How to Find a Web Host That Doesn’t Suck
Looking for a web host can be an overwhelming task. If you are new to hosting, the multitude of hosting companies and the plethora of features, packages, and technical jargon can be intimidating. If you’re a veteran of web hosting, and your DreamHost has just turned into a nightmare, it becomes hard to take the plunge again, knowing you’re bound to be disappointed.
Shared hosting sucks. Shared hosting is like moving into an apartment in a strange neighborhood, sight unseen. Your host may put you in the building with the party animals and crack dealers, whose visitors park on the lawn, hog the elevators, and clog the hallways. When one of your friends show up, they can barely make their way to your door.
Even if you find a great host you can still have an experience that sucks. Hosting companies often have hundreds of servers and your bad luck might land you on a slow or buggy one. You may have email problems after your host is blacklisted because of spammers. A hacker may take down your server with a DoS attack on one of your neighbors. The person who answers your support call may be a lifesaver or a jerk.
When it comes to web hosts, I prefer serial monogamy to marriage. Finding a good host is tough, maybe even hopeless, but here are a few suggestions on how to increase your chances of finding a host that will work for you.
AN Hosting offers an incredible 500 gigs of disk space and 5,000 gigs of bandwidth! You’d have to pay 10 years in advance to get the same deal from DreamHost! Use the code UPSTARTBLOGGER for 3 free months! But hurry— offer expires at midnight on Halloween!
What Do You Really Need From a Host?
Before you even begin looking, make a list of your hosting requirements.
Every host will offer a full menu of features and services, many of which may be of no importance to you. How many email or FTP accounts do you really need? What stats do you need? (Regardless of what stats your host may offer—Webalizer and Analog are the most common—I’d recommend using Google’s free Analytics service instead.) Do you need e-commerce features? How about Ruby on Rails support?
Here are a few things that may actually be important to you:
Bandwidth This isn’t the most important criteria, but I list it first because many hosts use it as an enticement, tempting you with gigenormous or even unmetered bandwidth. You’ll probably never be able to take advantage of it because of resource limitations (see TOS below), and the typical blog (a couple hundred page views a day, say) probably uses only a few gigabytes in a month, at most (if you’re really worried about pumping terabytes through the pipes, you should give some thought to dedicated hosting). But some hosting plans do have ridiculously low bandwidth allotments, so be sure to give yourself room to grow.
TOS (Terms of Service) Every host is going to place some kind of limitation on your resources (CPU and memory), and it’s a good thing they do; shared hosting only works when everyone plays nice with their neighbors. Some will be vague about resource limitations, others more explicit (e.g., limiting it to some percentage). You’ll have to dig for this info, which is usually buried in the TOS. Make sure you read this document, which will also have details about refunds, uptime guarantees, and other important details.
Number of Domain Pointers How many domains will you need? Many budget shared hosting plans limit you to one, or perhaps a few, domains. If you intend to have more than one site, or to publish more than one blog, make sure you can host all your domains under one plan.
Number of Databases Some hosts offer unlimited domains, but give you a paltry number of databases to work with. Sure, you can put more than one blog in a single database, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Control Panel You’re going to spend a fair amount of time poking around in your control panel, so make sure it’s user-friendly. If you’re used to cPanel, which is almost ubiquitous among hosts, you’ll probably find a proprietary backend (like those used by GoDaddy, 1&1, and DreamHost) somewhat awkward to use. Most hosts offer a demo of their control panel. Check it out before you make your final choice.
Blog-friendly? If you’re going to publish a blog, look for a blog-friendly host. I’d avoid GoDaddy and 1&1, for example, which have awkward backends and weren’t, in my experience, particularly WordPress-friendly (it’s been a couple of years since I was with these hosts, though, so things may have changed; feel free to comment if you’ve had a different experience). Most hosts offer Fantastico, or some other method of one-click installation of popular blogging packages. Make sure your host has the required versions of PHP, MySQL, or any extensions that are required (e.g., WordPress requires mod_rewrite for permalinks).
