Website Hosting Recommendation

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1

As many of you know, I was a big fan of GoDaddy—until this past week.

It seems a GoDaddy salesperson took it upon himself to call one of my clients. In this particular case, my client owns the domain name and I host their website through a shared hosting plan I have with GoDaddy.

I have no problem with GoDaddy trying to get business. What I do have a problem with is when the salesperson tells my client that I lied to her and that her site wasn’t being hosted on GoDaddy servers, when it clearly was. He should have known that. All it would have taken was a simple domain IP address search.

What’s worse is this rep proceeded to tell my client that her website wasn’t SEO optimized in an effort to sell her an SEO package. He went on to suggest that she needed to use meta keywords and meta descriptions. Once again, he probably should have checked the code, because had he done so he would have seen that we are using both—with the latter being more of a force-of-habit. Plus, if he was truly informed he would have known that Google no longer uses meta keywords for search engine ranking.

Anyway it took me about an hour to fix the damage this asshole created and I’m not happy about that. Then today, I received an email that basically directs me to this page: https://www.godaddy.com/design/web-design.aspx?ci=90391&isc=FBWEBDES#plan-pricing

So I guess GoDaddy is now in the professional design business, which begs the question—why in the world would I want to support a company that’s trying to undermine my efforts?

So, what website hosting service do you recommend? :slight_smile:

https://www.godaddy.com/design/web-design.aspx?ci=90391&isc=FBWEBDES#plan-pricing

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2

If you wanted a UK-based one I’d recommend Vidahost: https://www.vidahost.com

I was previously with Clook (I think they may have a US-based operation as well), which was also excellent but a bit pricey for the package size I wanted.

Roger

———————-
Roger Houghton
22 New King Street
Bath, Somerset, BA1 2BL

Sent with Unibox

On Feb 7, 2015, at 10:22 PM, RavenManiac email@hidden wrote:

As many of you know, I was a big fan of GoDaddy—until this past week.

It seems a GoDaddy salesperson took it upon himself to call one of my clients. In this particular case, my client owns the domain name and I host their website through a shared hosting plan I have with GoDaddy.

I have no problem with GoDaddy trying to get business. What I do have a problem with is when the salesperson tells my client that I lied to her and that her site wasn’t being hosted on GoDaddy servers, when it clearly was. He should have known that. All it would have taken was a simple domain IP address search.

What’s worse is this rep proceeded to tell my client that her website wasn’t SEO optimized in an effort to sell her an SEO package. He went on to suggest that she needed to use meta keywords and meta descriptions. Once again, he probably should have checked the code, because had he done so he would have seen that we are using both—with the latter being more of a force-of-habit. Plus, if he was truly informed he would have known that Google no longer uses meta keywords for search engine ranking.

Anyway it took me about an hour to fix the damage this asshole created and I’m not happy about that. Then today, I received an email that basically directs me to this page: https://www.godaddy.com/design/web-design.aspx?ci=90391&isc=FBWEBDES#plan-pricing

So I guess GoDaddy is now in the professional design business, which begs the question—why in the world would I want to support a company that’s trying to undermine my efforts?

So, what website hosting service do you recommend? :slight_smile:

https://www.godaddy.com/design/web-design.aspx?ci=90391&isc=FBWEBDES#plan-pricing

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3

Aesop used to tell a story about a farmer and a viper. The characters
changed and developed over time-- I first heard the story as the fox and
the scorpion… however, the ending was always the same.

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4

IMHO, there really isn’t a host that I can completely recommend. This is why a year back I decided to go the VPS route (DigitalOcean), but I can say that it is not for the faint of heart. Basically, if you are not accustomed to working with the command line, it’s not for you.

For shared (non-technical) hosting, the only place I can recommend is A Small Orange. I used them several years ago and was throughly impressed with their level of customer service. Because they have disk-space and bandwidth usage limits, you know they aren’t going to be overselling their servers so the performance is pretty nice. They aren’t the cheapest option, but are quite affordable and I found it’s worth paying a bit more for good service. They are who I recommend to my clients, and they’ve all been quite happy.

