I used to pick up domains from the cheaper source possible.  Later when I was ready to develop a domain name into a site, I’d then turn to InMotion Hosting for my hosting and redirect the domain from wherever over to InMotion Hosting.

That worked great for several years and I saved a lot of money.  But over the last year or so, those great domain deals are not as good.  Even worse the hassle of dealing with the companies that offer them is just not worth it.

So the other day, when I needed to pick up a single domain for a future project, I turned to InMotion Hosting.  The price isn’t too bad, just $7.95 per year, which is only just a little more than what I’d pay about anywhere else these days.

Buying just a domain there is not exactly easy.  In fact they almost seem to discourage it.

Its buried at the bottom of this page, that tries to up-sell a hosting plan (which is in fact a good deal).

Once you get that far, you still have 2 more screens to click through, a car cover to remove and you have to dance a jig underwater before you actually see the price is $7.95. 

But hey, I understand that.  Their just trying to turn off domainers.  Each unto their own I guess.

They do have great deals on hosting, and that deal is a lot sweeter when you experience their awesome tech support, which makes their prices look like their free. 

Business Class Hosting by InMotion Hosting Plans Starting at Just $6.95/mo • Unlimited Disk Space • Unlimited Data Transfer • 90 Day Money Back Guarantee • True 24/7 Support Rated 3 Out of 3 Stars by CNET.com!

This is a question that is central to anyone that wants to make a smart decision in choosing a hosting company.  If you are going to have a hosting company, eventually you will need to deal with them on the phone.  I don’t care what their up time is or how good they are technically, you will have to talk to them some day.

When you call the experience you receive and the time you spend can quickly change your perspective on who is good and who is affordable. 

If you get a hosting deal that costs you $50 a year for hosting expenses, but requires that you spend 8 hours a quarter on the phone waiting on hold or getting transferred around, and your time is worth $10 an hour (just a low example) then this hosting company would actually cost you $50 a year + $80 per quarter or $380 per year!

For that money, you could lease your own dedicated server!

So here is an excerpt from a discussion forum thread where a number of people are trying to share their experiences and assessments of hosting companies based entirely on the subjective view of how good their phone support is.

Obviously, this should not be your only criteria for choosing, but it definitely should not be neglected when you make your choice. 

I have used several hosters. Currently on Aplus.net and Godad, which have phone ssupport, and mediocre service.
My LIST So Far:
- Liquidweb: a very impressive company with good, 24 hour support. But to get dedicated IP, you need to go with their $25/month plan. Yikes!
- NewIdeaHosting.com. A very small company. My call was returned, and the owner chatted with me for an hour on the phone! Plans have small bandwidth, but promises No overselling, and personalized attention. Extra $5 for dedi IP. He specializes in Small business sites, and small eCommerce sites. He has only 250 accounts, on 3 servers. He rents servers from the Equinox data center of Chicago. Seems exceptionaly honest.
- MegaHosters. Excellent phone support and WHT reviews. But company was taken over by another company, and so may well go downhill in future. Another problem: uses Hsphere.
- Steadfast. Has a good rep on WHT, and seems impressive. Tech answered the phone immediately, but they say they prefer emails. Sales phone has limited hours. Good price on $20 SSL. But, uses Hshhere.
- JodoHost 24 hour phone. But, uses Hsphere. An Indian company with office in Florida, and good rep. I like the idea of outsourcing phone support, if it makes it more available and affordable. But, the accent on the phone was very hard for me to understand, so maybe this might not work…..
- Hostgator. Yes, it’s a big overseller, but seems to get good reviews/results anyway, and good phone support.
- ? ThePrimeHost ?? Mostly good WHT reviews; some dissenters. Site says 24hour phone, but when I called on several nights, no one ever answered… 

OnGoing List of Good Hosters with Good TELEPHONE tech support – Web Hosting Talk – The largest, most influential web hosting community on the Internet

Hope that helps get you started on your path to choosing the best host.  If you have a hosting company experience that you would like to share drop us a comment.  We’d be happy to cite your example and give your site credit in the form of a plug with a mention and a link. 

In the mean time, try and keep yourself sane as you work to deal with your hosting company.  At the end of the day its just business, not personal, don’t let a hosting company representative push you over the edge or before you know it you’ll find yourself drinking away your web profits and end up in drug rehab or something.  Keep yourself happy, sane and balanced no matter how bad your host is!

I have an update to my earlier article titled, “The Odd Complaint About InMotion Hosting “.  I’ve been continuing to work for by power through the weekend, and we’ve been making a little bit of progress identifying the potential source of the problem that caused my servers crash throughout the week last week.  Identify the solution has enabled me to see that a good chunk of the issue is not directly related to InMotion Hosting.

