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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Design, random musings, and the Web. Since 1977

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Hosting

I might be looking for a new hosting company. Currently I’m with Pair Networks and to be honest I have not much to complain (signed up with their “advanced” web hosting plan). Their service is fine and their price is about right. The only thing that really annoys me is that I only have 1 SQL database — which is just not enough.

I have been looking around and so far Dreamhost seems interesting. Has anyone used their services? I’m willing to spend about $20 a month or so. I’m looking for all the usual things a web host has to offer and unlimited SQL databases is a big plus. So what are you suggesting?

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Tuesday, June 29th, 2004.

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70 comments on “Hosting”

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  1. Posted by Dustin on Friday, July 2nd, 2004.

    http://www.surpasshosting.com

    $19.99 per month; 15GB disk space, 150GB transfer, unlimited DBs

    I don’t use it myself, so I can’t tell you how the support is and stuff. Half price of orange place, uh, plus more stuff.

  2. Posted by Tae on Saturday, July 3rd, 2004.

    i’ve been looking for a new host as well and i have to say that asmallorange looks really promising. the prices are great and i especially liked their Fantastico automatic script installer and reseller option. but support and reliability is extremely important – does anyone else have any experience with them?

  3. Posted by heath weaver on Monday, July 5th, 2004.

    People, what are you doing?

    There is nowhere else to go except Right Design Web Hosting

    http://rightdesign.com/hosting/

    Brad Choate, the king of great MT plug-in’s offers web-hosting. I have recently switched from Registerfly’s hosting to Brad’s and I couldn’t be happier. Not only did he install MT for me (including some of this fantastic plug-in’s), but he has solved many of my problems, when I wanted to customize my error pages he helped me through it and even sent me links to learn more about the subject. He also helped me figure out some tricks on using his plug-in’s.

    All of this and Brad prices very competitively (I should know I did a comparison of most of the top Hosting companies, if you want a copy send me an email), but I think access to Brad’s MT knowledge makes his the best deal on the market.

    Heath – A happy customer of Right Design Web Hosting

  4. Posted by Linda on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004.

    You gonna love this webhosting service u get unlimited everything at only 9.95 a month. Ive been searching for something like that when I found this site i signed up right away.

    Free Unlimited Hosting includes:

    • Unlimited Webspace

    • Unlimited Bandwidth

    • Unlimited Email Accounts

    • Unlimited Autoresponders

    • Unlimited MySQL Databases

    • Unlimited Subdomains

    • Cpanel 9x Online Control Panel

    • Fantastico ($90.00 Value!)

    • Super Fast Servers!

    http://www.free-unlimited.com/free/show.php?adid=31&affid=26&stp=0&adtr=13

  5. Posted by Ben on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004.

    Rack my vote up for TextDrive too, DH. Like some have said, they’re still in ramp-up mode, but the level of personal service is second-to-none. Jason and Dean are on a winner.

  6. Posted by Gabe on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004.

    Regarding John’s post about Dreamhost’s massive DDOS attack that took them down for 36 hours. Dreamhost has made major changes to address even the most difficult problems by having closer contact with their upstream provider, and putting up an off-network status site to keep customer informed. Since then they’ve had another DDOS that didn’t even cause a blip in service (apparently some sites were slow for an hour or so til they squashed the problem).

    Dreamhost’s web panel is custom built and is by far the most feature-complete I have ever seen. I’m a pretty hardcore PHP/MySQL developer and I’ve never had need to contact tech support for any assistance configuring anything. Apparently for their shared hosting they also have account load balancing software that allows them to move users between machines automatically to keep loads reasonable (I haven’t been moved since I signed up two years ago).

    My only gripe is that the webmail is pretty slow, but since I use IMAP I can just use a real mail client most of the time.

  7. Posted by Chet on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004.

    Definitly go DreamHost. They recently added 60% more disk space and bandwidth. Also, with their new sale, you can get HUGE features for only $20/month. I have had no problems except for one period of downtime because of security, but this was fixed by the company so it won’t happen again. Their features are phenomanol and their service excellent. They are very personal.

  8. Posted by randy on Wednesday, July 7th, 2004.

    ICDSoft [http://www.icdsoft.com] offers 333 MB and 5GB monthly transfer for only $5/month! They don’t have unlimited databases. You only get one database to start, but you can add additional databases for a $5 one-time fee. I have been with ICDSoft for over a year now, and I love them! Their customer service is excellent — they always respond within ten minutes.

    They also have a plan that triples the space, bandwidth, and databases for only $10/month.

  9. Posted by Kees on Thursday, July 8th, 2004.

    Textdrive is excellent and very nicely different! Support team is great too.

