New Editorial: HostGator Alternatives, Parts 1-3 (the EIG buyout)
 

Latest editorial:

• HostGator Alternatives, Part 1: Who is EIG?
• HostGator Alternatives, Part 2: Who to Use and Why
• HostGator Alternatives, Part 3: The Future of EIG?

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Thanks for reading. :thumb:

Do you have any information about LocalCloudHost.com? It has been recommended to me and since I want to take your advice and move away from Hostgator, which is sad because I used to love them; I noticed they weren't as helpful as in the past when I needed help recently. I do use Namecheap for my Domain names.

Thanks for any help with this.

LocalCloudHost appears to be a HostGator reseller or at least hosting "at" HostGator. In their header, they have a window power credit image with a HostGator logo in it...

Their site seems a bit tacky to me - not well designed, basic, out of the box WHMCS....

I'm not sure who recommended localcloudhost.com, but it wasn't a very good suggestion. That "host" has nothing more than an order pages online -- they don't even have a true site.

Take note of the whois for localcloudhost.com:
^ This whois is hidden. :hmm::unsure:

Never use a host with a hidden whois. It's likely a kid/amateur (kiddie host) or a foreigner pretending to be in the U.S. Regardless, they're trying to hide, meaning your money goes to an unknown location, and your site is not safe if the host doesn't answer emails or tickets. The domain was created in May 2013 -- just a few months ago. I bet the person that owns it left himself fake feedback, she suggestion you saw/read was just worthless spam.

Like the article said, the best true alternatives to all of this is Arvixe, Site5 and Namecheap are true alternatives to Hostgator, Bluehost and the others EIG brands. If none of those appeal to you, tell us your needs, and we can go over it with you to find the best host for your exact needs. Our suggestions are for top quality hosts only, and all of them are at least 4-5+ years old, and very established in the industry.

Thanks. :)

Thank you!
 

Thank you for your help. I will take your advice and move over to Namecheap.

What about stablehost.com?
 

I know that you have recommended stablehost.com in the past. I was wondering if you can give a short update in light of your last editorial? We are looking at their enterprise shared hosting at the moment, leaving hostgator.

Thanks,

David

Excellent information. Thank you.
I'm brand new to this forum.
What I find paradoxical is that much of your site adverts are from ipage, hostgator...
I guess I can't blame you for generating $$ but maybe a reference to that might avoid raised eyebrows? Or am I the only one who noticed!

Info here is great!!

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Stablehost is excellent and our #2 suggestion overall best hosts! We use it for both shared and VPS. We use the Stablehost VPS to run part of this very site -- www.digitalFAQ.com -- and that's something we can say about very few hosts. EuroVPS is #1. (They cater to different markets, so it would be fair to say Stablehost is #1 for USA, and EuroVPS is #1 for Europe.)

The Hostgator editorial had a specific goal, namely finding good non-EIG hosts with similar offering to HG. Site5, Arvixe and Namecheap fit that description perfectly. Those are top unlimited-host suggestions. Stablehost, of course, does not offer unlimited plans, hence its omission.

Leaving HG and using a Stablehost.com Enterprise server will be, to use the cliche, "night and day". :congrats:

The in-house ads are for good hosts only. Hostgator must be using some AdSense ads. We run a total of two spots, the masthead and the sidebar. I've seen the 300x250 a few times, but none of the leaderboards. (No idea if they have leaderboards?) It's amusing to me, too! All it does is waste their money on impressions.

Only people that have visited HG, or have a blank AdSense cookie, will see them. You fall in that category. I saw it right after I visited HG to see the price on something, while writing the editorials. Now I can't make them go away. They follow me all over the internet, anywhere where AdSense is.

Ah, then internet... sometimes its so silly. :smack:

What do you think of LiquidWeb? It was recommended and sounds good from what I've read. I am willing to pay more than I would for HostGator, but not prepared to spend $25+ a month.

I'll let kpmedia comment on LiquidWeb as I've never used them. What type of hosting are you looking for and what types of sites are you looking to host?

I have 3 websites, all very small traffic. My biggest website is at about 10k visits a month. All are on WP.org. I'm not very techie, but I can manage to do a few simple things in the CPanel. What I really want is good uptime, good customer service when I do have an issue and a company that will help me switch over the sites with as short a downtime as possible since it also means my primary email goes down during the switch.

I really just want affordable hosting that will be good...and shared hosting is probably fine for sites of my size as long as it is with a good company.

LiquidWeb is what I refer to as a premium host.

What that means is that:

• the hardware is all high-end
• the network is high-end; premium bandwidth, etc.
• the support is quick and effective, assuming you even need it
• the plans are all sensible, and they don't try to ever mislead customers with fluffy BS marketing

I could name at least 100-200 hosts from the top of my head -- but only maybe 10-20 are what I'd call premium. It's the upper end of hosts. By comparison Hostgator is a budget hosts. Then come all the non-budget hosts. Then the premium hosts. Less than 10% are premium.

Depending on what you need, there's many great hosts in the $10 to $20 range...

But given this, I don't think you even need that.