The problem that I seem to be having, seems to stem from an incompatibility and the latest version of WordPress 2.3 .3 and some legacy plug-ins that I’ve been using that previously had no difficulties with.  The plug-ins work just fine with older versions of WordPress does seem to be slightly incompatible with the new versions of Word press and essentially are calling on database tables that are no longer in WordPress.  This triggered errors on the domains that were running them and those errors increase the RAM utilization on the servers that I was using.

A very helpful person that InMotion Hosting was able to identify this by looking at my error logs.  I could not look at the error logs myself because they have been the lead in for my views and so I was unable to get in and troubleshoot this problem myself.  I’ve no idea how they are logs were deleted but I have a feeling it happened when they did some work on my server and possibly during the reboot process or something.

But the good news is we were able to find some potential source of the problem and since then I have been busy getting updates to the plug-ins that needed them so that I won’t have this problem on my server.

The bad news is, I have no way to monitor brand utilization history through my account at InMotion.  I can go and I can take a glance at what the regular location is at any given point in time, but if granules nation is not out of control at that particular point in time (something not happening that would trigger an error at that specific moment) but I cannot see that there’s a problem it is to be fixed still.

In defense of InMotion, their service is not include the ability to monitor the RAM on their own servers.  They seem to recommend that I should go out and find software that will do this myself.  I would contend that if I find software like that still not the software that they use in so we are then going to be comparing apples to oranges in their own view will rule the day and possibly shut down the server when I exceed the limits that I’m allowed.  So I still have a small complaint with them in that they don’t provide an answer to this solution is specially as regularization is key to their virtual Private server solutions.  It seems to me that if you’re going to have a metric that you track and bill upon, then you should enable your customers to see what you’re tracking.  It’s somewhat a can to having a cell phone wireless plan without being able to view the minutes that you’ve used yourself on the phone or even on a bill!

So if anyone out there has run into this problem themselves and found some good tracking software to install at the server level (preferably something that’s free), please drop me a comment or an e-mail.  I’d be happy to reference you and provide a link to your own site if you can help me out with this.

In the meantime I have to get back to work now that the problem is solved and got a backlog of articles to write and a backlog of websites to create including one that I have no knowledge about all dealing with bodybuilding and some concept known as prohormones.  I’m not a bodybuilder and so I’m going to have to spend a lot of time doing some research on this one to figure out what this is all about. 

So you thought worrying about service and support were important with your web hosting company, but have you been paying attention to how they’re powering up all those servers running all the electricity?

I have to admit that I haven’t been paying attention to my web host company when it comes to how Green they are either.  I couldn’t tell you if my web hosting company uses solar power coal powered nuclear power or Fred Flintstone foot power.

Affordable Internet Services Online, Inc. (AISO.net) uses solar panels to run its data center and office.  That may be a little extreme in a good way, but sometime in the future that could also be very very practical!

But it is true that Web hosting does utilize power, and in this day and age where electricity rates are linked to oil prices and oil prices are going way up while the volume of the dollar goes way down, it only makes sense that you might want to start looking at this situation if for no other reason to ensure that you’re getting the lowest rate possible.  If you’re hosting bill goes up because your web host has to pay too much for electricity, then that will hurt you in your pocketbook even if you don’t care about greenhouse gases.

So the next time you talk to your web host on the phone or maybe run into a rep at a trade show, throw them a curve ball and ask them if their power is supplied from a green or renewable source.  In the latter situation, you can further throw them for a loop and ask them if their trade show displays are made out of recycled or recyclable materials.

Got to keep them on their toes!

This evening I came across a very in depth review of Site5 Web Hosting at a site called Flixya.  The review caught my attention as the review detailed very well what a multi-site account was and how it worked.  This is something that I myself have been considering a migration towards (under a different host) but had not found a good description until this review.

One feature I like about site5 hosting is the multisite accounts. It is basically a full featured control panel for each domain. Unlike other shared web hosting companies which uses domain pointers, a multisite accounts exists on its own with its own subdomains, domain pointer, ftp, mysql etc. This help me to organize my websites better especially if you have a lot of domains. You can set the diskspace and bandwidth from the main pool of your web hosting account.

 

Two other aspects about this review that stood out was the mention of the flashback service provided by Site5 enabling a person running a multi-site plan to flip their domain back to an earlier time.

I would agree with the reviewer that at $149 for a 2 year multi-site plan Site5’s rates sound affordable, about the price of a decent pair of golf shoes.

I also agree that their lack of Multiple IP address options and inability to provide upgrade transfer options to existing customers could stand some improvement.

No Uptime hosting appears to be one of the most honest and possibly cheapest hosting companies around.

They offer a $2 per month hosting plan that is out of this world!