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5

Thanks for all the advice, and especially for reminding me about the Aesop fable. :wink:

For those of you who haven’t heard it, here you go: The Farmer and the Viper - Wikipedia

I can tell you that I really don’t want to change my workflow so I’m definitely interested in a web hosting provider that can do shared hosting or something equally as simple.

Here’s a review that PC Magazine just came out with. Any opinions on any of these providers?

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6

Here’s a review that PC Magazine just came out with. Any opinions on any of these providers?

Huh. The thing that worries me about this table is that all solutions get good ratings and all links are affiliate links. Don’t get me wrong, affiliate links don’t explicitly mean that a product is bad, but in the race-to-the-bottom world of web hosting it is a red flag.

Check out this site; I’ve talked with the guy who runs it and he seems like a very honest fellow: http://www.reviewpon.com. His reviews are straightforward and fairly ruthless. Not many hosting companies get a good grade there, but the ones that do coincide with my experiences.

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7

I use a managed VPS with Futurehosting https://www.futurehosting.com that I share with one other person to keep costs down. They have recently partnered with WHMCS, which allows you to easily setup accounts and billing invoices for customers, so if you have say a dozen or more clients who require hosting I’d say this is a very attractive option.

If you just want cheap shared hosting for your clients but with excellent customer service I found 5Quidhost https://www.5quidhost.co.uk to be excellent but their VPS solutions are too expensive. Frankly I think Ravenmaniac’s experience of with GoDaddy sounds appalling.

Ashley

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8

One other thing about Vidahost is that they offer a free basic hosting
package to charities:

https://www.vidahost.com/cpanel-hosting/package/charity-hosting

Roger

–

On Sat, 7 Feb 2015, at 10:27 PM, Roger Houghton wrote:

If you wanted a UK-based one I’d recommend Vidahost:
https://www.vidahost.com

I was previously with Clook (I think they may have a US-based operation
as well), which was also excellent but a bit pricey for the package size
I wanted.

Roger

———————-
Roger Houghton
22 New King Street
Bath, Somerset, BA1 2BL

Sent with Unibox

On Feb 7, 2015, at 10:22 PM, RavenManiac email@hidden wrote:

As many of you know, I was a big fan of GoDaddy—until this past week.

It seems a GoDaddy salesperson took it upon himself to call one of my clients. In this particular case, my client owns the domain name and I host their website through a shared hosting plan I have with GoDaddy.

I have no problem with GoDaddy trying to get business. What I do have a problem with is when the salesperson tells my client that I lied to her and that her site wasn’t being hosted on GoDaddy servers, when it clearly was. He should have known that. All it would have taken was a simple domain IP address search.

What’s worse is this rep proceeded to tell my client that her website wasn’t SEO optimized in an effort to sell her an SEO package. He went on to suggest that she needed to use meta keywords and meta descriptions. Once again, he probably should have checked the code, because had he done so he would have seen that we are using both—with the latter being more of a force-of-habit. Plus, if he was truly informed he would have known that Google no longer uses meta keywords for search engine ranking.

Anyway it took me about an hour to fix the damage this asshole created and I’m not happy about that. Then today, I received an email that basically directs me to this page: https://www.godaddy.com/design/web-design.aspx?ci=90391&isc=FBWEBDES#plan-pricing

So I guess GoDaddy is now in the professional design business, which begs the question—why in the world would I want to support a company that’s trying to undermine my efforts?

So, what website hosting service do you recommend? :slight_smile:

https://www.godaddy.com/design/web-design.aspx?ci=90391&isc=FBWEBDES#plan-pricing

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9

Here is my list, it’s quite short, and I don’t see any of them on Caleb’s site (so that’s either good or bad, I suppose).

Cheap Shared Hosting

Carrier-grade VPS

I don’t get around much, it seems. But I am very happy with the service I have gotten in these companies.

