Host experiences and testimonials thread

[TCM]

I figured this was common knowledge but reading this thread i was a little disturbed. Two of the most frequently recommended hosting companies (F5 and A Small Orange, which i checked out because they were recommended by so many people and looked very promising, did NOT have physical addresses or telephone numbers listed on their website. This is NOT a good sign. No matter how great of service you may be getting at the moment, stuff happens and it would be a pity to be stuck with no other option than to sit back and wait and pray for e-mail or online support.

With regards to ASO: Did you look at their about page?

Right. I took a look at ASO as well. For a host a lot of people praise, they have a terrible presentation.

What's that supposed to mean? If you're refering to their web site, I prefer one that just shows me information, rather than flashy stuff, and their website is not as important as their service, by any means. If you're refering to the same thing as the above poster, as you can see, they do have a physical address listed if you actually bother to look.

(I've been with ASO for a year and a half, and their service to me as been superb.)

[TheOverclocked]

I've been with Cartika Hosting for about 6 months or better now and all I can say is WOW

They have the BEST reliability, speed, services, and customer satisfaction out of every webhost I've EVER used. I've been through about five hosts now (not including free hosts) and Cartika Hosting is the best by a large margin.

They offers a clustered H-Sphere environment for your web site and application hosting. This in effect gives you many advantages over other setups that many other hosts will use.

• Dedicated Resource Servers ensuring performance and stability
• Redundant DNS Service (DNS1 & DNS2 services on dedicated resources)
• Users will never experience a complete loss of all services
• Ability to perform Control Panel Maintenance and Upgrades without affecting ANY other services

Diagramatic of CartikaHosting Cluster

The data center is located in Texas, a central location for US residents. The company is called Colo4Dallas. You can find more information about the data center on Cartika's site or the Colo4Dallas site.

All Servers in the CartikaHosting H-Sphere Cluster are configured as follows:

• Dell Server Hardware
• Dual Intel Xeon Processors with Hyperthreading
• 2 GB RAM
• SCSI Drives (Hot Swap) with Hardware RAID
• Dual 10/100 Nics
• Redundant Power Supplies (Hot Swap)

The customer support/technical support is out of this world. If I submit a support ticket, I always receive an e-mail from an actual representative (not the automated message) about the issue within 30 minutes. I had submitted a support ticked on July 14, 2006 at 3:18pm concerning an issue with my statics service. I received the automated e-mail instantly, and in 9 minutes I received another e-mail from a technical support representative regarding the issue. I didn't even get the time to reply when at 3:44pm I received notification from another rep that the issue has been resolved.

This is only a small view into their world of customer support. I've spent hours with one of the reps that I most frequently deal with. He transferred all my files from my old hosting company's server, set it up, and helped me resolve any and all issues. I've NEVER come across dedication like that in any other hosting company, or honestly probably any other company period.

Their site has all the Uptime Statistics, MRTG Graphs, and Network Status of all their servers in real-time. Rarely can you find a company anymore that is willing to put stick their neck out on the line and show everyone the truth. They will because they can with their quality services.

They also host for some major corporations. You can find their client list of the top sites on their Cartika.ca site. As of now they are:

• General Motors
• Sprint
• Habitat for Humanity
• Cunningham Lindsey Inc
• Dunning Golf
• Fleming College
• Faytex
• vLink
• Starr Celeste-Falconeri LLP
• GreenFire International LLC

If they can host for GM and Sprint but you think they can't fulfil your needs in a webhost, you should be looking into free hosting.

Anyways, just a testimonial for anyone looking for TOP quality hostig.

http://cartikahosting.com
http://cartika.ca

Thank you for your time,
Jordan S

I am in no way affiliated with Cartika Hosting. I only use their services and REALLY REALLY the quality of the company and wish to spread the goodness to users like you. Thanks.

[Tigurius]

Dinohost.com
WildRoseWeb.net - Canadian Web Host / Owns their servers
I used to store my site on Dinohost.com, stay clear of them! They have security flaws up the ying yang! As well are always targeted by "hackers" and are horrible when it comes to support. They never delete their access logs causing me to have a 3 gig back up of my entire site, making my VB site extremly extremly slow!

