What's good and what's bad about your hosting company?

[Clinton]

I had a UK hosting company that was great at uptime and answered emails quickly but refused to take phone calls and were very stingy with IPs (Is that a UK thing?)

I now use Westhost. They have pretty good uptime, quick chat support (most of the time) but have a tendency to refuse to accept when the problem is at their end.

What's good and bad about your host?

[hooperman]

I'm using Site5 and so far there have been no major problems. I get the odd problem with domain names not resolving when I've set up the hosting, but these are resolved promptly and courteously. I don't tend to run big sites or have complex needs, though, so my demands don't really test them. They run Fantastico so all teh one click installs of Wordpress/Joomla/etc are there.

[tke71709]

I used to use westhost but found their prices to be out of line for what I got, now I use AxisHost and have no complaints whatsoever.

[DomainMagnate]

I have a managed server with wiredtree. Their support is usually very quick, but not so efficient. Still I like the fact that it's managed and I dont need to take care of technical stuff.

[LukeMoulton]

I've been very happy with HostGator, I've had a reseller account with them for a couple of years now. Their email support is usually very prompt and I receive SMS's about anything mission critical. Speed is my only qualm, but when it's a shared server, I can't really complain.

[DomainMagnate]

I also have a few shared servers with hostgator - it's fine for small sites, but it's quite unreliable. Every time there is any problem, they just disable the account and all the sites end up being offline for a while until I notice..

[Michelle]

Bluehost, VodaHost and Hostgator have all been fine for me although Hostgator's live chat service has been fantastic so they are the standout for me amongst the three. In fact now that I think about it, VodaHost support is only by support ticket and the responses although quick have been delivered in quite a rude manner.

One problem with Hostgator was when they performed server maintenance without informing their users which really annoyed me as I had just put a site up for auction and the domain was unavailable for about an hour...pretty unhappy but that was once over a long period so I've forgiven them.

I've researched a little in regard to a dedicated server and Liquidweb has come highly recommended.

[catweasel]

I use jaguarpc vps.. been with them nearly 10 years without any major problems.. also use Linode, they are unmanaged VPS and are *extremely* good.. unmanaged means you set everything up the way you want it, install whatever web server you want, whatever software you want.. so you do need to be a little bit technical, but they have good support forums and tutorials

[Clinton]

A bit OT, sorry, but in my recent acquisition of a finance network I "inherited" a hosting account at an "SEO hosting company". Under one umbrella they'll host hundreds of your sites and give them all different C-Class IPs! I've been in websites for a while but this was a new one to me. Live and learn.

[tvanslooten]

I've been with HostGator since day one. They've been rock solid but as others have mentioned, the load times sometimes aren't the greatest and with a reseller, you never really know if your sites are up and loading fast With Google's push to supposedly factor in load times in their rankings, I'm starting to get concerned so I may be making a switch in the near future to a dedicated server.

Travis