Comments on: Web Hosting (Is Not) For Dummies

By: Web Hosting

Web Hosting — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:43:55 +0000

The main problem with shared hosting providers is that they offer these great prices which are only applicable if you purchase a long term lease. OK this is generally fine, but if you get a rubbish provider then your stuck with them unless they will provide a refund.

Hosting does need to be regulated in some way, but as with everything internet based, that’s virtually impossible.

Time will tell, and the best providers do generally cost more, but as the old saying goes "you get what you pay for"

[WM: We don’t recommend any hosting plans that require a long-term commitment for the reason that you have suggested. In our view, competition is the best regulator … not the government.]

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:10:03 +0000

I won’t dispute much with your choice of DimeHost now, but they did have some problems a few months back. At certain times (almost) everyday, trying to connect to the server was almost impossible; the problem has since disappeared.

However, I would like to caution against one company in particular; Netmondo. They gave very ridiculously large amount of disk space & bandwidth for an extremely low cost. That’s good right? Not really.

Initially everything was ok, but a few months later, my login password gets changed on a regular basis (Not by me!) and I had to get them to do a reset almost on a monthly basis. When I request for a password change or any other form of help, respond time was always 1 or 2 days later.

In under 6 month’s hosting, the whole server gets hacked. And a few weeks later, they get Denial Of Service attack which lasted for 2 weeks.
Again, my password got changed by someone other than myself. The last straw for me was when I told them I need yet another password change; instead of trying to find out who has been changing my password, they accuse me of forgetting my password on a regular basis and giving them too much work by having to change the password. They simply ignored my request for a password change and I told them where they could put their servers.

I lost almost a half year’s hosting cost (I paid a whole year in advance to Netmondo) when I shifted to Hostdime. With Hostdime, I’m paying higher cost for hosting with less disk space and a lot less bandwith but I’m happy and haven’t had any serious problems so far; so are my customers. (I haven’t even once requested for a password change from hostdime since they hosted my sites for a whole year now).

By: Mike Cohen

Mike Cohen — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 01:12:39 +0000

I’m very happy with DreamHost, which I’m now using to host all of my sites. I went through a lot of hosting providers with lots of problems. When they’re down for more than a day and the staff proves themselves to be clueless I usually jump ship to a different provider. That’s what happened when I left my last host a few months ago, where I had a reseller account with WHM.

DreamHost doesn’t use a standard package like cpanel; instead they have a pretty unique setup. At first I didn’t like it but once I got used to it, I can see it has lots of advantages. They also give a ridiculously huge amount of space & bandwidth for $20/month.

One funny experience with my last provider demonstrated their cluelessness. Their mail server went down frequently. To demonstrate the problem I sent them a log of the results of telnet’ing to port 110 or 25. Their instinctive reply is ‘we don’t support telnet’, never mind that I wasn’t connecting to the telnet port.

With CPanel, you need to allocate space & bandwidth to each domain separately. With DH’s setup, each domain is a separate directory under a single account, sharing the same space & bandwidth. They also support SSH & WebDAV as well as the usual stuff.

BTW, I don’t work for them – just a satisfied customer 🙂