Web hosting reviews list? (discussion thread)

[knector]

Hi,

Great list you have made.

Are there any special/serious reason to not include Crocweb on the list anymore?

Thanks
Kim

[kpmedia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by knector

Great list you have made.
Are there any special/serious reason to not include Crocweb on the list anymore?

Thanks.

Crocweb had a lot of minor issues in 2014 and 2015. It was more than other host on our lists had. It was mostly downtime, and it was sometimes blamed on DDoS even through they supposedly had DDoS protections in place. They are not a bad host, and they were never at the top of our lists anyway. They merely fell off due to others being better.

We let our account recently lapse with them, and do not plan to monitor them anymore.

In that price range, for small/medium hosts, Stablehost, MDD Hosting, Veerotech, and Squidix are doing much better.
Larger hosts like Siteground and InMotion are doing better to.

[rgrosz789]

I've been in contact with some vendors on the Managed VPS Hosts list. I was looking for Windows hosting, but found out that Veerotech does not offer that. Here is the response they sent me:
"In regards to Windows hosting, we currently offer Linux services only at this time."

[kpmedia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by rgrosz789

I've been in contact with some vendors on the Managed VPS Hosts list. I was looking for Windows hosting, but found out that Veerotech does not offer that. Here is the response they sent me:
"In regards to Windows hosting, we currently offer Linux services only at this time."

Correct, Veerotech does not offer Windows.

However, LiquidWeb, EuroVPS, and Godaddy all offer Windows.

Note that Godaddy had some internal changes in 2014 and 2015, and is actually quite decent now in 2016. Times have changed. The old "ew, yuck, Godaddy!" days are over. We have a managed Windows 2012 R2 dev VPS with them, and it's been a great experience for the past 6 months.

We have Windows VPS and dedicated servers (both 2008 R2 and 2012 R2) with LiquidWeb and EuroVPS as well.

[joeyg]

Hello from Berlin,

This is my first posting; I apologize for starting off with what may be viewed as a "negative comment".

Your "Web Hosting Reviews" page says, "... Dreamhost and 1&1 are other examples of large well-known hosts that have a terrible reputation for quality of service and tech support."

From the outset, I'm not in any way, shape, or form related to Dreamhost; I'm just a customer there and have been for at least a decade.

I have three VERY simple sites hosted there. Before I retired, I used one of them intensively to run the various English classes I taught at two universities here in Berlin.

As far as I can remember, my site has never been down for more than an hour in all the time I've been with Dreamhost, and the outages happened no more than 5-6 times.

As mentioned, my sites are VERY primitive, which perhaps makes fixing things easier, but whenever I've had a problem, Dreamhost's email-based customer support has been quick (within 6 hours) and to the point.

I am well aware that people have had issues with Dreamhost; maybe I've just been fortunate.

[kpmedia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by joeyg

maybe I've just been fortunate.
I have three VERY simple sites

That is essentially what has happened to you. As the saying goes, "even a broken clock is correct twice per day". Even the worst business has to eventually treat a customer well, though it's usually do to accident. In this case, you probably never contacting support, had no billing issues, with a small simple site hosted, etc.

Understand that it'd be great if all hosts were good, and it was a simple matter of choosing price and preference. And I wish Dreamhost was a good hosting option. Godaddy, for example, was a terrible host that has turned itself around in the past 3+ years.

Quote:

As far as I can remember, my site has never been down for more than an hour in all the time I've been with Dreamhost, and the outages happened no more than 5-6 times.

This comment is only valid is you were monitoring the site with tools such as Pingdom. If you only noticed downtime 5-6 times, then rest assured it was probably far more prevalent. And even with monitoring, known-bad companies often have micro-downtimes that slip by monitoring. Falls into the monitors windows.

[samuel111]

I've been subscribed to this tread for about 10 years.
Used few hosts off it back then till came to stay with HawkHost, for almost 10 years now...
and am thinking of leaving - everything is so connected these days, probably even this forum. I'll explain.

HawkHost is still "an OK" host - what is it now on the list? #10? #11? - and they deserve to be at the very bottom.. but NameCheap?..
I had couple of dormant domains with them for 2-3 years (again, based of this tread on the forum) and kinda didn't have any problems... but then again, DORMANT domains, one of which got the same dormant hosting...

Today, I tried to transfer a working domain from HawkHost - lucky me, semi-working - and went to their "support"...
The guy I got on the chat, a Ukrainian or something, was so much in upsell that it became obvious that good'ol NameCheap is still a data-mining/domain seizing operations.
Screw them! But, they are in top-5 of this used-to-be-so-trusted (by me, anyway) "forum".

I think everyone has their price after all.
I'm outa'here guys

[RobustReviews]

I think the hosting model as we know it will fade (not vanish, but fade) in the next few years.

I'm slowly migrating everything into lambda/S3 and my current web application is now built entirely serverless, it's better value, infinitely (!) scalable and when running large DBs or data throughput it's becoming a no-brainer. I'm now fully converted to the AWS model, although obviously there are similar alternatives I'm sure are every bit as able, if not better in some aspects.

I use load-balancing, IPs I can flex to be whatever I want, VPNs between my servers, deep archival for a few pence for TBs of storage a month....

My days of messing about with MySQL updates, WP etc are long gone. I've had to learn Node over the last year to accommodate (don't laugh, I was a PHP guy for about twenty years) but I'm certainly convinced by the model.

It won't work for hobbiests or those with established projects, but if you're starting a web-application now I would certainly recommend going serverless.

YMMV.

[kpmedia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by samuel111

The guy I got on the chat, a Ukrainian or something, was so much in upsell that it became obvious that good'ol NameCheap is still a data-mining/domain seizing operations.
Screw them! But, they are in top-5 of this used-to-be-so-trusted (by me, anyway) "forum".
I think everyone has their price after all.