Important note: the latter list is a sheer, Gibraltar-sized learning CLIFF away from the former. When you get a VPS, you get a virtualized piece of hardware, not a many-layered abstraction (cPanel) above the professionally-managed operating system (some hardened version of Linux or BSD). First step in a VPS: choose which operating system (and which version of said system) you wish to install on your hardware, where you are Root. Next step, weld all the doors shut with shared SSH keys and destroy the root login password. Many, many steps later, install the Web server of your choice, configure the database server, maybe in a while you can get around to SFTPing some files to the Web root folder and poking a tiny hole in the firewall so that people can look at them. I use a number of shell scripts (RailsReady is one) to shortcut this process and make it repeatable, but it’s still a whole lot of work that many/most designers would never do, because it does not return any value to them. In my case, I am hosting Web applications, written in Ruby on Rails, managing workflows for multi-national companies. This is literally the simplest way to do that. I could never use shared hosting for any number of reasons – many of them contractual and involving Spanish Inquisition-style recriminations.

Walter

On Feb 8, 2015, at 12:42 AM, Caleb Grove email@hidden wrote:

Here’s a review that PC Magazine just came out with. Any opinions on any of these providers?

Huh. The thing that worries me about this table is that all solutions get good ratings and all links are affiliate links. Don’t get me wrong, affiliate links don’t explicitly mean that a product is bad, but in the race-to-the-bottom world of web hosting it is a red flag.

Check out this site; I’ve talked with the guy who runs it and he seems like a very honest fellow: http://www.reviewpon.com. His reviews are straightforward and fairly ruthless. Not many hosting companies get a good grade there, but the ones that do coincide with my experiences.

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10

I can second A2.

Of all the shared hosting I have experience with (so far) they have been the most consistently reliable and fast, and with good support. Perfect? Nope. But very solid. Their Turbo plans which use the Lightspeed server are absolutely screaming fast, as long as you don’t need the ability to switch between PHP versions (I do).

(yes it’s a refer-a-friend link, deal with it), The Best Web Hosting Services at 20x Speeds | A2 Hosting

That being said, if you’re up for it Kelly definitely look into a VPS, either managed or not. It’s a big step up from shared hosting.

Todd
https://xiiro.com

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11

Under certain circumstances a shared hosting plan can actually be preferable to a VPS, particularly if it’s an entry level VPS without much ram. I’m talking about cases where you write something that gets picked up by social media and goes viral for a day but over the longterm if you want more control and reliable performance a VPS is the way to go.

In my experience non-managed VPS servers are pretty reliable if you run cPanel but I had a lot of problems in the past with some free control panels. Nowadays I use a managed VPS with cPanel for not much more money and I can sleep at night knowing somebody else will deal with it if something goes wrong at 4.00am. I can also contact experts to make any modifications. When I had an unmanaged server I ended up spending more money overall calling in help whenever something went wrong.

One quick side note on shared hosts. There are many people who expect to use shared hosting accounts costing $10 a month or less and slam them with traffic all year round but sooner or later web hosts find a way of losing these clients.

Ashley

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12

Speaking of affiliate links, don’t forget the one to DigitalOcean VPS that earns free hosting for ActionsForge: DigitalOcean | Cloud Hosting for Builders This link gets you $10 credit (which is two months free at the lowest-size hosting level) and after you spend $25 there, I get $25 of credit toward ActionsForge. It’s a lovely deal.

But you still have the VPS learning curve/cliff to climb first, so this is mostly of interest if you know you need that level of control.

Walter

On Feb 8, 2015, at 11:29 AM, Todd email@hidden wrote:

I can second A2.

Of all the shared hosting I have experience with (so far) they have been the most consistently reliable and fast, and with good support. Perfect? Nope. But very solid. Their Turbo plans which use the Lightspeed server are absolutely screaming fast, as long as you don’t need the ability to switch between PHP versions (I do).

(yes it’s a refer-a-friend link, deal with it), The Best Web Hosting Services at 20x Speeds | A2 Hosting

That being said, if you’re up for it Kelly definitely look into a VPS, either managed or not. It’s a big step up from shared hosting.

Todd
https://xiiro.com

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