Our good friend Eileen describes her experiences with a hosting company that is involved in what feels to Eileen like a ‘never ending’ server migration.  Running a site on a server with stats on another definitely sounds problematic!

1. Who was the company?

Your-Site

2. Was the experience Good or Bad?

Continues to be bad.

3. Why was it Good or Bad?

Your-Site has been migrating servers to NYC forever, which makes finding my websites, reading my web stats or editing my website difficult. Why they are moving to New York City, the site of more disaster movies than Los Angeles, CA, is anyone’s guess. For awhile, I had one website on one of their servers and one on the other. Then they switched web analytics provider. Now my stats are split between two programs. I have registered a new domain and am looking for a new website host and will move my Texas RV Travel website then. I have another website, CoolAdz.com, also with Your-Site and will be moving that one as well.

Eileen T aka CyberCelt
Texas RV Travel
http://USAer.com

Lisa provides a story about a very good first experience with a younger hosting company called bluehost.com.  I too have heard many good things about this company and their service.  They are growing and I hope they can keep up with the growth.  Even with over 200,000 sites hosted there, listen to Lisa’s positive and personal experience!

I have to admit that my first experience with a hosting company was surprisingly pleasant. After much deliberation, I decided on using Bluehost. It came highly recommend by several people and the price was right. The owner of the company has a great blog to read. It was one of the factors in my decision-making. You can really tell that Bluehost is his baby (he also has five kids and runs several other businesses too!). He reminds me a lot of Ted Murphy from Pay Per Post. They both are young and driven. The other thing that impressed me was that I got a call from Bluehost the next day after signing up to make sure everything was going okay and if I needed any help. I have never had a company do that before. I also like their help menu. Everything is in plain English and is very easy to follow. I have yet to have to call their support team, but I have heard that they are also excellent. I am very happy with my decision to use Bluehost as my hosting company.

Lisa M.

http://mythoughtsideasandramblings.com

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings

 I remember back in the mid 90’s when dial up was still ‘the way’ many companies started up business overnight to provide dial up and hosting service.  Many of those companies grew with the times and many died a few years later.  There is still some popularity on occasion for people to consider running their own server or going with a friend or an acquaintance or a mom-and-pop company running a couple servers.  Kat provides us with some of the extreme pitfalls of what can happen when you do not connect with professionals in the server hosting company industry!

I was hosted for 3 years by a husband and wife team who bought servers to have their own webhosting company called GNS hosting.
I moved my blog away from GNS hosting due to the non-professional behavior of it’s owner. Instead of emailing me like a REAL company would, she posted in my comments that I was in violation of her TOS regarding mp3s.A TOS she didn’t add until that day. Very unprofessional. And mean. She took me off of her blogroll for that whole WP, issue yet was still reading me 3-4 times a day to see if I was violating her TOS which also includes obscenities.Another one she didn’t add until that day. If anyone knows me after 3 years, they know that I say f*** like it’s an everyday word, perfectly acceptable to say. And to me, it is. Even the FCC says it’s ok to say f*** as long as I don’t say things like f*** me, bob f***** sue etc etc. I was fed up with her controlling, dominating ways for a blog that I paid for not just in hosting fees, but with $50 in an Amazon purchase, to pay her to upgrade my blog to the latest issue of WP, and when it broke immediately after the install, she refused to fix it. This was agreed to by her. She wanted a $50 item off her wish list, and accepted payment in the form of a gift for the upgrade. For that amount of money, she should have. Her regular price for upgrade was $20. She ripped me off first and then screwed me.What’s funny in an ironic way, is that people warned me about her . Many people. They all said when I got on her blogland blogs, not to go with her, that they would help me find space. I wanted to try ya know? I had never had an issue with her. In the 2 years that I had been with her, I had posted more than 50 mp3s but she was only saying something now? After the WP upgrade failure, I asked her to fix it. No, I asked her how to fix it, and she said that I was taking advantage of her kindness and knowledge. I do not see how it is taking advantage if I PAID for a professional upgrade and didn’t get it.

And before my switch to my current host, she did the most deplorable thing.
She put up a redirect page so that anyone who visited my blog, was met with a really nasty porn picture.
I got emails from hundreds of my readers asking if I had been hacked. I was, she hacked me, and posted a picture so offensive, I couldn’t believe she was even capable of doing.
I bought space on my current host, waited about 4 hours for them to prepare my mysql and other directories, and then transferred all my files without telling her. I thought if she knew I was moving away from her company, she’d lock me out, or destroy my files.
After I transferred, I sent her an email explaining, and she sent the most foul mouthed email back.
I’m glad I got away from her when I did. In hindsight though, I wish I had listened to the people who warned me.

