Reliable Hosting Provider

thesteve

Apologies if this has been posted before but since boards changed it search function many moons ago I haven't been able to find much info... anyhow...

I was using hostingzoom.com for the last year for some sites. They offer every possible feature as a hosting company for a reasonable price, hence what attracted me to them. But now my missus started her own business and while she has a staff of 1 at the moment, she relies on an internet connection, her site being up and heavily on her email.

This company just has too many outages for my liking. Their support is in India while their servers are stateside. I have no issue with Indian support, these guys are quite knowledgeable but they tend to seem cut off from the mainland and have a complicated support structure. It took 4 escalations of support teams to tell me the errors on my site was because index.php on my joomla site was consuming too much memory and was being killed by the server.

What I am looking for is a reliable company in Europe (for good ping times), that offers good bandwidth at a reasonable price. I would like to see an SLA for 99.9% uptime etc but know I won't see this in the price range I am looking for. Don't get me wrong, I am willing to pay more then cents, but there doesn't seem to be a small business package out there that offers up times.

I would appreciate any recommendations you guys could make.
Cheers,
- S

axer

thesteve wrote:

Apologies if this has been posted before but since boards changed it search function many moons ago I haven't been able to find much info... anyhow...

I was using hostingzoom.com for the last year for some sites. They offer every possible feature as a hosting company for a reasonable price, hence what attracted me to them. But now my missus started her own business and while she has a staff of 1 at the moment, she relies on an internet connection, her site being up and heavily on her email.

This company just has too many outages for my liking. Their support is in India while their servers are stateside. I have no issue with Indian support, these guys are quite knowledgeable but they tend to seem cut off from the mainland and have a complicated support structure. It took 4 escalations of support teams to tell me the errors on my site was because index.php on my joomla site was consuming too much memory and was being killed by the server.

What I am looking for is a reliable company in Europe (for good ping times), that offers good bandwidth at a reasonable price. I would like to see an SLA for 99.9% uptime etc but know I won't see this in the price range I am looking for. Don't get me wrong, I am willing to pay more then cents, but there doesn't seem to be a small business package out there that offers up times.

I would appreciate any recommendations you guys could make.
Cheers,
- S

What country does your wife target for customers?

WeeDiddly

You have covered all of your requirements there, and seem to be fairly familiar with the features of web hosting.

USA probably is the most competitive market, with the best host probably being www.bluehost.com, which offer a very very comprehensive service for circa. €75 a year, and if it is going to be a very heavy site, you can run more processes at once by paying circa €240 a year. The mail service is very good also.

If your target audience is Ireland(eg. Everyone who uses your site will be in ireland), you may want to consider an Irish option, which will be more expensive but will be better in many ways, mainly with speed, because if the missus is uploading something to the website, it will upload faster if the server is in Ireland rather than USA or even UK/France/Germany for that matter. You can rest assured that with Irish Hosts, they aren't going to bother having their staff in the middle-east controlling servers 10,000 miles away.

If you do decide to keep your hosting irish, you can be assured that the support is there by telephone, is helpful, and not one of those multi-national scams. Your servers will have the correct time, etc. which is a pain in the backarse having to configure your website 6hours ahead of the server.

Also if you have irish hosting AND/OR a .ie domain, it will rank as a better site in google when searching for an irish site. This is not too big of a concern and don't let people fill you up with rubbish telling you, you need Both!

Therefore, it is now your choice to go Irish/European or further abroad, but make sure you Google your prospective host for reviews before you give them that all important credit card number. If the host gives two options for "live chat", technical support chat and sales support. be sure to always give both options a go, because on some of these sites, they won't reply to you on the Technical Support.

As for my recommendations in irish hosts, I would have to say either Hosting365 or blacknight as they are the two i hear most about, and have not ever heard of an unhappy customer with them. Don't let people say that they were happy with Hosting365 or Blacknight, brcause both have extra-ordinary reputations but it's whichever one suits you better.

CoNfOuNd

Pick a few different providers, preferably in Ireland, and test out their customer support. Make sure the company has the same level of pre-sales support as it does after-sales support.

Also, run some tests and ping their servers to see how fast they are.

Sposs

WeeDiddly wrote:

.