So now I moved to a new host stored in Canada, the servers are owned by this hosting company not rented out like most hosting companies, its great because when I had an error i needed corrected they quickly took care of it, my troubleticket went to their blackberry device which they responded immedietly! My site I must say runs faster then ever and has only gone down once, and that was because I was transferring from the old site to the new site and forgot to update nameservers! Check them out http://www.wildroseweb.net/

PS. Just found out they also host Neons.org, an extremly large and popular site.

[jaycob]

Highly Recommended

Downtownhost

http://www.downtownhost.com

*99.9% uptime guarantee,
*30-day money back guarantee.

I am currently on the
Bronze plan $4.95 a month
which is perfect for my VBulletin Forum
which was Installed for free plus many
other features like
Arcade, styles ex:

*Awesome Support response 24/7.
*Exceptional, personal service.
*Very fast server.
*Friendly support forum.
*lots of features.
*Great control panel.
*Jorge Catena, Martin Redrado, great guys in general.
*No extra charge for account upgrade if needed.

Been with Downtownhost for over a year with no troubles.

[OS,]

Thats all I say!

[ericguttormson]

I use three different hosting companies.

One of them I am planning on replacing (the one that uses PLESK VPS's), they wont keep my hosting software current without paying them big bucks.

Another one of my hosting companies is ASO. I see others are talking about them. I wish they offered PLESK VPS accounts because I would be all over that! ASO has given me nothing but top notch service and support for about two years (I think).

[King Internet]

Don't go with Site5, I've been with them for 3 years now and while they were awesome at the start they are getting worse and worse. They blacklisted my forum without explanation and Customer Support takes 4 hours per email.

http://forums.site5.com/showthread.php?t=11917 More information here, or read recent reviews at http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/site5 - the one by is Kay Eichai is -spot on-.

[Langly]

I'm hunt for a new host and have tried 7 this past month.

eleven2.com:
They are good for a SMALL site. I have 12000+ users and over 100meg SQL file and they can't handle that load. They have a restriction of 15 concurrent active users. Average download speeds: 250kb/s

site5.com:
I must have been on a server that had script kiddies on it because the server load would spike WAY up and my site wouldn't even load. The techs didn't even know about it until I would email them a trouble ticket since they don't have phone support. The support times are terrible and the techs don't seem to know what they arer doing anyway. Average download speeds: 600kb/s

imhosted.com:
An OC192 backbone provider? 3 weeks and I still have not received a response to a ticket I sent in. Customer service? Customer support? Nothing there. Average download speeds: 35kb/s

lypha.com:
You can use the same response I had for imhosted.com here as well. Its the same company with a different name. I dropped them in 2 hours.

godaddy.com:
Good company to start out with but once you outgrow them, which is not long, you'll need to move on. My reason for moving was the 50 concurrent active users at once restriction they had. Average download speeds: 150kb/s

canaca.com:
Mine rate to their servers was 50ms. Once I got my email with my IP address for my domain I pinged it - 350ms. Thats the average of 4 times pinged. 2 days went by and several emails sent in to get my 100+ meg SQL database imported and it still was not done. I was transferring my files from one site to this site and it constantly just stop transferring. 13 hours and not even half the default vbulletin software was uploaded. Average download speeds: 9kb/s

aplus.net:
They seems like a good choice. Good speed to my cpanel. Once they were trying to upload my SQL file they didn't even email me telling me they could not do it since an attachment in there was over 1meg which is against their policy and they would not change it. I don't know what file they are referring to b ut I'm not about to go chopping up my database to hunt down this 1+meg attachment. Average download speeds: 300kb/s

I'm looking for a shared host. I have about 15gigs of vbulletin files, 12000 users, 180meg SQL file. I'm going to give servage.net and try now. I'd like to get a dedicated box but since I make no money off the site, users just leech and don't post, mods that hardly login, I can't afford a dedicated box.

