Who are you using for hosting? Are they good or bad? Expensive or inexpensive? In the 6 years I've been playing with forums, I've gone from a pitiful host to a rotten host to Downtown Hosting. DTH was really a super host for me. Uptime was great and their support was super. Every time I managed to shoot myself in the foot, they were there in seconds to get me back up and running. (Yes, I'll be honest and admit most of my hosting problems have been of the self-inflicted variety :innocent As my sites were growing and I was adding more, I started out-growing the plans at DTH I could afford. So I started looking for a VPS host within my budget that offered service similar to DTH. After watching WebHosting Talk for several weeks, I was seeing KnownHost's name coming up in positive light. I found a couple KnownHost customers and they had nothing but good to say about the company. I moved to KnownHost in April 2008 and it has been one of my better decisions. Everyone, from top to bottom, is extremely friendly and ready to go out of their way to help. Uptime is virtually all the time and they have also found a way to provide even better tech support than DTH. I'll contact Support to ask a question and the reply comes back in minutes. And if I've asked for guidance on how to do something, they've usually already done it for me. So if you're looking for a really super host, contact KnownHost to see what they can do for you. And tell Jennifer in Sales I said hello. :winkn:
I have servers co-located in Dallas at Softlayer's data center and I have servers co-located at a local shop minutes from my office. I did have a server at LayeredTech before they went downhill. The last shared host I used was a company that is no longer in business, at least I don't think they are, Communitech. Before I moved my office I used to run my servers from my office. Back then a T1 was all you needed and I had 2. I sent them off to colo 4 years ago. I had thought about a T3 in the new office, but, that would have been overkill. I am looking at Business class service with Comcast and If I can get enough IP's I might move them back to my office.
Eleven2 and ClubUptime are the only hosts I go with. And IPS right now since I'm too broke to afford a IPB license .
I've used three different hosts for various sites. First host was InfluxHost. They were okay, it was good for my first site. They've changed a lot since I used them, and no longer offer the same packages. Not much I can say because it's been so long that I forgot a lot of stuff about them. Second host was DreamHost. They were okay... I didn't like their custom control panel. Their customer service wasn't very good either. Then I discovered A Small Orange. Been with them ever since. Their uptime is fantastic, they have amazing customer service, and their memberbase is great and very friendly. Can't say enough good things about them. And they've very affordable.
I know a few people that have used A Small Orange and always spoke highly of them. It's been a while since I've heard any reports about them, so it's good to hear they are still providing great service.
I moved my secondary sites off ASO shared hosting a few months back. I use a monitoring service and it would text me 4 or 5 times a day that my site was unreachable for a few minutes at a time. None of the sites were mission critical, so it wasn't a big deal, but I still didn't like that fact that their support didn't do anything about it except move to another server that was worse then the first one. From where I sit it looks like their shared servers are overloaded only Apache seemed to be timing out. Wound up giving Namecheap hosting a try, I pay $4 a month more then ASO and it's been great, no problems yet knock on wood. For my forums I host a VPS with ServInt, they're far from cheap but the techs have been awesome whenever I needed them. Downtime is just about nill. Currently my server has been up for 255 days without a hiccup.