To be blunt, Hostgator sucks. It's an EIG brand with lots of issues, and is owned by a fairly shady company. Furthermore, Hostgator was also stupidly overpriced for what little you got.

All you need is a better host.

Brent here is with Veerotech, and that's definitely a good host. So are Stablehost, Arvixe, Site5, WebhostingBuzz, and quite a few others. All I see you needing is a standard shared host. Nothing more. 10k monthly traffic is not at all large, and you should be fine on a typical shared hosting plan in the $10 range.

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Thanks! I'll spend some time looking at your suggestions tomorrow and will make a switch.

Best read, ever.

I found this article in a link on someone's sig (on another well known site that deals with hosting). I've been trying to figure out what some very well known providers have become, shall say, "difficult" and this makes it very clear. :congrats:

Well, well, well. Who would have guessed that? A great article! I myself have been perfectly happy with Monstermegs. Their price is right, customer support is blazing fast (in most cases you get an answer in less than 20 min by email..) and uptime is great. They also lately upgraded all their gear for no additional costs to old customers which is great. If you're looking for a reliable hosting company, check them out!

For a long time, I was happy with HostGator, and had excellent support from them. Only in the last month have I noticed a deterioration. My account expires soon, so I'm looking for a good host to migrate about 50 sites.

Are you sure about DreamHost? They seem to be ok, support-wise, but the proprietary panel they use would take getting used to.

I'm sure. Dreamhost isn't much better than EIG. That custom panel locks you into their service, and you can never leave without manually migrating. It's not a cheap or low-cost host either. Support is Walmart quality. Honestly, it's a lose-lose scenario.

If you want to continue using unlimited-style hosts, you'd have a much better experience with Arvixe and Site5, or WebhostingBuzz. If "unlimited" doesn't really matter, then there's quite a few other good hosts to pick from, such as Stablehost, Stream101 or Veerotech.

For 50 accounts, you should use reseller hosting. Are you currently using reseller hosting at Hostgator?

For resellers, Site5 and Veerotech are two of my favorites. Both have excellent support.

If you have any more specific requirements, I can help there too. Just let me know what you're after. :)

No. I originally signed up for the "baby croc" plan. At the time, I did not see any advantage to the reseller hosting. Of the 50 sites, only 4 of them have any significant traffic (100-600 visitors/day). Some of them are only redirects.

I'm a relative n00b at this (in case you haven't already guessed that). What is your opinion of certifiedhosting.com? It appears to have what I'm looking for (I will need a static IP and an SSL certificate for one of my domains).

Stream101 has a limit of 40 domains for shared hosting. For the reseller hosting, they charge about twice the going rate for static IP.

Veerotech.com looks ok for shared hosting. Something to compare to certifiedhosting.

It's not immediately obvious from Stablehost's site if I can get a static IP with shared hosting.

Monstermegs.com also looks like it has what I need, and is roughly the same price with their current 40% discount. (I suspect there will always be sales and rumors of sales, and the price of bandwidth and storage is going down pretty steadily anyway)

I had a friend who reported that WebhostingBuzz would not allow a PHP script to send emails, which is basically a show-stopper for me. I can understand that they would like to eliminate spam, but that is a bit like using a tennis racket to kill mosquitoes; both ineffective and harmful.

Site5 looks pretty good. The $12/month plan looks a lot like reseller hosting (separate cPanel per domain). I might go on that one month-to-month ($14) for a while to see if it really works for me.

Reseller hosting is not about traffic, but rather separation of domains for security. If any 1 of your 50 sites get hacked, then the entire account usually gets hacked. You'd potentially lose 50 sites at once. Not good!

The "addon" domain system used by cPanel is very dangerous for anything but HTML-only sites. Are your site HTML only? If you're using anything like WordPress or Joomla, it's a huge risk. cPanel accounts are the same Linux account, and thus all "addon" domains have the same permissions. Separate cPanel accounts have separate permissions. And you can only create separate accounts by using a "reseller" cPanel plan.

Understand that terms "reseller" and "addon" are made up by cPanel. The "reseller" is nothing more than a multi-domain account. You don't have to resell anything.

Most hosts offer (and charge for) an IP, and require justification like SSL certs. We're in the age of IPv4 depletion. The new average rate is $3 monthly. Few are cheaper, and some are more expensive. It all depends on what datacenter they're using, and the bulk discounts they have in place (if any can be had from the DC, that is).

The price of storage has gone up since 2011 -- not down. It's been fairly stagnant for the past 2 years now. Ever since that Thailand flood some years ago, prices have been on average 10-20% higher than they were pre-flood. It used to be 50% or more higher! So "fallen" is relative.

Bandwidth is coming down in price, yes, but slowly. It will plateau here soon unless ISPs start to invest more funds into bandwidth carriage -- both business and residential. That includes backbone-only carriers, what few are left (ISPs have been buying backbones for the past few years). I know some nice new pipes are coming in Asia, and will lower their prices, but that does nothing for North America.

Your friend probably had something else wrong with his script. WebhostingBuzz has no issues with that. The only "problem" is that it needs to use SMTP. Almost all mail scripts implement this, and have for years. And then hosts are now disallowing php mail (sendmail, etc), and requiring the script to locally SMTP authorize itself. Any host not doing it now either (A) will soon, or (B) find their servers on DNSBL/RBL mail blacklists. Then you'll really have problems!