That's nothing more than a xenophobic comment. We live in a global community. That was a basic fundamental aspect of the internet, after all. Connecting the world. Not just connecting your city, state, country, continent, whatever.

Yes, Namecheap has some extremely talented employees in Ukraine.
And elsewhere in Europe.
And North America (including USA).
And Asia.
See also: https://www.namecheap.com/careers/

Quality of a host has little do with where it operates, and everything to do with the quality of the operations.

I'd also suggest that some people don't understand what "upsell" means. Some folks get their panties in a twist when an employee makes a suggestion, or asks a question.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RobustReviews

I think the hosting model as we know it will fade (not vanish, but fade) in the next few years.

It already has, and mostly for the better. It's something I'd like to write about soon.

Quote:

I'm slowly migrating everything into lambda/S3
I'm now fully converted to the AWS model

S3 really isn't hosting in the traditional sense. It's good for the intended use, and has downsides like everything else.

Quote:

My days of messing about with MySQL updates, WP etc are long gone. I've had to learn Node over the last year to accommodate (don't laugh, I was a PHP guy for about twenty years) but I'm certainly convinced by the model.

I started writing ASP about 25 years ago, and didn't really become a PHP convert until about 15 years ago. Not by choice, but necessity. Languages start to blur together after a while. I was writing code 30 years ago, and have seen languages come and go. The younger programmers always claim "this is different!" but it never really is. Few new features, different interface, slight variation in approach, faster, etc, but essentially does the same things. Load, run task, end session.

Hosting is just a reliable place to put it online. The exact specific will vary, but the main difference is the quality of hardware and the people running it.

You seem somewhat savvy with running sites, so welcome.

[RobustReviews]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kpmedia

It already has, and mostly for the better. It's something I'd like to write about soon.

It's certainly is something interesting, the severless model is a bit of a brainbender at first and it's not the way to handle small or simple sites, but once you add login, or in our case client portals, video streaming, CMS, archival, basic video editing functions online etc it's the only realistic way of doing it in 2021. I stress though, for basic static sites it's overkill.

Quote:

S3 really isn't hosting in the traditional sense. It's good for the intended use, and has downsides like everything else.

I should have clarified this, clients stream their videos by S3 storage through lambda/elastic transcoder, the actual site code is a Github repository. You can host statically on S3 though, we do a bit of it.

Quote:

I started writing ASP about 25 years ago, and didn't really become a PHP convert until about 15 years ago. Not by choice, but necessity. Languages start to blur together after a while. I was writing code 30 years ago, and have seen languages come and go. The younger programmers always claim "this is different!" but it never really is. Few new features, different interface, slight variation in approach, faster, etc, but essentially does the same things. Load, run task, end session.

I've never touched ASP as I've always been a bit mean with these things and played in the FOSS pool - it looks powerful but I would say I see less-and-less of it on the general web. I can't write a line of it, and I do love PHP, I truly do, but as I once heard it referred to as "the Swiss Army Chainsaw" which I think sums it up quite nicely. PHP8 looks like it has brought some substantial improvements but I fear it may be a bit too late for PHP, it'll be a large part of the web for a long time, but I think finally its days are numbered.

PHP syntax is terrible, function names are inconsistent and a joke, there's plenty of glue within the language itself (let us never forget the 'REAL_ESCAPE_STRING' debacle from years ago) functions can behave in bizarre ways and the documentation is like reading a programming manual from a PDP-11: but I still love it, I still 'think' in it, and it's an easy lanugage to fall in love with, it's simple to read once you understand it and I dunno.. I just love its quirkiness.

It's also the only language where:
TRUE [BOOL] == "foobar" [STRING]
"foobar" [STRING] == [INT] 0
[INT] 0 != TRUE [BOOL]

Yeah, that's the mess of the comparator operators, PHP8 even boasts "sane" comparators, the PHP consortium's term, not mine. It's the only language where seemingly things can be simultaneously TRUE and FALSE.... It's taken from the famous "Why PHP Sucks" post, it's very witty and worth a read if you've never read it. It goes on to explain even equality/type comparisons ('===') is also broken and randomly does and doesn't obey standard universal logic.

That said, I still adore it, quirks and all.

Languages certainly go through phases, I felt left behind five years ago when I didn't pick up Ruby/Rails as it was "the future" five years later and it's a dead language, similarly the rush for JQuery (a language for this casual conversation), Node seems pretty settled though, it's very, very powerful and fairly easy to pick up if you have JS experience. I personally couple it with React & Express front ends. I'm sure there's an Angular & " " pairing that's equally good. I'm not a React 'fanboy' it's just the one that made the most sense to me as a casual onlooker for my projects - I'm sure it sucks as some stuff compared to Angular or full-hardcore JS/TS.

Quote:

Hosting is just a reliable place to put it online. The exact specific will vary, but the main difference is the quality of hardware and the people running it.

You seem somewhat savvy with running sites, so welcome.

Thanks, I'm not a professional (amateur hour here) but I've built some big projects - I "know what I know" but my opinions should only be taken as the ramblings of a bar-fly, not genuine advice from an expert. I'm routinely trawling StackOverflow for some very simple things.

It's quite cute though, that I was told only yesterday I couldn't fathom the complexities of this forum and some blog-posts.... No, I'm confident I've worked on more technical projects.

Thanks for the kind words, let me know if you want any input on a AWS/Serverless article, I'll be glad to provide my experiences as an amateur dabbling with it.

[Creamcoalition]

I would normally look for in below order:
Support (Technical support is very important), Value for Price (you will get what you pay for), Uptime, Reliability!