About 30 months ago Talj and I created single website to raise funds in memory of my daughter Rose. It was hosted with the company I park my domain names with. Uptime was good and customer service was excellent with tickets being answered within an hour or 2 day or night. Sadly this has changed, in the last 10 days I had to wait 8 days to transfer a domain name in after the IPSTAG was changed, 2 of my domains were suspended by NOMINET.org.uk due to non payment (I paid my host in February) and now I can't connect to either my backend or front end (a history of a dodgy DNS issues that used to be solved within hours - its been 2 days now)
Two years later and we are currently running 3 websites with 3 more planned by the end of 2009 and what started out as a small fundraising campaign is now one of the most respected Brain Tumour knowledge centres in the UK.
So, what I am asking for is both personal experience and advice for a new webhost. To date all of our work has been funded by Talj and myself however today the Association of Neuro oncology nurses (England) came aboard requesting we create a new website for them and they will help fund our work so if we can't find a charity sympathetic host to help us we will be able to pay for decent hosting.
We run our sites with JOOMLA and don't (currently) need much, 2,000mb of space, PHP4, MySQL, loads of mailboxes but want a good 98% of uptime with 24/7 support and a quick turnaround of any issues and, maybe most of all we want the site to be fast.
Any answers/suggestions below would be much appreciated.
On the recommendation of someone here on DPC, I signed up with HostGator for the website I built for my day job. I imagine they'd host a UK site? In the several months I've been using them I've never had any trouble at all. I have their mid-level package and the pricing was very good, the little service I've needed so far has been prompt, and the whole thing is pretty easy to use.
If outside of the UK is ok then check out 24-7 Webs Inc (US site, Canada site). I've used them since 2005 to host about a dozen web sites. I've never had a problem with their service and whenever I've emailed them they respond quickly.
I have reccomended hostgator several times on this site. Excellent 24/7 live online chat support (have never had to wait more than 5 minutes), Never had my website down, unlimited storage and bandwidth, ETC, etc. Plus, for those of us whom are pretty passionate about the enviroment, they have gone to 100% green power. The only thing I didnt like about them at first was that their control panel was a bit confusing (but I got used to it). Other than that, I cannot say enough good things about them.
They are very affordable, and I believe they also give breaks/free hosting to certain groups as well.
I run a business website through godaddy.com and i have been nothing but satisfied. I have never had any problems.
Ditto. All my freelance web clients get their sites hosted on GoDaddy, as well as several projects of my own. I can remember the occasional e-mail glitch (nothing in a long time though) but I can't ever recall an instance of website downtime.
Their founder/CEO is a little dubious, but whatever...
Bluehost- they're very highly rated, support JOOMLA and the others, and they're very inexpensive (currently US$3.95 a month). My experiences with GoDaddy have been rocky lately, and their site can be tough to navigate.
Thanks Adam, I just used their live chat to ask about the discount and they have given me an email address to get further details. I'll leave the rest up to Andi as I really have no idea what I'm doing when things start to get technical! :)
With that number of websites and potential traffic, and considering you'll be running database apps etc. have you thought about a VPS (Virtual Private Server) - Gives you more control, and you can host and configure it how you want.
Most hosting companies offer a VPS service. In January I moved 11 sites across to a VPS server at Blacknight //www.blacknight.com/ a hosting company based in Ireland. The advantages to having someone in the same time zone were considerable - Up until now I had to live with 'scheduled downtime' falling mid-morning my time. Plus, you know you're going to get a support response during your daylight hours.
I've had no downtime... Well, that's the thing with VPS - it puts you in full control, so you can reboot the server and do whatever you want with it.
Andi if you want UK based servers and unrivalled customer support I can wholeheartedly recommend this company I run a quadcore dedicated server with them but they have lots of other options available (inc VPS), before using this company I went through about 12 or 13 UK server hosts and the service was awful with loads of downtime whereas this company has 24/7 phone service and online support and I have never waited more than 2 hours for a ticket to be actioned (only 1 server outage which was directly after a memory upgrade, the rest were SSL certificates).
Been with them around 12 months now and have zero complaints, if you want any info feel free to pm me.
I've used Gradwell for some small sites for a number of years. They have an average 99.3% uptime and respond well to support requests. However you may find other places cheaper if you have a high-bandwidth site.
I've also used OVH where you can get dedicated boxes or VPS for bargain prices with good bandwidth. I've not had issues there. Some say the support is not so great, but I have not seen that to be the case.
Of course, if you choose to have a VPS or dedicated server you are accepting that you would need to manage it yourself, which some people can't or don't want to do. For that group of people there are managed servers, but you tend to pay a premium for that.
Thanks for all the responses folks, I'll be doing some surfing this weekend.
As for my current website/mail/backend issues I masked my IP addrress and voila! I'm sure its their dodgy DNS but just saw they closed my ticket saying the error was a my bad code. Strange that the error is 2 days old and the logs say the error occured 00:03 this morning.
Working full time I think I'll choose the managed route although I do sit next to 3 config guys that manage 100+ AVIVA servers.
Hi Andi,
I use www.daily.co.uk and have their business package and have no bother at all - the only thing that doesn't match your criteria is the support isn't 24/7 - but other than that everything seems tickety-boo. You also get a `daily-drive` which is around 2.5gb of on-line storage space.
Try IXwebhosting.com, I have 4 websites running with them and I dont see any issue and I have been doing this for 3 years +. unlimited disk space, free domain and cost is $6 approx per month so not that costly.
I put the neighborhood on Hostmonster. Decent price, good service so far. They always rank #1 or close in lots of surveys. (I build the pages myself, so don't know if you're looking for a hosting site or a host and web building site).