Veerotech is more than a shared host. It's an excellent reseller host. Lots of higher-end hardware and commercial software runs their platform. It's much better than average.

The Site5 "MultiAdmin" (or "+Turbo") setup does work quite well. Have you ever seen it? See the images below. The resources (resources points) on +Turbo accounts is lower than reseller, but if the account is not using that much as you suggest, then it will be fine. It's really nothing more than a custom reseller system -- except for one user (as per ToS), not reselling to other users.

Hope that helps. :)

____________

This account is not heavily used right now, but it's good to show what to expect. In the excellent "Backstage" custom control panel, you can access all your billing, support and servers. It's nice. In Backstage, you access the multi-admin and pick your primary account.

Attachment 3703

Once in the MultiAdmin, you can choose your individual sites admins. It's not that different from reseller accounts, but your not using WHM (cPanel). This is where you access, add or delete more cPanel accounts.

Attachment 3704

After selecting the admin you want, you're in cPanel. Yes, this is cPanel with a custom skin/theme. It's nicely integrated to Backstage.

Attachment 3705

I've used them for a while now, so if you have questions, just ask. :congrats:

Well, I knew I had a lot to learn on this journey, but I did not realize how potentially deadly my ignorance was...

OTOH, here is an exchange with a salesperson at CertifiedHosting:

Was that Live Chat? Chat is often staffed by L1 techs, which are nothing more than glorified secretaries that read scripts, and respond to basic questions.

I don't think this person was even reading what you had written -- a common problem with chat techs everywhere. Of course the servers are secured, and that's what he/she was referring to. But that has nothing to do with the issue of "addon domains" vs full domain isolation.

Beyond that, there are red flags:
Ignoring the fact that this is poor grammar, it sounds like the shared and reseller accounts are on the same servers. If true, that's a horrible setup ripe for abuse and resource exhaustion. The host easily and quickly loses control of the server resources, and it will lead to slower sites, even when CloudLinux is deployed.

Quality hosts keep shared and reseller accounts on different servers. (Exception: small hosts with few accounts)

The person let this slip by wrongly answering your question. Between the poor setup, and not reading (or understanding) your question, I would stay far away from that mess. It will lead to no good.

So far, it seems Site5 is the best fit for you. Honestly, it's all downhill from there. That's easily one of the best hosts that you'll find.

Just thought I'd mention for anyone reading the article that Arvixe was, in fact, bought out by Hostgator and is now an EIG company.

It appears the purchase happened last month.

Can you support a bit more information? Simply a personal bad experience isn't exactly proof of anything. All host have their ups and downs, because no one is perfect.

Adam, fair enough -- I removed my personal experience from my original post and stuck with the objective facts. If you would do the same to my quote in your reply, I'd appreciate it. If you'd like to know more about my experience, I can PM, but no need really.

Since I just missed editing my original post to include the sale info, I'll post it here:
http://www.hostjury.com/blog/view/71...-mega-host-eig

Thank you for providing a visual link to the source of your information. :)

No problem -- and if you can still edit it, your original post contains my complete quote. If you can edit it out, that would be great (to stick to the objective facts). Cheers.

Site5 acquired by EIG
 

Your article is still promoting Site5 as a non-EIG company, however it is now proven that Site5 has been acquired by EIG as announced in their 2nd quarter market results. They have also swallowed up Verio.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/end...lts-2015-08-04

It's proving very difficult avoiding EIG.

Yes, it was silently bought by EIG (as usual), in October 2014. But the information was not revealed for a few months.

Starting in June 2015, Arvixe was finally dissolved, and EIG seems to be at the helm now. Some of us already knew that would happen, as Arvixe was a liquid-asset company, having limited ownership (renting Softlayer servers) and an all-remote workforce. Servers are being migrated to Provo (Utah), and other services are being affected (example: the affiliate program, for those still spamming writing "reviews".

Correct, Site5 was bought in May 2015.

On one hand, it was a surprise, because Ben was very anti-EIG, and had surrounded himself by talented folks. But he was always friendly to ex-Hostgator-now-EIG employees, as he'd started in the industry alongside former Hostgator owner Brent Oxley. I guess Ben can now relax of Brent's Texas ranch. I can't blame the guy for accepting millions of dollars, as that's a life-changing amount.

But for the rest of us, it spells doom. EIG has already stated that it will be migrated around Q1 2016. And like Arvixe, Site5 was purely liquid, with Softlayer leasing and all-remote workforce. Some may stay, but I have a feeling that the good guys like Tom will be moving to non-EIG pastures within 6 months.

It was a nice host while it lasted.

We're in process of updating our articles and guides again. At this time, Siteground, InMotion, WebhostingBuzz, Stablehost and Namecheap seem to be top options for the "unlimited" web hosting space.

UPDATE NEEDED: - apparently Site5 has bitten the dust...
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...7914dex991.htm

I found this update ...
 

As of today, I am a new member. Found this group via the web post of the original post. Found it VERY enlightening!