  10. Posted by Dustin on Thursday, July 8th, 2004.

    Actually, I use ICDSoft too, Randy. I really like it. Service is the best in the business, mostly because they respond with in like 5 minutes of every ticket you send in, even if it’s 3 in the morning. It’s pretty amazing, you must see it to believe it.

    My site (click my name) is located on a server in Hong Kong at the i-Advantage Data Center, the largest internet service building in the world.

    I had forgotten that you could purchase additional DBs. However, surpasshosting.com has the best bang for your buck that I’ve ever seen. Someone should check that one out.

  11. Posted by Nathan on Friday, July 9th, 2004.

    Check out TMaxHost at http://tmaxhost.com. I know their site is a little goofy — they’ve got grammatical errors here and there; I’m pretty sure they’re based internationally but I’ve been very, very happy with them. I’ve had a reseller account with them for a year now and report the following:

    Good: no down-time yet, very fast response time on help tickets (always same-day, usually a few hours), and $14/month gets me 4GB storage/40GB transfer, unlimited db’s, domains and FTP accounts.

    Bad: no 1-800 number, no clear information on their servers like where, what, etc.

    Anybody else have any experience with this company? I realize I’m gambling on some level, since I can’t find any 3rd party reviews, but they’ve been totally reliable so far and no hosting company on the planet comes close to their plans.

  12. Posted by Jeff Clark on Friday, July 9th, 2004.

    I would suggest looking at ServerSeed Hosting. Incredibly quick responses to help tickets, cPanel backend, shell access, it’s just great all around.

  13. Posted by james on Sunday, July 11th, 2004.

    I’ve been with Dreamhost for nearly five years now. I’ve onlt scanned all the praise already heaped on Dreamhost, and I probably agree, with this to add:

    WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG, THEY TELL YOU WHAT’ S HAPPENING.

    For example, they recently had some downtime due to a DDOS attack. In two instances, once targeting just a site they host, and another time their nameservers directly. Another time I recall, they upgraded their version of MySQL, and things went haywire till they reverted to the previous version. These are commonplace mishaps, but here’s the thing: as soon as the problems developed, they emailed us, not just waiting till it’s over to run damage control. They’re pro-active, and you know they were up through the night nursing the servers back to functionality, posting updates all the while.

  14. Posted by Daniel, medical transcriptionist on Tuesday, July 13th, 2004.

    I just switched to SurpassHosting. It starts at only $4.94 a month!

    From the reviews I have read, they have great reliabilty and fast servers!

  15. Posted by Jenni on Friday, July 16th, 2004.

    I know this topic is kind of old, but i’d like to add http://www.netrillium.com to the list.

    $14.50 a month (or $170 a year) will get you 600MB of space, 17GB monthly bandwidth, Unlimited FTP Accounts, Unlimited Subdomains, Unlimited MySQL Databases, Cpanel 8.5.3, Unlimited POP3 Accounts, Unlimited Autoresponders, Unlimited Mailing Lists, Unlimited Email Forwards, WebMail Access… I could go on but you can just read it all here: http://netrillium.com/plans.php

  16. Posted by David on Tuesday, July 20th, 2004.

    I’ve hosted a number of sites with Dreamhost over the past two years. While I’m a big fan of their prices and services, I haven’t been terribly impressed with their support. It’s all e-mail and they promise a response within 24 hours… however, sometimes that response is just to say “we’re working on it”. Nice people, but that kind of turn around time is maddening when you have a problem!

  17. Posted by Mandy on Wednesday, July 21st, 2004.

    Simple and to the point:

    1 MySQL, and 10 data sources, 30 GB bandwidth, and 600MB disk space, Control Panel Access, 50 POP3 email accts, external email forwarding, auto responding email, for as low as $19.95/mo

    or

    2 MySQL, and 15 data sources, 60 GB bandwidth, and 1000MB disk space,Control Panel Access, unlimited POP3 email accts, external email forwarding, auto responding email for as low as $32.76/mo

    http://IpockDesigns.com or

    http://ipockartandmusic.com/Enter.htm

    Just the facts! Loads of helpful goodies on site!

  18. Posted by Ryan Petrello on Saturday, July 24th, 2004.

    Somehow a web hosting and design site that implements the “blink” tag doesn’t seem so appetizing.

  19. Posted by Brady J. on Thursday, July 29th, 2004.

    http://www.ithium.net has been excellent — many of us moderators on http://www.codingforums.com use them, I have over 20 sites with them — and it’s cheap. his ithium site is on the redesign, if you would like his email, drop me a line — I’d post it, but who knows how much spam he’ll get.

  20. Posted by michael on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004.

    if your in asia you can try web hosting provider in asia

    so far its been good hosting with them.

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