salt.

    Let us know what you finally decide on!

  15. Another vote for SiteGround here. I’ve not been with them long (about a month) but for price and features they seem to be one of the best. Their basic packages gives you quite a bit. I also used their online support service before signing up to ask a ton of questions and they were very helpful.

    As Bill mentions they are WordPress friendly, they have quick install option (where they install it for you) but that’s for 1.5. You’ve got free reign to install version 2 though, which is what I did.

    http://www.siteground.com/

  16. 1and1.com has done wonders for me. I get close to 1 million page views a month and performance hasn’t changed much from when I got 50,000.

    I am using shared hosting on a Linux plan and I haven’t experienced any downtime in the last 17 months (since I started with them)

  17. i have an account with 1and1.com. their control panel and webmail access is excruciatingly slow. in addition, you might experience some email rejections due to lots of spam going through their network.

    on the other hand, i’ve been using icdsoft.com for a few years and they have been the most reliable so far.

  18. Gw has some of the same complaints against 1and1 that I’ve heard against Dreamhost. Since I don’t have a shared hosting account with them, I can’t really speak for it, but if you’re looking for dedicated hosting, you really can’t beat 1&1.

  21. NetBunch is horrible, terrible, utterly disgusting and imcompetent.

    August 30, 2006

    “We are sorry to inform you that We had 16 servers completely wiped clean of all data. We are working with FBI and other Law enforcement officials at the present time.

    At this point all we can do is recreate your account and give you 1 month of credit for the loss. If any data is recoverable, we will restore it.

    Thanks,
    Jim”

    One month free. How generous. 9.95 for months of work. Good thing we had a backup of all our sites.

    Consider your self warned.

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