Service Your host may offer online, email, chat and/or phone support. If you’re new to hosting (and even if you’re not) I’d recommend finding a host that offers phone support. Trying to explain what you don’t understand in an email or in a chat can be laborious and frustrating. You won’t always get an immediate answer by phone (sometimes a more tech savvy person will have to get back to you, usually by email), but it’s a relief when you do. And there are few things more infuriating than not being able to speak personally to someone when your host has just deleted your account without warning.
Affiliate Program Okay, this is the least important thing to consider. But I’d hesitate before choosing a host that didn’t offer a referral fee. Any blog with traffic should be able to get a few referrals over the course of a year and with most hosts you’ll make more than enough to pay for your own hosting.
Comparing Hosts
It’s impossible to predict your future satisfaction with a host for reasons outlined above. There are few reliable sources of comparative information about web hosts, and testimonials (including mine) are perhaps the least reliable source of all. Be especially skeptical of review sites; most of them are affiliate link farms. Nothing wrong with making a commission for a referral (I’ve included a few links of my own below) but a site that’s devoted to hosting will tend toward hyperbole). And keep in mind, as you do your research, that any popular host is likely to have ardent supporters and detractors due to the sheer number of customers.
First, limit the field by using your list of what’s really important to you to find a handful of candidates that meet your needs. Then, start your comparative research.
Google I’d start by searching Google for comments about your potential host. Also, try “[your potential host] sucks” (don’t forget the quotes). Consider these results for example:
Upstart Blogger is currently hosted by AN Hosting, so let’s start with them. Google search for “AN Hosting Sucks”: No results.
Since AN Hosting is owned by Midphase , let’s do a search for Midphase. Google search for “Midphase Sucks”: About 38 results.
Before AN Hosting, I was with Hosting ZOOM. Google search for “Hosting Zoom Sucks”: Two results, both because of me.
Before Hosting Zoom, I was with DreamHost. Google search for “DreamHost Sucks”: About 24,200 results (I contributed a few).
Now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Carl Sagan said. The lack of Google results for your potential host may not be an indication of anything. But a multitude of “[your host] sucks” results should be a red flag.
Hyperspin Don’t host with a company that doesn’t offer at least a 30-day money back guarantee. And while you’re in that honeymoon phase with your new host, sign up for Hyperspin’s free monitoring service. They’ll notify you immediately by email or SMS if your site goes down.
You’ll also find a ranking of hosts by uptime on Hyperspin, but it doesn’t tell you very much. The 100th ranked host (at least at the time of this writing) posted a respectable 99.740% uptime. And these rankings only include companies that pay to be monitored by Hyperspin; the fact that your host chooses not to pay for this service doesn’t mean it’s unreliable. The same is true of Netcraft, which publishes a similar performance ranking.
WebSitePulse If you want to get a quick sense of the relative performance of a host, you can run a website test at WebSitePulse.
Status Pages, Forums, and Blogs You may have to hunt for these, but most hosts have status pages (where you can monitor uptime), forums (where you can get the pulse of their customer community and see how responsive the host is), and company blogs (where they may write about customer concerns). These are often the best sources of information. DreamHost has a DreamHost Status site and one of the better blogs. Midphase/AN Hosting lets you check the status of any of their servers online.
A Place to Start
I’ve given you some things to think about, but where to begin? Since I’ve had some direct experience with a handful of hosts, I’ll briefly share some of my experiences here.
N.B. My experiences are not the best indication of your future happiness with a host (see everything I’ve written above); this is just more grist for your mill. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I will get a referral fee if you follow these links and sign up with one of these hosts. Some of the details below may have changed by the time you read this.
AN Hosting Upstart Blogger is currently hosted by AN Hosting. AN Hosting offers a generous package that includes 500 GB of disk storage, 5 TB (that’s terrabytes!) of bandwidth, 40 domains on one account, a free domain for life, and unlimited MySQL databases for $4.95 a month (yearly payment). Though AN Hosting is owned by Midphase, Midphase’s basic plan (Mega-Phase) lets you host only one domain name and one MySQL database, and their Pro-PHASE plan, while it lets you host unlimited domains and offers unmetered bandwidth, gives you only three MySQL databases. AN Hosting is a much better deal. Recommended
Hosting ZOOM I was actually very pleased with Hosting ZOOM for the better part of a year, but sometime after I signed on with them they eliminated their phone support. Then, within a week of moving me to their new Clustered Failover Hosting, they lost all of my databases and my backups. I was shocked and pissed for a couple of days before moving to AN Hosting. Still, I kept my account for a while to use for testing. But their customer service has become so intolerable that I cancelled my account. Not as bad as DreamHost, but STAY AWAY.
