Note: The problems seem to have been fixed. See update below.
My site experienced another outage today due to problems with AN Hosting’s data center. I’ve had sporadic problems with AN Hosting lately…
I’m saddened by this because, in my experience, AN Hosting has been a damn good host (note that AN Hosting is owned by midPhase, which has been plagued by the same problems). The service has been among the best I’ve experienced and they were very reliable until recently. Unfortunately, they’ve been crippled numerous times by problems at their data center and, while there’s a rumor that they’re planning to move, I’m growing weary of service interruptions.
I haven’t jumped ship just yet, but I’m actively looking for a new host. I’ve been doing some research and I’ve come up with a short list of shared hosting providers. I’m so jaded by my experiences with hosts over the years that I’m reluctant to offer any kind of recommendations, but I’ll be advertising some other hosts that look promising. Please feel free to comment or add your recommendations.
Note: If you want to plug a host, that’s fine, but please link back to your own site. Don’t include your affiliate link here (I hate advertising on my own site; I don’t want this post to fill up with host spam).
Update: I’ve now moved Upstart Blogger and a couple of my other blogs to Media Temple. I still have a couple of blogs at AN Hosting and I’ll be watching them closely and waiting for news. We’ll see… (06.16.07)
Update: (06.26.07) Encouraging news from AN Hosting. This was published in the latest midPhase Newsletter (AN Hosting is owned by midPhase, but offers much better hosting packages than midPhase):
Unless you’ve been hosting under a rock or vacationing in Tahiti you’re undoubtedly aware we’ve had a rocky month of power outages and other data center woes. I know a few months back we talked about why we chose the new RCN data center facility and one of those reasons being power, power and more power. We had every reason to believe our woes were behind us and it wasn’t until power usage for the area as a whole increased with summer did RCN’s shortcomings become apparent. What was normally reliable uptime plunged as we endured repeated outages due to bad infrastructure and planned responses. From midPhase’s side we feel we did everything right. Our cabinets were never overcrowded, our servers as power efficient as we could make them. Short of buying our own data center we were doing everything possible to ensure you, our beloved customers, had your service up to snuff. This wasn’t so, however, so we apologize. Our current plan is to move every dual processor server from the RCN facility to our new, as of now unannounced data center. The RCN data center will house only low-end servers that won’t draw power enough to cause any problems. We hope with these precautions there won’t be any more service outages caused by data center power issues. We want to thank each and every one of you for your patience and understanding, please know that we’ve been a zillion times angrier and fed-up than anyone.
This is great news. I still host a few sites at AN Hosting and I’m confident things will only get better there. Update - I now host ALL my sites at AN Hosting for just $4.95 a month.
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I currently use 1&1. Mainly because of the amount of storage and the price. My sites seem to run incredibly slow at times. So, I am not hugely impressed with it. However, I haven’t had any issues with stability. The other downfall to 1&1 is no support for Rails with the package I am using, but that hasn’t been a big deal.
I know a lot of people pimp Media Temple. I just can’t justify $20.00 or more per month. I will be interested to see what you end up deciding on.
Will, I was with 1&1 a long time ago. I don’t remember them ever going down, but I remember being dissatisfied with them from the beginning. I think they were slow, I had problems with my domains, their back end was clunky, and I had problems getting things to work (I may have been using Textpattern then).
Actually, I am testing Media Temple. I paid for one month and am moving a domain that gets almost no traffic over there. I’ve also set up Montastic to monitor my uptime (it’s a great, free service, BTW, which monitors your site every ten minutes). MT is probably more than I need, too. They’ve had problems with their grid hosting, but the idea makes great sense. I’ll see if they’ve worked the kinks out.
In the meantime, I’m also hoping for some good news from AN Hosting. A shame to see them brought down by their data center like this. My experiences with them were mostly very positive.
