September 22, 2006

Curious George; My hosting company (Dreamhost) is having serious problems. I need a reliable hosting company. Suggestions?
  • nearlyfreespeech disclaimer- I haven't hosted anything with them more important than a WOW clan forum.
  • I've been using Doteasy for years, and I don't have any complaints.
  • Hostway.com - been with them for five years and running. Great tech support.
  • Hey, you're waiting for your your server to come back! Me too! I love dreamhost. Why do they have to hurt me so? Why do they test my love so often? :(
  • lunarpages.com I've been using them for about five years, very reliable, prices and features are generous.
  • I've been wicked pleased with 1&1 (3 years using them) and the price is right for the business package I recently upgraded to: $7.49/mo 200GB space and 2TB bandwidth.
  • Thanks! I'll check out some of the suggestions. It's been a real nightmare...
  • I've been using Dreamhost for donkey's years and haven't had much in the way of problems--didn't even notice these ones, frankly. They're better than most.
  • Man, I saw the word "hosting" and "suggestions" and was about to start raving about how much I love Dreamhost til I read the title all the way... Dreamhost really is a great company with a lot to offer, I think they've just been plagued by many problems, some culminating together at the same time (see Anatomy of a Disaster and Part 2). But they are a very transparent company that is not afraid to admit when things are not going well. I think the server problems are temporary, and in the long run I've found their service to be far more excellent than others.
  • icdsoft are pretty reliable.
  • I use OLM for three domains (two work and one personal) and I'm pretty happy with them. Up-time is excellent and they're consistent under heavy loads. I wouldn't necessarily recommend them to everyone, since their learning curve for the neophyte webmaster is pretty steep, but the features are there and they have 24-hour live tech support. They offer a variety of plans, based on traffic and features. I believe they're entirely LAMP, so if you're looking for Windows/ASP, they're probably not for you. I've never been that impressed with DH, even when they weren't having constant problems. My experience has been that they're good for low-volume sites, and very good at helping new users set things up, but they slow down a lot under heavy load and at peak times. I moved one of our work sites from Dreamhost to OLM because of this. YMMV, of course.
  • Oh, and avoid GoDaddy. I let them suck me in with one of their "deals". Guess what? You get what you pay for. And their head honcho is a fruitcake.
  • I second the motion to avoid GoDaddy. I've been using Fatcow for years and have found them to be really excellent- very helpful folks, and virtually no unscheduled downtime.
  • Hi Argh! I, too, have had to run from Dreamhost... this was two weeks after their collapse in late July. We were getting massive latency and slow performance, and I sent support request after support request asking them to look at it and they'd say everything was fine. FTPs were running at a blazing 1.4 MB/minute! Meanwhile I was having trouble managing the server and my users were complaining en masse. What a crock. We went to Verio and now we are having trouble with sporadic Server Not Available messages (and you click reload and it's fine). They basically sent me a form letter saying everything is fine. We're moving. In short, Dreamhost sucks ass. And I can't recommend Verio either. Sweet Jesus, it seems like webhosting everywhere is starting to get really sucky.
  • i use Servage - a fantastic deal
  • I like Dreamhost most of the time. I'm just mystified that they decided to do some "rewiring" in the middle of the day where 80% of their customers are from. My site was down for only 2 hours... but in the busiest part of the afternoon!
  • $2 domain name registration for new Yahoo users I know nothing about it, nor am I affiliated, or even interested. YMMV. still $2 to register "quidnuncr00lz.net" is a deal!