DreamHost DreamHost is one of the most popular hosts, at least among bloggers. It’s the host some people love and other people love to hate. They offer generous plans, including 200 GB of storage and two terabytes of bandwidth, along with unlimited domains and MySQL databases, for only $9.95 a month (yearly). It all sounds good, but read Why DreamHost Sucks before you go any further. DreamHost was my hosting nightmare. They’ve got personality. In spite of all my warnings, people still chose DreamHost after reading my horror story. If you still want to host with DreamHost, use this link and enter the code FUTUROSITY for a $50 discount. But, I can’t recommend DreamHost. Avoid.
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RobertRobert Ellis was the founder of Upstart Blogger. He now blogs (and continues to design themes) at Futurosity.
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Thanks for the article. I’m going to try out a few of your suggested host sites. I am relatively inexperienced, and ended up going with Host Department. They never respond to the work tickets I send in, and their customer service/support is a joke. They offer unlimited everything, but the whole service is so damn slow and buggy, you can’t access most of the features. I’ll be looking to transfer my site soon.
Kyle, the problem you’re having is common among inexpensive hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth.
Please do check out the sites I recommend. I’ve been very happy with AN Hosting. I’ve found them to be very responsive when I’ve needed support, their uptime is excellent (I monitor it with Hyperspin’s free monitoring service), and they offer a great value.
Good luck!
Thank you for this really informative article :)
Now what are your thoughts on (mt) and GoDaddy, cause I’m on G.d. but want to switch to (mt)…. I’m utterly confused and hope you can help me out, sorry to use this as a support forum hehe but I’m desperate :|
Thanks :)
I don’t recommend GoDaddy for hosting for the reasons outlined in my post.
I don’t have any personal experience with (mt), though I considered them more than once when looking for a host. In my opinion, they’re too expensive. I’ve also read recently that they are having some growing pains and have suffered from some outages lately. I can’t remember exactly where I read this, but do some research on Google and you’ll find lots of people who’ve been unhappy.
I can still heartily recommend AN Hosting. I think it’s one of the best values out there. They’ve been reliable so far and their service has been very responsive and helpful.
That is one great article!
Hope I never actually have to use it though :)
I’ve been spoiled by having direct access to data centers for too long.
As an alternative to hyperspin, you could use the free server uptime monitor service offered by basicstate.com
Kyle,
I would never buy hosting and domains from the same entity in a million years. Too many opportunities for problems. Problems==arbitrary treatment. Just look around on the search engines, you’ll see what I mean.
On the other hand, if mt means Media Temple, they’ve been having problems in the recent months too. Usually in the area of crashing servers. Not a good thing(TM)
ttyl,
spenser
Thanks for the article. I’ve been looking for a new host anyway when I came across this and decided to give AN Hosting a try after reading your article and doing some searching on the web. So far I’m less than impressed though unfortunately, evidently they can’t process new accounts outside of M-F 9-5 central, and while the online start up process said the coupon code was accepted and gave me the 2 months free, they actually charged me for the full 12 months. I’ll have to wait and see what happens Monday.
Walt, I’m sorry to hear you had trouble signing up with AN Hosting. You’re the first person I know that has used the code. Maybe they added 2 free months, but only charged you for 12? Let me know.
Thank you and the other contributers for the information. I have been hopping from one host to another since the year 2000. As long as you have backups and access to the DNS settingsof your domains, you can change host relatively fast. Finding the right host is so much more time consuming. I had some bad experiences with registrars too.
At the moment I have domain registrations at Registerfly, hosting at different addresses, email at gmail.com and email forwarding at the very disfunctional registrar.
