Hosting Companies

Just one man’s experience, but I’ve been happy with GoDaddy since I chose them for hosting 13 years ago. And to top it off, they made an accounting error on one of my renewals (actually, a very minor issue). But they owned up to it and voluntarily gave me the renewal free. It saved me well over $100US.


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I started with MacHighway and then migrated to GoDaddy due to client requests. Since then, I’m thinking of going back to MacHighway which never failed me.
At the moment, I haven’t been able to convince GoDaddy that I am who I say I am since I’ve moved to Europe. My bad. Back in the States for a while trying to remedy my situation.


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I use Fatcow for all my clients, Media Temple for those who want to spend more money for some reason, but Go Daddy is not too friendly with php scripts… if that helps any

just make sure to cal Fatcow during the daytime hours. some of their support is in the Philippines , I just hang up and call when I get the US team who are really amazing, and they negotiate hosting rates for multiple years…


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I use ‘I Need Web Hosting’ - www.ineedwebhosting.co.uk - never had a problem with them. Good pricing and first class support, when needed.

Lee


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I use A2 Hosting for my own sites and regularly recommend it to clients. Never had a problem.

A sharp group of geeks at A2.

Todd
QREATiv | https://qreativ.space
Chicago | 312 . 212 . 3955


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I’ve been with JustHost for quite a number of years, pretty reliable, easy access to the back end, but what I really like is the 24/7 help available should it ever be needed.

On 13 Aug 2017, at 5:45 AM, Caleb Grove email@hidden wrote:

Yeah, it looks like Reviewpon bit the dust.

Another review site that looks honest (and whose results match my thoughts) is https://www.reviewhell.com


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Google is really forcing HTTPS and the next release of Chrome will flag even more sites as unsafe if they do not use it. Besides the nice green padlock you will need HTTPS to take advantage of HTTP/2.

This has put the cat among hosting providers. There seem to be two schools in the hosting world at the moment:

  1. Lets charge as much as we can for SSL certificates and hope no-one notices that there is…

  2. …a bunch of hosting companies that includes Let’s Encrypt certificates in even their cheapest plans.

Until today, I was with iNeed and found David’s services excellent. Great support and very good pricing. However it was going to cost me more than I had to spend to implement SSL with them.

Consequently, I looked around. Two companies stood out Inmotion and Siteground.

If you are in the US then Inmotion would be my choice. I’m in the UK and most of my traffic is UK, which is why I opted for Siteground. Both these companies feature well in Reviewhell, too! In addition, they are independent of the huge EIG group.

So made the switch today. Very happy so far - the support is excellent.

Steve


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Hi Steve

Is switching to HTTPS hassle free?

Kind regards

Graham


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GoDaddy is great for a domain registrar as they have about the best control panels in that biz, but they are a terrible web hosting company for anyone that knows how to use a Cpanel and the WHM. Over the last twenty years I had used a few web hosting companies before I finally deciding on using HostGator and I have been quite happy with them for the last eleven years or so. I think they are the best in the biz.

As for getting a SSL certificate, it is a bit of a process, far from “hassle free”. But it is something that the web hosting companies do not “do” themselves and it is done through a 3rd party, but a good web hosting company will help you get the processing done.


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You can also buy a web hosting plan for a fair price from HostGator that includes SSL. To get your very own SSL the cost is right around $75.00 for the real deal. If anyone is charging much more than that, they are price gouging.


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Just left Hostgator after nine years as they wanted to charge extra for HTTPS and their customer service had deteriorated. Went to The Best Web Hosting Services at 20x Speeds | A2 Hosting where HTTPS is offered for free with their hosting packages. Being billed in UKP was also a bonus.

All the best

Gordon
http://www.gordonlow.net/


On 27 Oct 2017, at 12:53am, Robert Mitton email@hidden wrote:

GoDaddy is great for a domain registrar as they have about the best control panels in that biz, but they are a terrible web hosting company for anyone that knows how to use a Cpanel and the WHM. Over the last twenty years I had used a few web hosting companies before I finally deciding on using HostGator and I have been quite happy with them for the last eleven years or so. I think they are the best in the biz.

