Host experiences and testimonials thread

[Kohhal]

F5hosting.com

I'm new to all this as I used free hosts before and I found F5 to be great. Extremely friendly and helpful, affordable package for my small site and fast load times(seems to me anyway).
They've helped me out when my knowledge was letting me down and seem really eager and aim to please.

I highly recommend them.

No cons to date.

G

[Sausie]

i used classichosting.com. Usually a good host but have had nothing but problems trying to set up the vb. Its all stuff on their side, one thing after another...i gotta buy more space somewhere else to host the message board.

[Max_Radius]

heh, I'll probably never use as much bandwidth as some of you, so....

I am a paying customer of ITXDesign , a great starter host for budding sites.

Key Pros

plans from $6.95 to to $39.95 per month
transfer ranges from 3 gigs to 8 gigs. (plenty for most start-ups)

$9.95 per month plan=>

200 mb webspace.
4 Gigs transfer.
65 e-mail accounts. (w/ forwarding, autoresponse, mail lists, etc)
full PHP, ASP, mySql, Perl, Java , Frontpage, RealAudio/Video, and Flash support.
simple web based control panel + ftp access.
site statistic monitor + trouble shooter option for nasty people.
secure server manager.
site search engine included (option for a shopping cart).
claims 95% uptime. My site has gone down for very short intervals, nothing long term.
Tech Support knows their stuff, and they do help.

more options, yadda yadda.

Key Cons

8 gig bandwidth cap at the highest package is pretty low.
24/7 tech support sometimes = next day service.

Relative to vBulletin, I've never had a glitch of any type beyond the need to ask the name for the mySql path with this host.

bottom line

ITXdesign is a great, inexpensive hosting solution for the new site builder like me. I'll begin to look at other options when my site grows beyond the cabability of this host. Until then, I'll likely stay where I am.

Regards,
Chile
Webmaster- Visual Cues.com
General Manager- The-Group.org

[Kakarot]

Host Provider: ZeonHost
URL: http://www.zeonhost.com

These guys have very great support, and they give you awesome stuff for small prices. I currently pay $79.95 A YEAR and some basic stuff you get with the certain plan I picked is:

• PHP, CGI, PERL, SSI, and More
  Telnet and SSH
  150 Megs of Space
  6 Gig Transfer a Month
  10 Sub-Domains
  20 Pop Email Accounts
  10 MySQL DB's
  Dedicated IP
  Anonymous FTP
  Real Audio/Video
  GZIP and Zend
  Daily Backups
  Awesome H-Sphere CP
  99.5% Uptime Guarantee

All that and more ran on stable Red Hat Linux on Apache.

Their servers are extremely fast, and it runs vB like a charm with GZIP and Zend. Anyone who has vB or wants vB should seriously consider these guys, they simply rock. Their support is great too, their always online on Instant Messenging programs such as MSN and AIM, and if you can't catch them online on IM they have great support forums (and yes their forums are ran on vB too!)

http://www.zeonhost.com, check'em out.
My site is Z Force Network (ZFN) which can be found at http://www.zforcenetwork.com. My forums are at http://forums.zforcenetwork.com at which you can witness the insane speed their servers work at with vB.

[AlexUK]

VBulletinhosting.com

I had a very bad experience with them.
They took 3 days instead of the 24H promise to setup my site and they hardly replied to my emails asking for support. Infact one of their staff was rude to me using CAPS instead of being polite

They didnt send me any details abouy my account benefits and I decided to cancel after 1 week. They apologized and said they dont have very good customer support.



Not recommended!!

[MikeL]

VBulletin Hosting...marginal...

I started using them thinking that they are part of Vbulletin. Still haven't determined if they are or not...

First impressions...

4 days so far... Easy to set up once you actually get a hold of someone, took over 24 hours to speak with anyone. Prices seem reasonable.

Down on saturday for at least 8 hours... No return email or call unitl about 10 hours after I discovered the problem (half way into the 8 hours).

Down today (for who knows how long???) Again can't get a hold of someone...

For giggles I pulled up Ip's, to see what else was being served using the same class C (not necesarily on the same server, but on the same ip range) sadly, mostly porn.

I am mostly disappionted with the fact that I can never reach anyone on the first call.

4 days since I started (down 1 1/2).