Now I urgently need another registrar, the registrars hosting has failed me a long time ago. The email gets no longer forwarded. The “free” services that registrars offer is often not what they advertise.
No need to explain why I need to find a reliable registrar. The hosting was never good. Now the hosting and email forwarding arecompletely gone. Many of my domains are expired despite my payment for renewal.
I urgently need to move domain registration, but I do not want to get stuck with another unreliable company. Can anyone advise me on that? Has anyone good experience with a reliable registrar , with email forwarding and DNS control, that is not overly expensive?
Ingrid, I’ve been happy with GoDaddy. I wouldn’t host with them, but my domains are registered with them. I believe they offer email forwarding and DNS control, and their prices are reasonable.
Well to be honest this is a great way to get your referrals up, but be warned midphase has a shady business practice of suspending your site to upgrade your account.
which is how i foud this site searching midphase sucks and as of now has a lot more results than the article says
From my point of view, the must-have feature for the host is SSH access.
If you are working with some package, like gallery, or dojo, there are tons of small files, the long waiting time for ftp transfer would drive you nuts.
With SSH, just ssh to the server, and unzip the package.
SQL always down
I have had midphase for 6 months and there servers are always going down. I have used many other web hosting services and i went to midphase because of there price and the amount of services they offer. Well it was to good to be true. My sites have been down so many times as well sometimes their servers are very slow.
Pay the extra money and go somewhere else. I am moving even though I have 6 months left, I cannot afford to have my sites down as much as they are with Midphase.
TB, I haven’t heard anything about Midphase suspending your site to upgrade your account. I’m not even sure what you mean.
steve, I’ve experienced a couple of hiccups with Midphase, but nothing like what you’re talking about, and nothing like other hosts I’ve been with (especially DreamHost).
Hi! Your blog is great.
I did read all and I will come again.
My blog is in French but my friend
as a site in English
http://oliviabauer.ws
We wanted to have a hosting at Dreamhost, but after reading your blog, I thing I will go to AN HOSTING.
May we have only one account for two persons? Or do we take two accounts?
Thank you for your usefull blog.
Chris, you’re welcome! Glad you like the blog.
AN Hosting gives you up to 20 domain names on one account, so you should be able to share an account with your friend.
I looked at Olivia’s site. Great photographs!
I am totally with this blog. I was using HostingZoom and goDaddy both.
My blog is now running on ANHosting as well. I actually do a lot of research and go with ANHosting.com after reading this blog. Although I am not 100% happy with ANHosting.com, but all other hosting companies are just suck.
I have post many review and issues I have on my blogs. I still recommend ANHosting after all.
About HostingZoom.com their tech support is in India. There is nothing wrong with India people. It’s just matter that they can’t really give your tier two and tier three support. All they can tell you is that they will pass on to their administrator to take a look. So my shopping cart site was down for 18 hours and lost few sales.
After all, their solutions is “We just reboot the server. Everything looks fine now. There was nothing wrong.”
Their failover hosting is the worst hosting platform I have ever with.
Thanks for your comment, Terence. Glad to hear you’re happy with AN Hosting. They’ve had a couple of hiccups at their data center lately, but I’ve talked extensively with people there and I’m confident they’ll sort it out. As far an Hosting Zoom goes, I no longer recommend them. Their service has declined considerably since I first signed up with them. AN Hosting has been much better in my experience.
Robert:
Have you heard about ANHosting is going to move to new datacenter sometime later this year? One of the tech support told me they are not happy with the current datacenter. They just got a network routing issues yesterday. I called. One of the guy told me the same thing.
When I was with HostingZoom, they moved datacenter as well. My site was down for 2 straight days. Just hope it’s not the case with ANHosting.
Good luck to us. ;-)
Yes, I’ve heard something about a new data center. We should know more soon.
hehehe…
Today I was having bandwidth problems, so I google “webhosting that doesn’t suck”. And who should be the 3rd result but good ole upstartblogger (my Pligg buddy).
Thanks for this article.
I am fed up with shared hosting. You described how aweful it is brilliantly.
