Hosting Hell

C

ChipThome

Well-known member
Well I had a hosting firm hosting my sites, was basically happy until an issue came up which I found unethical and their responses were substandard, so I left.

Low and behold..... I found my next one to be even worse !!!!

So I am out there trying to make an intelligent decision on who to have host me next. Attempting to be diligent in my search, I am also searching customer or user reviews for all that appear promising.

My searches reveal THEY ALL SUCK !!!!

My most recent hosting company has 24 hour phone support. The main goal for this company's support team is to GET YOU OFF THE PHONE, any way possible.

As I tend to do most of my website work and tweaking later at night, 24 hour phone support for me is critical. That's a big hot button for me in my selection.

The next hot button, is Spam Assassin, as I am getting bombarded as of late with 100-200 spams a day and the last two hosting companies used my email addy as a funnel for the stuff with no automated blockage at all. I don't have the patience or desire to configure filters, I want click and delete for this crap.

Of course, the most next most important part is being able to host sample video flash files in the 16-31 mb range and play in my individual Dreamweaver page flash players.

Do you have suggestions of who to go with or better yet, your horror stories ???

I am all ears if you want to chime on in.
 
I use HostMonster. I have not had business come through the site, as it's not meant for commerce anyway, nor have I had technical issues that required me to contact them.

As for the flash players? I use JW Player myself with videos that exceed 30MB, you can check them out for playback on my signature.
 
For spam you should use gmail, you can setup your mail records so that you can still use your email address for sending and receiving email, but you use the gmail interface (or imap). gmail has tons of storage, is reliable, and has the spam filtering you need.

Why do you have to call your hosting company in the middle of the night? Most hosting companies are there to make sure the server is online - not so much for day to day updates to the site. Maybe if you provide more info on why you need to call them so often I could give you some more ideas.
 
I checked out your site Douglas and it looks fine, as did mine with my first hosting company.

I then went and checked out HostMonster user reviews, and this is what I found.

As I begin this latest quest, I did the same research for both the hosting companies I have used of late and neither had any better reviews than yours did.
 
Tghe reason for calling at night is two fold. One, my day job. Two, I have found when you can contact a company, most any company, and do it in "off hours" the conversation is more relaxed and time is available for a someone to address my questions / problems.

And honestly, my issues have been primarily infrequent and minor when I do contact support. This last go around though, the issue is a definate problem, and with no support to help, I have to move the site. Right now my video samples are not viewable in either Firefox or Safari, where they were and worked perfectly when my site was originally uploaded. File deletion and re-uploads of the files and then the entire site have not rectified the problem.
 
Hosting companies are not usually adept at content issues unless they provide a specific hosting platform. You might want to look at companies like simplecdn.net that offer flash streaming and then use the free flowplayer flash player on your webpages to stream the videos from simplecdn.

This way you can have your basic HTML pages on whatever hosting account you like, but the important videos (which sounds like your issue) will be hosted someplace trusted. Its definitely more setup work, but far more robust than some $5 a month hosting plan someplace.
 
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