As for getting a SSL certificate, it is a bit of a process, far from “hassle free”. But it is something that the web hosting companies do not “do” themselves and it is done through a 3rd party, but a good web hosting company will help you get the processing done.


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You can also buy a web hosting plan for a fair price from HostGator that includes SSL. To get your very own SSL the cost is right around $75.00 for the real deal. If anyone is charging much more than that, they are price gouging.

While some web hosts still charge 2010 prices, SSL certificates have gone down in price tremendously. Our web host (pair.com http://pair.com/) has a $10 SSL certificate option, however https://letsencrypt.org https://letsencrypt.org/ has a free certificate offering that you can either configure yourself on a server if you manage it yourself, and many web hosts use that and offer it for free.

Our you can use the free trier of cloudflare.com, to both accelerate a static site and get free SSL.

Duncan


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I think you must be talking about a “shared” SSL whereas I was talking about a separate, wholly owned SSL.

On Oct 27, 2017, at 3:55 AM, Duncan Wilcox email@hidden wrote:

You can also buy a web hosting plan for a fair price from HostGator that includes SSL. To get your very own SSL the cost is right around $75.00 for the real deal. If anyone is charging much more than that, they are price gouging.

While some web hosts still charge 2010 prices, SSL certificates have gone down in price tremendously. Our web host (pair.com http://pair.com/) has a $10 SSL certificate option, however https://letsencrypt.org https://letsencrypt.org/ has a free certificate offering that you can either configure yourself on a server if you manage it yourself, and many web hosts use that and offer it for free.

Our you can use the free trier of cloudflare.com, to both accelerate a static site and get free SSL.

Duncan


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I think you must be talking about a “shared” SSL whereas I was talking about a separate, wholly owned SSL.

There’s different kinds of sharing. Cloudflare does jam a bunch of hostnames in the same certificate.

A huge problem SSL had was that you could only have a single certificate per IP address. As IP addresses were getting scarcer and scarcer this https/SSL technical issue was solved in the form of something called server name indication (SNI). SNI lets multiple https websites share a single IP address (thus addressing IP scarcity), but the web hosts and certificates are otherwise independent, in the same way multiple http hosts are on a shared web host.

The problem was SNI was incompatible with the original https implementation, but since its introduction in 2004 browsers have gradually been made compatible, and these days it isn’t really an issue.

The way the public key infrastructure works in simple terms is there’s a “chain of trust”, so browsers trust a website’s certificate because it’s signed by a certification authority, and it trusts the certification authority because it has the certification authorities listed locally on the computer.

So the only thing making encryption and trust work is whether or not the certificate was signed by a certification authority that’s included in all browsers. And the free let’s encrypt is absolutely on par with every commercial, paid certificate when it comes to the chain of trust. No difference. They all allow full data encryption with no quality difference. You can use any key length and cypher .

What can make a difference is in terms of site visitor perception, so these days there’s a distinction between basic “DV” certificates (domain verification), “OV” (organization verification), and “EV” (extended verification). The latter is the one that’s only paid and makes the browser bar turn green, and while you might prefer it there’s actually no encryption advantage. And arguably with huge companies and institutions leaking credit cards, social security numbers and getting hacked I personally don’t think the OV/EV certificates are a worthwhile investment per se.

Also regarding perception, the bunched up hostnames in the certificate details can be considered worse than single host DV certificates. But hey free and painless setup.

Duncan


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Hi,

In response to Graham – yes! To generate and install the Let’s Encrypt certificate was just a matter of clicking the provided buttons in Siteground’s cPanel. Could not have been easier.

Moving web host can be a little trickier.

I moved three sites to Siteground from iNeed (one Freeway and two Sparkle). Siteground included the moving of one site in its hosting deal so I selected the larger Freeway site. My Sparkle sites are small so I just needed to update the publish details in Sparkle. I could have re-published the Freeway site to the new host just as easily.