My first websites (before I knew anything) were with webhostingace.com (recommended to me but an equally clueless friend). Never heard of them? That’s for the best.
They had fantastico in the cPanel when I started with them and all those easy to install CMS made me feel like a kid in a candy shop. Then they must have gone with a cheaper cPanel package or something because suddenly fantastico was missing…
So I googled webhosting with fantastico (of course I looked at things like disk space, bandwidth, etc. too). And I looked at sites comparing webhosts. I was very thorough, but still pretty clueless.
So I found my current host and they were great at the time for my needs, but now I need something better.
Speaking of the risks of shared hosting. I had an experience with my current host that was pretty crazy. i wake up one morning and type in the URL of my site and a page comes up that my site has been suspended. When I came to… I checked my gmail and there was an email from my host saying the following:
It turns out that phishers have become more sophisticated. Phishers had cracked into my site and planted their fishing pages in among my files. It was murder convincing my host that I had no idea how their files got there and getting my site back online. I don’t know if you or any of the readers here have had a simialar experience but I hope not because it is the worst experience I have ever had online. I mention it because, although I don’t know for sure, my host likely HAD to suspend my site because of the effect on my shared-hosting neighbors. Plus like they said their “upstream provider” told them to do something and not to mention that they didn’t want some phishing jerks stealing people’s paypal info. I found the phisher’s email addresses inside of some of the code for their phishing pages and I reported them to an online spam watchdog, but I don’t think anything came of it. (btw, spammers, phishers, and black hat hackers suck a lot worse than shared hosting :) I had a site that was cracked before this too and there seems like their is no recourse with these hackers, you just have to take it. Am I right?
I don’t know if that story has much to do with picking a host. I figure that even with dedicated hosting I could have the same problems. But maybe it will be better. I will blissfully believe that it will be better…
AN hosting huh? That sounds good.
Wow, this is a long comment. hmmm.
Wow! Interesting story.
I’ve had good luck with AN Hosting. But if you’re looking at a dedicated server you should also consider midPhase Hosting. They’re the same company, but AN Hosting offers better shared hosting packages.
What’s that famous saying…
One man’s interesting story is another’s hellish nightmare? Or did I just make that up? *Laughs, then blushes since no one else is laughing*
Anyhoo,
Thanks for the recommendations about hosting plans. Once again I owe you one. I might just become a regular on UpstartBlogger
No problem. I can empathize. Good luck!
This is great advice! I’ve been trying to find information on this, and this is the first one I’ve been able to understand! Thanks!
On your favorite shared hosting, say we put up a website like youtube.
Upload a single, one and only, 20mb video.
Let’s disregard uploads.
QUESTION (without abusing or “using too much much cpu”)
1) what web hosting?
2) how many people can view the video at the same time?
3) how many people can view the video each month?
i know that dedicated hosting is more suitable, but
is there any shared web hosting where we can put that kind of website without running into any “too much cpu”, “abuse”, or other similar problems.
- slimetoner @ yahoo.com
I’m looking for a host, and I have a mac, and no knowledge at all that isn’t contained in your blog post. If a host does not mention “mac-friendly” in their advertisement, is it “mac-unfriendly” by default?
Terry – Good question. I think that most hosts are Mac friendly since most companies understand the need to support as many people as possible. Speaking from experience, AN hosting are friendly whatever you use, Mac, PC or Linux. They really are that good.
Hi Ashley,
I have a little doubt and sure you can help me with it. I would like to know how email is managed in An Hosting. Now I have a hosting with dreamhost and the email is managed through Google Apps. Maybe it’s a good solution, but fails a lot with one of my adresses. I’m using the IMAP protocol. An Hosting seems a good solution for my next domain, but despite the “Zillabytes” of hard disk and “Quantumbytes” of bandwith, It’s really important to me the fiability of the email, 99.99% uptime is a must, and IMAP too. Please can you tell me your experience with that ? Thanks !
Hi Roger, I’ve sent you an email outlining the punishing treatment I give AN Hosting’s IMAP servers. I can honestly say that they are totally reliable and will be infinitely better than your current Dreamhost solution.