I’ve been with hostmonster for a while and they’ve been good, but in the last month or two their server reliability and uptime has took a nosedive. My website is unavailable or suffers mysql unavailability almost every time I’ve worked on it in the past month.
I know some people still have a good experience with hostmonster. It seems to depend on which of their servers you’re on. I guess I’m one of the unlucky ones.
I use hostgator.com for my personal stuff. My work uses bluehost.com, which I think is okay, but I am pretty sure I got it slightly cheaper at hostgator. They’ve been pretty great.
I’m giving hostgator a try. Anything has to be better than the service I’m getting from hostmonster at the moment.
Silver_Tyler_Girl how often and how recently have you worked on your site? I’ve found hostmonster to be faultless for a long time and then recently they’ve gone downhill. I see lots of bad reviews of recent performance on the internet. People saying they wouldn’t recommend to a friend etc. I can’t trust them any more. I have a photo gallery. It’s embarrasing to put new photos up, send link to a friend or facebook, and then have that friend reply with a mysql error message they got when trying to view the page. I think that was the last straw.
It wasn’t just that. I’d worked on the site four or five times spread out over a month and every single time there was something going on with their servers.
edit: Just in case anyone is thinking “What if the problem was your code?” … These are pages that have worked flawlessly for months. When the problems occur every page that uses sql goes down - including the wordpress blog. And finally - hostmonster confirm the problem is them (not my website) each time.
I’ve been a very happy customer of VerveHosting.com for wow, going on 8 years. Extraordinary customer service there, and minimal downtime over those years.
To the thread in general: I’ve got mine fully up and running (except that the blog is the default skin and I haven’t copied my old blog posts over yet)
Feel free to let me know if you encounter any errors.
Also, feel free to make suggestions. I’m always fishing for stuff to do.
edit: Also, I’m working on a new version of the photography code. It uses jquery to load the larger thumbnails so hopefully resulting in quicker gallery loads (or at least the page is useable earlier)
I’ve used WestHost for a variety of websites during the past ten years and have always been pleased with their customer service and pricing. They are quick to respond to problems and requests for technical help with the free utilities and software they offer clients. However, my websites have all been non-commercial with small to medium traffic, so I can’t vouch for eCommerce potential or massive bandwidth reliability.
Using hostgator for my friend’s organic farm site. The site is very simple, but everything seems to be working. It has a little PHP, uses MySql to store a mailing list. No problems so far.
I have used Hostgator for over 4 years now, including hosting for 2 medium sized sites (130k & 50k unique/month mysql/php driven sites) and I am very happy with them. They are one of the better web hosts that I have done business with over the past 15+ years of using such companies.
I’ve only been with hostgator for about a year, but it has been great mostly the entire time. There were a few glitches when I first changed over, but it was mostly due to outside forces (a client had used a different service before that wanted to hold on to her domain name and space, no matter what, until she got a little angry on the phone and got it settled). I started out with just 3 sites on my account, all with simple html/css coding that I did by hand, but I’ve expanded and now have 5, which includes a store, a few blogs, and a client’s wordpress site. Her site has been up very close to 100% of the time, at least as far as we know, and it is the one we track most because she is doing a large number of sales instead of just providing content. I also had a failing hard drive on my computer so I made backup folders to ftp to. I uploaded all my files, about 3000 some, and downloaded them onto several different drives. Great speeds both directions. I originally had signed up with godaddy when I started doing sites after college, but the service was not all that great. With hostgator, I had a few glitches, like I said, but customer service was pretty awesome. They emailed me information, helped me out over the phone, and then checked back to make sure everything went right. I was in Orlando last week and saw a sign that they were hiring - I actually thought about applying, but I’m not as much Linux guru as I am sure they would be looking for…
>
I was already aware of it but it helps to have validation from a doper