Here's my honest review for the two hosting companies I use. First of all, ICDSoft I've started my experience as a webmaster with this company, starting Helpedia, now it's a bit neglected but planning to change that soon. What can I say, I am so impressed with their services that I've bought another hosting account for TGDB.net and will probably use the same company for several other sites until their needs will exceed what ICDSoft offers. Everything in their offer is AT LEAST what they say, at least 10 mbps download and upload speed, servers are not overloaded, my two sites are on different servers, the help support responds in less than 15 minutes.. I had maybe a couple of 5 minute downtimes in two years and these were announced hours before they happened... I don't care that bandwith is small, I am using compression to transfer the pages to users and by my calculations I would need about 20-30.000 daily views to reach the monthly limits. If I manage to reach that number, I'll have a dedicated server by then. Yes, they're not cheap initially but the service is well worth it. You get discounts for the second, third and so on accounts you buy.. Ok, enough of this, they're great, if I praise them more you'll think "where's the affiliate code?" Second one is Netfirms It's maybe the classic example of the shittiest service, the most overloaded clustered servers and your worst host ever. I took advantage of an offer they had for some time and took the Netfirms Advantage for about 10 or 12 dollars. The great thing is that you can have two domains for free, there is lots of space (so far i'm using about 3 GB so I guess they really have that space) and they offer lots of bandwith but it's of no use if you are not able to use it. Also, they give you SSH and lots of domain administration But the bad side is that the PHP version is old, the FTP server always has at least 150 users on it, bandwith is probably 3-400 KB/s at most, mySQL server goes beserk whenever it wants... I've written about 4 support tickets and they respond usually the second day. Their mySQL cluster or server often disconnects or crashes, tables get damaged, it's simply too overloaded. Just today I've had to import about 3 million records (a 600 MB sql dump file), their server kills the connections after about 40 minutes and 170 000 records processed. I actually had to split the file in chunks of 50 000 records (8 MB each file) and manually import each file. 15 minutes for 1 out of 61 chunks, you can imagine the speed of the server. Also today, while importing records, the connection just dies. I'm typing the address of my site in the browser and a Netfirms page shows that simply says "This site is under mantainance and will be back at 1.00 EST" No announce, nothing. Big thumbs up for ICDSoft, stay away from Netfirms. I don't know about other companies and I don't really have the pacience and nerves to test other hosting companies, I can afford to spend about 40-45$ / year at ICDSoft for sites that I care about. Happy new year folks, this will be maybe my last post this year.
For the moment I am sticking with Godaddy but it seems their services don't accept adult websites.I'm not talking about porn,just adult,like a page with sexy girls in their underware.Please tell me a good hosting provider,except dwhs.com,that accept adult websites and multiple domain hosting on the same package. Cheers
Hi Guys. Great thread. Im looking at a cheap reseller package and hostgator seems to be very popular but im UK based and looking for UK ip addresses? for seo reasons . Any suggestions on good cheap uk hosts? And do i need uk ip for good ranking in uk serps?
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Hi Darrens, as long as you have a .co.uk domain name the IP should not be an issue. If you have a .com name you would not get listed in uk only searches. I am hosted on hostgator but an in Canada. This is a bit of a paid with .com names but most of my customers have gone with .ca domains so its not a problem. cheers
When you host your website on a UK based server then you get 2 major advantages :- 1. Search Engines categorize your website as a UK website and you get better ranking in UK. 2. Your customers from UK get better browsing speed and your websites wil load much quicker in comparision with US server.