For $2 per month you get:

• 200 KB of Storage
• 10 MB of Bandwidth
• PHP 4, 5 and 6
• MySQL, SQL and Oracle
• Dedicated Dedication
• Host Up to 6.8 Sites
• Free Identity Theft

They have some great upgrades available too!

With their “Take My Money Plan you get 2 Glow Sticks and a Free Broken Toaster and much more for $20 per month.

Resellers will be please with their “Resell-Our-Crap plan”.  $200 a month gives you Ruby on Railroads, 10 Bytes of Bandwidth and Steve Ballmer.

All of those plans are very affordable, but if you are strapped for cash today, you can always stop by and visit our sponsor for a payday loan and take a few bucks to get your new site going.

Phone Support 24/8

Their phone support seems to be typical for all hosting companies.

Other Services

Customer Testimonials

Their customer testimonials will keep you hitting the refresh button over and over again to cycle through all the great things that people have to say about No Uptime Hosting,

Like

No Uptime used my credit card to buy porn magazines. This service is a sham!

and

Harry Kornes writes:
Exceptional service for an exceptional price. My only complaint is that technical support told me to fuck off when I called them, but everything else has been great.

Affiliates?

My only complaint is that I can’t seem to figure out if they have an affiliate program . . .

GoNomad.com is a travel site.  On their blog they offer an interesting article, almost a case study on selecting a hosting company.  At a high level they are suggesting that small businesses should avoid the cheaper is better sales pitches that many hosting companies provide and instead look to the hosts capabilities and determine how those fit your goals as a company and the amount of money you have already spent or intend to budget for the creation, maintenance and marketing of your website.

Make the right choice and you will be happy and successful of course and off enjoying cruises regularly in the Carribean.  Choose poorly and your site will rarely function, you will likely be surprised with unexpected charges, and get a comfortable headset for your phone, because you will spend a great deal of time on hold!

They break down in their article a case study of what it would take to run a hosting company.  From a business and equipment perspective their case study seems solid.  The intangible item in the equation is the experience of the team that will keep the equipment running.

Amanda appreciates not only the personal touch but getting a fair price from E-Starr.com

1. Who was the company?

E-Starr.com

2. Was the experience Good or Bad?

Good

3. Why was it Good or Bad?

The owner is amazing she is very helpful, she
goes out of her way to be supportive and insightful. She actually works
with my website theblogworld.net, to offer people fair prices discounts
and great service. There is a help line you can call and there aren’t
any extensions you need to know you’ll actually get a live person. The
prices are reasonable the servers are always up!

Jenny from Pajama Mommy has great experiences to share regarding her hosting company E-starr.

1. Who was the company?

I’m hosted on E-starr (http://e-starr.com) and I absolutely love them. The service is wonderful, I never experience any downtime and the support is awesome. Always fast and quick to reply.

2. Was the experience Good or Bad?
The experience was great. Or is. I’m still with them.

3. Why was it Good or Bad?

As I said before, quick to reply, fast on fixing problems, getting things done, just an overall great service.

From Jenny T of Pajama Mommy (http://pjmommy.com)

 Shane points out that its very easy to go with GoDaddy because they have one click installs of many popular web based programs such as Wordpress (blogging tool) and Coppermine (a photo album tool) and Joomla (a content management system – non blog)

 1. Who was the company?
Godaddy.com

2. Was the experience Good or Bad?
Good

3. Why was it Good or Bad?
They have 24 hour support.  The support reps are always friendly, and very knowledgeable.  They have free software that you can just click and install like joomla, wordpress, coppermine, etc.

Shane M.

www.dontfearthetruth.com

Here is a great example provided by Elizabeth regarding the help that she received from blue host when she had some issues in her WordPress theme.

My hosting company is BlueHost. I have never had any problems with them, except for that day that there was a $1000 opp on PPP and the server kept crashing Last week, I was having problems getting a theme installed on my blog MomReviews. I noticed on the BlueHost home page that there was a link for Live Chat, so I clicked it. Now this was Friday night at about 7:00 p.m. EST. Almost instantly I had a chat window open and a support person came on. I explained my problem, and he started looking through my blog files. It took us about 90 minutes to go through a bunch of tiny errors in the theme code, and then he realized there was no php.ini file, so he uploaded one for me. He stuck around while I got the theme installed, and we ended the chat.

A few minutes later I went to my other blog Table for Five, and my header was gone! I clicked on the Live Chat button again, and explained that I had just been on with Ryan (the support guy), and right away he came back into the chat window. He had done something to mess up the .htaccess, for which he apologized profusely, got it fixed, and stuck around while I re-uploaded my header. I was so impressed that I could get live help, from someone who was both knowledgeable and friendly, even though it was really a Wordpress problem and not a BlueHost problem. I am very happy with BlueHost!

Elizabeth Edwards
http://momreviews.net

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