Moving mail accounts was just a question of dragging and dropping in Mac Mail.

Do bear in mind that when switching host it can take more than 24 hours for the new DNS records to propagate so be patient. To monitor the DNS propagation I put holding pages on the old host.

After 36 hours I encountered one small problem in that I was still being served one site from the old host. It turned out local DNS caching was causing a problem. I had OpenDNS servers listed in System Preferences , Network. I deleted these and everything ran fine. (Note: flushing the MacOS DNS cache does not always work and I could not be bothered to generate .htaccess redirects for the short period needed!)

Robert – any one charging more than about $10 for a certificate is price gouging! Let’s Encrypt certificates are free. Many UK companies are charging 50 GBP or more and this is bordering on the scandalous. As Duncan says, Let’s Encrypt generates absolutely proper SSL certificates for free.

I’ve got three years hosting with Siteground, with certificates, for only slightly more than the cost of three certificates for one year from other sources. Alternatively, if you don’t mind your servers being in the USA, then Inmotion offers an even better deal.

Now to throw another stick in the fire. Many hosting companies will try and charge you more for hosting your site on SSDs because they will serve your site faster. Really? An HDD in a decent server farm configuration should be capable of delivering at least 100 megabytes a second. Ofcom gives the average UK broadband speed at around 32 megabits a second – the Internet is still way slower than an HDD!

Don’t be conned – work out what you need from a hosting company, set a budget, check reliable reviews and then shop around.

Steve


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Thanks for the info! I actually have not bought a SSL in a few years now, so it is good to hear that they have come down in price finally. Before you could have a Facebook “app” work back then, you had to have it on an SSL server.

Good point though, the fact that the hacked sites like Equinox had SSL “protected” sites, so why bother? But many people on the net now are looking for that green lock.

On Oct 27, 2017, at 3:04 PM, SteveH email@hidden wrote:

Hi,

In response to Graham – yes! To generate and install the Let’s Encrypt certificate was just a matter of clicking the provided buttons in Siteground’s cPanel. Could not have been easier.

Moving web host can be a little trickier.

I moved three sites to Siteground from iNeed (one Freeway and two Sparkle). Siteground included the moving of one site in its hosting deal so I selected the larger Freeway site. My Sparkle sites are small so I just needed to update the publish details in Sparkle. I could have re-published the Freeway site to the new host just as easily.

Moving mail accounts was just a question of dragging and dropping in Mac Mail.

Do bear in mind that when switching host it can take more than 24 hours for the new DNS records to propagate so be patient. To monitor the DNS propagation I put holding pages on the old host.

After 36 hours I encountered one small problem in that I was still being served one site from the old host. It turned out local DNS caching was causing a problem. I had OpenDNS servers listed in System Preferences , Network. I deleted these and everything ran fine. (Note: flushing the MacOS DNS cache does not always work and I could not be bothered to generate .htaccess redirects for the short period needed!)

Robert – any one charging more than about $10 for a certificate is price gouging! Let’s Encrypt certificates are free. Many UK companies are charging 50 GBP or more and this is bordering on the scandalous. As Duncan says, Let’s Encrypt generates absolutely proper SSL certificates for free.

I’ve got three years hosting with Siteground, with certificates, for only slightly more than the cost of three certificates for one year from other sources. Alternatively, if you don’t mind your servers being in the USA, then Inmotion offers an even better deal.

Now to throw another stick in the fire. Many hosting companies will try and charge you more for hosting your site on SSDs because they will serve your site faster. Really? An HDD in a decent server farm configuration should be capable of delivering at least 100 megabytes a second. Ofcom gives the average UK broadband speed at around 32 megabits a second – the Internet is still way slower than an HDD!

Don’t be conned – work out what you need from a hosting company, set a budget, check reliable reviews and then shop around.

Steve


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Robert Mitton
Organic SEO Specialist
Custom Mobi Websites
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303 South Broadway, B353
Denver, CO 80209
cell phone (720) 435-9205

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