I just cancel my MT account earlier today. I was with them for the last couple of years on a regular shared server and the downtime was too much. This year (after being tease for a year about the new stuff), I was told I couldn’t get any new feature and the old dedicated server was no longer supported and even if I had been with them for a couple of years, I couldn’t get even a deal to move to the new Grid Server. Hope your experience is better than mine.
p.s. I’m still looking for a good host, that’s how I found your post about hosting, I had hope about AN Hosting, guess I’ll go with the cheapest that has what I want and go from there… again!
Stephane, sorry to hear about your experience with MT. So far, my experience is a mixed bag. I’ve had problems using Coda with MT for some inexplicable reason that no one can help me with. I’m not convinced it’s worth the money.
I still have some domains at AN Hosting, and my server hasn’t had any problems lately. I’ve yet to find the ideal host. So far, I think I prefer AN Hosting to MT, but we’ll see.
You might consider my hosting short list. I always have a list of alternatives that I’ve read reasonably good things about.
BTW, I looked at your site. Beautiful photos!
I am having some major problems with HostMonster. Sure their services looks promesing, but its just plain crap when it comes down to speed. So would someone please suggest me a good host (Yes, im willing to pay) for my site? I just hate this and i’d hate to have my last resort be switching to a dedicated server.
Millenium, thanks for the report. I’ve removed HostMonster from my short list of recommended hosts until I hear more reports. In the meantime, consider AN Hosting, Media Temple, or Hostgator.com.
Excelent thanks. I Will definitly consider those. To elaborate more on the HostMonster situation, the main problem is that their server machines struggle to uphold and maintain Sql databases, which is pretty bad considering that most sites run of Sql databases these days. For scripts that run without Sql databases, Host Monster is fine for. Then you would get terrific speed. Also, they host allot of accounts on single servers, which just pretty much worsens everything.
Hostmonster’s service is terrible! I just signed up not too long ago and almost immediately I was dismayed at the frequent slow down and server problems. My e-mails have not been responded to and my phone calls aren’t resolved. Their response is that there are many people using the same server so that might be the problem. I am seriously contemplating moving to GoDaddy…they are pretty reliable I hear..agreed?
Raymond
@Raymond: Thanks for the comment. I have taken Hostmonster off my short list and no longer recommend them.
I wouldn’t recommend GoDaddy, though. The back end is proprietary and awkward; cPanel is much easier to use. Their phone support, while prompt and friendly, is useless in my experience. They aren’t very knowledgeable about WordPress. I recently helped someone with a couple of blogs on GD and everything took longer to set up than it should have.
Well, I’ve moved my site to a new server, and things are going great. Fast loading times, great support, quality (and reliable) server machines, affordable price packages, AND there are 3 different server’s to choose from. I used the Chinese server , for obvious reasons which i will not be declaring in this post, and its great. Except for the Chinese server, theres another one in USA, and a final one in the UK.
I’m not sure whether or not I’m allowed to post a link to the host’s main page, since its a private server, and this message could then be regarded as spam. So admin, let me know if you want the links ;)
@Millenium: My policy is not to allow affiliate links or self-promoting links to commercial sites, or anything that might be construed as spam. But you’re free to link to your own blog where you have a post containing links. Unless, of course, your “obvious reasons” are because you have a porn site (not that I’m a prude, but I try to keep this site PG out of courtesy to what I expect is a diverse group of visitors) or a warez site.
In any case, glad you found a host that works for you!
Thanks for the sharing. I’ll try top up some by add my experience.
I’m currently with Bluehost, Hostgator, Lunarpages, and Hostmonster (the most recent) and I don’t have any problem with all four of them. I don’t quite understand why people’re telling me Hostmonster sucks but they seems alright to me (so far).
Host that sucks: Network Eleven and Gate.com.
Back when I first started, Network Eleven was doing great but then they went overselling and the server uptime turned terribly wrong.
Gate.com, overpriced and screwed up control panel. They don’t allow any addon domain until now; they have the worst control panel which do not offer any features! Want a WordPress blog, go install yourself manually; want to check Awstats, go install your own script; want a ecommerce cart system - “well, what’s a cart system?”
That’s the sharing from my side. Hopefully it helps.