 -
~Kat~
Webmaster
http://www.mysinglemomlife.com/blog

Here is a great story about a hosting company that you probably wouldn’t hear about anywhere else as they are in Hong Kong, and they don’t spend $2m per year on Super Bowl ads.  Instead according to Kat they deliver up a great service.  Its been my experience that rapid customer service is worth its weight in gold and anyone that gives you too low of a price will probably take a pound of flesh from you when it comes time for you to make a support phone call!  

 Don’t take my word for it though read Kat’s Perspective below:

The one hosting company I absolutely love to pieces is icdsoft.com
I was skeptical at first, based in Hong Kong, took paypal, but I have never been more impresses with a host in my 10 years of blogging.
My experience has been phenomenal with them, I couldn’t be happier.
They take paypal, CC, and Western Union.
They guarantee support tickets answered within 1 hour, usually it’s within 10 minutes. They work non-stop with you until whatever issue is resolved. Then, 24 hours later, a supervisor emails you to ask if you were satisfied with the service and if not, what can they do to make it right,
No days, no weeks of pleading for support, it’s immediate.

My site has gone down a total of 3 times in 4 years. Two times were my fault and they fixed me within 15 minutes.
The third time was when a huge blizzard knocked out centers in the north east this past winter. They had us all back up and running again within 8 hours by working with other servers all over new england, and getting everyone back on line.
That whole time it was down, they posted to their main website every hour with the status update.

I have never been more pleased with a web host in the 10 years I have been on line. They simply rock.

Kat C. www.mysinglemomlife.com/blog

we are going to launch several campaigns to gather your stories. If you tell us your story about the hosting company that you work with, we’ll post your story online along with a link back to your website. There’s no requirements for a reciprocal link in return for this reason hear your story. You got a good experience tell us about it you had a bad experience we want to hear that too.

To participate all you have to do is send a quick e-mail with your story, your first name or initials, the name of your website and the URL of your website.

The email address is stories@top-5-hosting.com

(Naked URL addresses only, no affiliate links, no porn sites or hate sites, and the story must be provided in English)

We are pleased to announce the launch of a brand-new web hosting review website.

Top five hosting will gather together many of the qualitative stories about the love-hate relationship that webmasters, bloggers, businesses and publishers share with the Web hosting services that enable them to maintain webpages on the Internet.

Many Internet hosting companies have grown to be extremely large over the last few years, and many have not grown out their customer service capabilities to match their growth and customers.  Some hosting companies have stayed lean and mean with customers to keep up with customer service while others have outsourced their work.

We’re not making a judgment call about how they achieve what they achieve, but we will be asking our readers and bloggers and people that work with Web post to share their experiences.  We’d like to hear about your great experiences, your terrible experiences, your great deals and your biggest ripoffs.  Then would like to hear about everything in between.

Basically were looking for anecdotal stories to help provide more subjective perspective about the services that Web post provide.  Sometimes the numbers in the statistics cloud out the real way that Web host treat their customers.

Disclaimer: this website is hosted on InMotionHosting.com and the domain was registered through Ipower via TuCows.  This website will list many different web hosts and provide links to those web host as time goes by.  Each and every reader is responsible for doing their own best due diligence to find a good service provider.  We hope to provide a little more insight into the realm of possibility of what that experience might be like.  We will provide objective information about hosting plans and prices and technical capabilities, we will not endorse any web host nor will we target any web host with malicious or derogatory views.

The views submitted by our readers and posted on this site along to those readers.  We will also search out and review other source of information about anecdotal experiences with Web hosting companies.  Where possible we will summarize that information provided here with appropriate links to those details.  For our readers that maintain their own websites, blogs, or forums if you reviewer provide details about a web host and we summarize it here we will provide a link to your site.  We will not copy inordinate amounts of content( anything that we copy will be appropriately sited and hyperlinked — typically we might copy if you words or a line that captures the essence of a review and then provide our own summary around it) and, nor steal content from any site.

Goals

Over time we will provide review rating mechanism subset our readers can rate our reviews.  And we will also provide rating mechanism such that our readers can rate Web hosting services on a number of characteristics.