USA probably is the most competitive market, with the best host probably being www.bluehost.com, which offer a very very comprehensive service for circa. €75 a year, and if it is going to be a very heavy site, you can run more processes at once by paying circa €240 a year. The mail service is very good also.

Irish hosting is now as competively priced as American hosting if not cheaper, the register365 hosting plan starts at 39.95 per annum and includes everything you need to host a fairly large ,busy website.

PM me if you have any additional questions.

WeeDiddly

Sposs wrote:

Irish hosting is now as competively priced as American hosting if not cheaper, the register365 hosting plan starts at 39.95 per annum and includes everything you need to host a fairly large ,busy website.

PM me if you have any additional questions.

Indeed you are correct, and I agree with you. What I really meant was that things like Bluehost have better and more advanced services for marginally more money, but they offer way more than you'll ever use(300gb of space?)
Looking over what I wrote, I gave the impression of "Ireland Crap - USA Great", which I apologise for.
But needless to say, Ireland has a bulletproof reputation for having quality companies such as what is there at the moment. Whereas other countries aren't so good, and they have a stereotype reputation for "Walk through the field - and hope you don't step on a landmine".

forbairt

WeeDiddly wrote:

Indeed you are correct, and I agree with you. What I really meant was that things like Bluehost have better and more advanced services for marginally more money, but they offer way more than you'll ever use(300gb of space?)
Looking over what I wrote, I gave the impression of "Ireland Crap - USA Great", which I apologise for.
But needless to say, Ireland has a bulletproof reputation for having quality companies such as what is there at the moment. Whereas other countries aren't so good, and they have a stereotype reputation for "Walk through the field - and hope you don't step on a landmine".

I've got problems with stateside hosting ... the time difference can be annoying .. their down time seems to coincide with our up time (whether its server upgrades taking an hour or so on its annoying) ... whereas you'll find most irish hosting companies will do their upgrades late evening or similar ...

I'd recommend blacknight.ie or hosting365.ie as will most users on here ...

I'd recommend you go with an irish hosting company as well ..

Getting 300gbs of space is all well and good .. but releastically whats the likelyhood you'll use that ... I've not developed many sites containing lots of media but the max diskspace I've ever seen a site use up would be around 1 gb and that was a technology company with various downloads.

A lot of the US hosting companies seem to promise the world ... I mean at the moment I'm with a US hosting company and I believe I have something like 2000 gbs of storage space ... and godknows what bandwidth ... while I think I do have this ... I can't really believe anyone will ever need this ammount for a basic ecommerce website .. and if all the users (shared hosting) decided to download huge files at the same time I think everything would break so its pretty much a marketing ploy

Go with an irish host .. if your market is ireland or europe both blacknight and hosting365 offer packages for around the 35 quid mark ... having both of them on boards is kinda handy as well

Webmonkey

I find Servage Extremly well. Their support is just amazing. They respond to their tickets within Literly 10 minutes.
They have really good prices and I've seriously yet to see them going down. Not once in the last 2 years have I had outage and they're servers seem to be extremly quick.

They are: http://www.servage.net/

WeeDiddly

Webmonkey wrote:

I find Servage Extremly well. Their support is just amazing. They respond to their tickets within Literly 10 minutes.
They have really good prices and I've seriously yet to see them going down. Not once in the last 2 years have I had outage and they're servers seem to be extremly quick.

They are: http://www.servage.net/

Looks great! Excellent Package! Another Irish Host in the good books!

mneylon

WeeDiddly wrote:

Looks great! Excellent Package! Another Irish Host in the good books!

Huh?
They're not Irish

Webmonkey

Don't be fooled if it says Servage Ireland! - They just doing that based on your IP. I think they German or something. Still good in my opinion though.

steve-hosting36

They are based outside Frankfurt - good company.

AARRRGH

I use hosting365, and I am happy enough with them. I keep all my "important" websites on my hosting365 server.

I also have two servers in the US which I use for silly little projects I like to work on.

My general thinking on hosting is this -

If your website is important to you, and your server being offline stresses you out, play it safe and pick an Irish host. At least they're within the Irish legal system and just a car journey away...

You didn't mention if you are looking for a dedicated server or shared. Shared hosting seems very reasonably priced in Ireland. Dedicated is a bit more expensive, but again, I like the peace of mind that comes with the server being in Ireland...