Hosting Recommendations

[Killswitch]

I'm just after any suggestions about where to try for hosting. Ideally I'd like a smallish UK-based company who offer decent tech support suitable for a professional geek like me. What I want to do is;

1. Transfer the registration of a couple of .com and .co.uk addresses
2. Set up mail forwards to a couple of different ISP-hosted email accounts
3. Have a good interface to control the DNS for my domains
4. Have the option to use a hosted LAMP setup in the future

Most important thing would be good customer support and knowledgeable staff who can answer questions and sort out problems for me. I'd also need reliable email forwarding, at least for now. The old Ultra10 that used to handle my domain (email/web/DNS) is in a bit of a bad way and I need a slightly more robust solution than a flaky home ADSL connection and a 10 year old UNIX workstation.

Rep/beer on offer for good advice (but you have to come to Bradford for the beer!)

Dave

 

[Jonty]

Hi Dave

You might want to check out Web Hosting Talk. They are the real experts when it comes to finding suitable hosting (although there's still the usual disagreements and partisan responses that you'll find anywhere).

To be honest, most hosts should handle requirements 1-3 without any problems. Many places use cPanel to take care of all this, and it's fairly powerful and easy to use. Requirement 4 maybe a little more tricky, so this depends on how important it is to you. Shared hosting offers the best value, but places restrictions on what you can do, whereas dedicated hosting is more flexible, but is also much more expensive.

In terms of customer service, if you find a good host then it shouldn't really matter if they're in the UK or not (very good hosts don't outsource their support, but still offer 24 hour assistance). Obviously if you want to talk then it may be trickier using a non-UK host, but I've never had any trouble just using web forms for support (in fact it's easier because your query is automatically logged and you can usually set the importance etc.). The only thing with a non-UK host is making the payments. This is good right now because of the exchange rate, but it can complicate things slightly (e.g. I received a US dollars refund cheque for unused hosting months, which not only took a long time to arrive, but also cost me money to cash).

A few hosts I know of are:

• Media Temple (mt): There's a lot of respect for (mt) among big companies and talented designers. I must also say that their support was always great (very prompt, friendly and helpful). However, I often needed their support because of little problems that I couldn't fix myself, mostly because of their bespoke control panel which (at least back then) wasn't great (e.g. limited options, a little counterintuitive at times etc.). Also their shared hosting grid servers have had huge teething problems, and this has upset many clients. Finally, their reputation comes at a price, as they're certainly not the cheapest host around.
• Site5: Attractice prices, generous hosting plans, and fairly good support. However, I experienced quite a lot of intermitent downtime, hence the reason why I left. They have a good server status page, but seeing that your server is down doesn't really help matters. They also oversell their hosting, so peak demand can impact your site's performance.
• HostGator: Another site that offers great prices, generous hosting, and good support. Although HostGator also oversells, I haven't experienced any major problems or outages. So far I'd recommend them, and I know the Web Hosting Talk guys also think pretty highly of them (at least for a big company).
• Downtown Host: I've never been hosted by them, and they're not particularly cheap, but I heard it's a fairly small business and the owner gives prompt and personal support. This obviously has pros and cons, but it may be worth considering.
• Dreamhost: Again, another host I've never tried, but they offer amazing plans at very low prices. Personally I've always felt it too good to be true, but I know some people who use them without any problems.

Anyway, all the above are US hosts, but they may be worth considering. I know of some UK hosts too (Burton Hosting, Hosting Unlimited etc.), but my experiences were not so good with these (the former was okay, just not very generous or cheap; the latter was fine, but gradually deteriorated over time).

Anyway, good luck!

Kind regards

Jonty

P.S. If you do signup with some of the above hosts, try searching the net for special discount codes, and also make sure they have a money-back guarantee in case you want to cancel.

 

[Chilly]

The big hosts you point out are indeed ok value for money, Jonty, but they tend to be slow as a mofo.

I do dev work on a couple of sites on MT and it's excruciatingly slow, I believe because of their centralised storage which favours busy sites over small unused ones in terms of cache priority.

There are lots of small UK isps that do the standard cpanel stuff for decent prices but they tend to oversell, although there are a lot of decent ones that don't do it.

If you want to hear a sales pitch from me (yes, I do run a small hosting business) pop into #primefarm on quakenet for a chat.

 

[Jonty]

The big hosts ... tend to be slow as a mofo.

Good point Personally I've not had any problems with the speed of these hosts, but it's true that everyone's needs are different, so it's certainly something worth considering.

Kind regards

 

[Clown]

Another vote for Primefarm here. It's easy, it's fast. It's Primefarm.co.uk.