Web Hosting - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

MickMcGeough · 04-01-2011, 11:45 AM

With the recent backlash against GoDaddy after CEO Bob Parsons posted his elephant killing and slaughtering video for the world to see, I was really shocked to see how many people actually use them for their hosting. I mean, I knew they were big but I always figured it was filled up with customers who'd seen the superbowl ads and just didn't know any better.

I've been using CanadianWebHosting a lot lately. Their base shared hosting packages are very cheap and it supports everything I need for most sites. I don't do anything with really high traffic so I haven't run into problems. Admittedly I haven't done a ton of research in the last while to keep up with what's available.

I'd be interested in hearing other's experiences. Anybody using Amazon EC2 micro-instances?

Russic · 04-01-2011, 12:27 PM

Godaddy is just so cheap it brings in quite a few (I've been guilty of this). I haven't used them as a host but I did buy a url from them. It really is one of the worst web experiences out there. You hit confirm to buy the url and you're given several pages of "extra services" that you must click to opt-out of. Like walking through a casino it feels like they make it purposefully confusing to just get out with what you want and nothing more.

How a CEO kills and elephant and posts the video without expecting to be destroyed in the public eye is astounding to me. I get that hunters have their arguments, and assuming his story is true he even has one here... but from a PR perspective this guy must be pretty dim.

Personally I use Blacksun.ca because they are Canadian based and (more importantly) I've never had an issue that wasn't dealt with incredibly quickly and politely.

photon · 04-01-2011, 01:54 PM

I've had good experience with DreamHost and BlueHost.

Avoid Cirtex, lots of downtime with no help.

Ivrnet.com is the best tho.

MickMcGeough · 04-01-2011, 02:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

I've had good experience with DreamHost and BlueHost.

Avoid Cirtex, lots of downtime with no help.

Ivrnet.com is the best tho.

Cool - if you have a few spare minutes sometime I'd love to hear about your experiences with those hosters.

fredr123 · 04-01-2011, 02:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

I've had good experience with DreamHost and BlueHost.

Avoid Cirtex, lots of downtime with no help.

Ivrnet.com is the best tho.

Nice. Some of my favorite sites are hosted on Ivrnet.

Russic · 04-01-2011, 02:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fredr123

Nice. Some of my favorite sites are hosted on Ivrnet.

Pfft. This one time I was on a site hosted by them when Dion was traded. There were only about 17,000 people all hitting refresh at the same time and the site couldn't even keep up.

fredr123 · 04-01-2011, 02:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Russic

Pfft. This one time I was on a site hosted by them when Dion was traded. There were only about 17,000 people all hitting refresh at the same time and the site couldn't even keep up.

The webmaster shouldn't have been so cheap and opted for a better hosting package. At least this place doesn't catch on fire.

Finner · 04-01-2011, 02:39 PM

mediatemple.net was fantastic when i used it years ago.

Hosting packages seem reasonable for what they offer. They handle hosting for some of the biggest companies in the US.

FanIn80 · 04-01-2011, 02:45 PM

Slicehost is nice, if you're looking for full control.

photon · 04-01-2011, 06:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Cool - if you have a few spare minutes sometime I'd love to hear about your experiences with those hosters.

Sure, DreamHost I've hosted sites with them on and off, and never had any problems. Any outages were fast enough I usually couldn't even get a ticket in and shared hosting almost always equals some downtime (though there are better classes of shared hosting that are more reliable, but not for $2 a month).

BlueHost I haven't used personally, but the guy I work with/for does and he really likes them, and he has zero tolerance for crap. He says things always work and any time he's had to contact them he's gotten a good response.

Cirtex.. I used to like them, but I've had lots of downtimes recently and their support is completely unresponsive.. they just say "is it up now?", if it isn't then I don't hear from them again till later when they ask again, if it is that's it.. if I ask what happened or what they're doing to fix it they just say "hopefully it won't happen again". The only reason I haven't moved is because I've been too busy.

webhostingtalk.com is a great site to research hosts.

JohnnyB · 04-03-2011, 05:51 AM

I use Bluehost and have been very impressed with them. Zero problems and virtually instant customer service response by chat or phone for all questions I've had. Very helpful.

Bill Bumface · 04-04-2011, 04:10 PM

Dammit. I bought a domain off godaddy just because it was somewhere I knew of and I didn't really care if I saved a buck or two for something that was going to cost $12. I wish I knew about the elephant thing

Jayems · 04-04-2011, 05:33 PM

I use dreamhost for my website and have never had an issue.

yads · 04-05-2011, 09:00 AM

hostgator.com is super cheap, almost as cheap as godaddy.

llama64 · 04-05-2011, 03:00 PM

Adding to the posts in this list:

Shared host: Dreamhost. Been with them for nearly 5 years, never had a big problem. Occasionally had to harp on them for slow MySQL servers, but it's a shared host - comes with the territory.

VPS: Canadian Web Hosting (http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/) or Steadfast (http://steadfast.net/). Both have been great experiences for me on a few different projects.

Cloud host (for the uber-nerd): Rackspace - super cheap but you need to be able to setup your own server. Pain the ass overall though - only recommend if you actually need this level of hosting.

Amazon Cloud is OK... but it's ridiculously expensive.

My Hosting ##### list:
GoDaddy - it's GoDaddy
MediaTemple - shared hosting was slow, non-existent support
1&1 - their shared host is poorly setup and slow (apparently they do better with Microsoft hosting)
Primus - no support, uses Zeus web-server which isn't clear at the outset. Makes setting up anything open source a bloody pain in the ass.
Telus - not sure they actually understand what the internet is

zamler · 04-05-2011, 10:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by llama64

Shared host: Dreamhost. Been with them for nearly 5 years, never had a big problem. Occasionally had to harp on them for slow MySQL servers, but it's a shared host - comes with the territory.

I've been with more shared hosting plans than I care to remember. None of them were great. Comes with the territory rings very true, if you want something reliable you have to pay for it.

These shared hosting companies operate under multiple (or even dozens) of names, so you may very well move to a "different" host and wind up on the same backbone.