(I get 215ms pings to servage.net so I'll try out realwebhost.net, 22ms, instead)

[gopherhockey]

F5Hosting.com

I am very new to websites and forums, so when I searched for a webhost the main thing I looked at was support. I emailed three companys, out of the three the only one who sent back a timly and correct response was F5.

In the past I have placed a few support tickets, not because the server company messed up but because I botched the install. Much to my surprise not only did they explain what I did wrong, but they also fixed the problem all on their own.

Ive been with them for a few months now, no down time amazing technical support and no sown time. Five stars.

If your forums grow at all you will quickly outgrow F5hosting.com. Customer service is good, but getting systems back online is another issue entirely. They have recently done some consolidation and moving of data (overseas I believe) and its created nothing but problems... SQL errors, bandwidth issues, etc. When this happens they promise a lot and deliver very little.

F5hosting.com is another one of those that has outsold its capacity. Stay away if you want any kind of reliability.

[thenicevoice]

If your forums grow at all you will quickly outgrow F5hosting.com. Customer service is good, but getting systems back online is another issue entirely.

Is this the same F5 that I've been dealing with?

My site has been down for 2 days . . .and the only response I've received was:

Hi,

We are investigating on your issue and will get back to you shortly . Thanks
for your kind co-operation.

I don't call that customer service.

Whenever the site comes back up, it does so intermittently. I have received, on an average, over 1000 database errors per day.

I am DESPERATELY seeking another host.

[gopherhockey]

Is this the same F5 that I've been dealing with?

My site has been down for 2 days . . .and the only response I've received was:

I don't know what happened to F5hosting.com - they were rock solid to me for 3 years, then went downhill a few weeks back and have shown no sign of recovery.

They moved a number of sites all at one time between servers and did not check the results, then backed off their change only to do it again a week later because the lease was up on one of their servers. Their "no way you can go back" attitude and their unwillingness to just set up a space on a new server and let us move our own data over was unprofessional to say the least.

I continue to get fairly good feedback from them, but its worthless when they don't fix their issues.

I can't even get a backup now to change my host even if I wanted.

They seem way behind the times on disk space and transfer limits anyway... I just hope they come back online and I can find a decent new provider. There are sooo many people in the same situation that its difficult to find a good one. I don't trust the ones that make "top 10" lists as they are probably on their way out by the time they get that popular.

[thenicevoice]

Gopher,

I really, really feel for you. I also did not want to move. But since the ownership changed, customer service went WAY down hill.

I feel that at the very minimum, a warning e-mail should have gone out about the possibility out intermittent outages. Once the outages occurred, I STILL didn't learn about what was going on until I happened to find a thread on their forum. My site was still down for 3 or 4 days afterwards....but my cries went unanswered.

I found Joey at RealWebHost to be phenomenal.

[G3MM4]

How about 1and1.com ????Has anyone had idea about this hosting company ? Please let me know thanks

You can do much better than 1&1/Pipex. I would not recommend them.

I had spent over a year with them, and at least half of that time was spent trying to cancel my account with them. They require you to put it in writing to actually cancel your account. They send you forms to fill out, then you have to mail it back to them and so on. Twice they claimed to have sent out these forms and the forms never turned up. After that, all my requests for their cancellation forms to be mailed were ignored. I ended up being out of pocket.

Their control panel is weak, and they take too long to answer your support emails and so on. On top of that, they are rather expensive for what you get IMHO.

[shaynehammy]

Warning. DO NOT USE IX Web Hosting (www.************.com).

I would rather chew off my own arm than ever go with them again. My site is consistently slow (when its up) and despite numerous complaints (1-2 a day!) it remains unresolved. Their 24x7 chat live support is in India and the representitives there struggle to understand English in its basic form.

After 7 months i have learned my lesson and searching for a new hosting company. Hence my input into this thread.

Regards

Shayne

[chrisj8221]

been with ASO for a few weeks now. sent lots of questions their way and always quick answers. I would recommend them for sure!

Chris