Mike

[SWF]

My two cents

I been with many host in my time and had many domains as well. I have to give credit to Host for web for giving the most space, the best bandwidth, unlimted email and great support. Right now I have 3 domains with them at this time. If you have any question about them I can answer them, just write to me at [email protected] and I will answer them. I am not here to try to sell their hosting package; myself I wanna move to a dedicated service in the future. I would like to start my own online host company but I dont want to be a reseller. This would be costly to start a hosting company as well and I have look into getting a T1 or T3 line. Bottom line is your happy with who your with because it hasnt been a problem!

http://www.hostforweb.com

P.S. I been with them the longest
If there was a better deal I would
take it. I am not saying cheaper is
better either; you should think about
something in the price range of $30 -
$99. I am betting once your forum
gets real busy your going to want
mega bandwidth and this would be
DEDICATED

[xboxinfo]

I have found markhost

edit: i have typed the wrong address in first but i have replaced it with their correct one now:

(http://www.markhost.co.uk)

very good for me their support has been very good and havent had a spot of downtime since i joined them (4 months). Setting up VB on their servers couldn't be easier as you can set up the database in real time via their control panel. Furthermore their prices are the best i've seen for what you get in return so i reccomend them all the way!

[filburt1]

Awesome: Hosting Matters (http://www.turtletips.com/forums/sho...&threadid=3613)
Alright: Discount Hosting (http://www.turtletips.com/forums/sho...=&threadid=805)

[JungleMan]

SplashHost
Great uptime, somewhat decent prices (I've seen lower though..) but absolutely AWESOME support. And I mean awesome. They have a full fledged forum, a LiveChat thing to talk with their agents, and the hostmaster is even available on ICQ, and I have him in my list. The people and the support team are what makes this host absolutely 100% worth it.

I needed a couple of simple things solved and within a minute I was talking with a live support agent, and in about 5 or 10 minutes the problem was solved.

https://www.splashhost.com

[floleb7]

Tangaweb (ex American Hosting) - Shared Hosting.

Home page: www.tangaweb.com

Pros:

• Good uptime
• Lot of feature

Cons:

• Very poor support
• Strange stat
• no professionnal act
• They cut your account with false information and don't try to talk about
  

Conclusion : Don't take this host.
They cut me without any reason they lie about a lot of stat
They lie and they are very agressive

[Brian Scherzer]

I have to join Alex and Mike in saying that vbulletinhosting.com has been a problem. I switched my vbulletin site to them in April and was down the first weekend. Since then, like clockwork, every other week we have been down on a holiday or weekend for at least 8 hours. One of the biggest problems was no replies to emails to support for long periods of time. It was as if there was nobody available on weekends or holidays. The owner acknowledged the problems in an email a few weeks ago and he promised better things ahead. Things only have gotten worse. July 3 and 4th, we were down for 36 hours. It took 30 hours to get a response to my email asking for help. This past Sunday we were down for 11 hours, although I got an email after 4 hours and 45 minutes from support. I decided to go with Ventures Online, which happens to be about 10 minutes from my house. Ventures Online (VO) could not get to the data on vbulletinhosting.com (vbh) and asked me to contact vbh so they could get telnet access. I spoke to Brian, the owner of vbh this morning to ask for access to the data. He told me to send an email to Support asking for a "data dump". I called him back in the late afternoon (my time) to ask when this would be done and he said that it would be by the end of the business day. I'm still waiting for something....anything...in the way of a response or action. Obviously, I am upset, so keep that in mind when reading my post. Yet, I have given the facts as unemotionally as I can. I don't know if other users have head the kinds of problems I have been and am experiencing with vbh. If so, I would hope that vbulletin staff might consider whether the affiliation is worth it. If others haven't had these problems then I am simply unlucky and my post about vbulletinhosting.com should be ignored. That's as straight-up as I can put things.

[bill-t]

Pair Networks www.pair.com

Board not currently up.

Webmaster account, $29.
- 500MB/day transfer
- 400MB disk space
- 50 mailboxes
- Login by Telnet, SSH, FTP
- Telephone Support
- Log analysis tools
- Custom CGI, System CGI, SSI
- Perl 5, PHP 4, Python, MySQL, and more
- Additional disk space billed at $0.10/month for each megabyte
- Additional transfer billed at $0.40/month for each MB increase in the daily average

I like that you can add as many domains as you like to one account for $1/month... 5 databases... Good control panel, easy to use... Up time is full time... In one year I have never been down... Very fast... Support returns email in 5-15 minutes normally... Not always on the ball first time but they are persistant... Have their own newsgroups with the most active helpful people around... The owner, users and support staff use the newsgroup and get anything answered.... Everything about the service is out in the open including all outages; this info is available on a ng, on a www page and in a newsletter... the www page is updated to the minute... Planned outages, slowdowns, backbone problems posted there including what info the company has... An earlier post complained about not having customized error pages; they do... (perhaps this has changed?) Extremely professional... Support for everything needed for vB...

My board has always been small; always performed flawlessly and very fast... Not sure about bigger sites... Would check with them first on bigger sites... They are touchy about scripts that tie up the cpu too long on a shared server... As would be most shared hosts (I would hope.)

[sunit]

I am very happy to have found

http://www.hostony.com/ for hosting my forum http://www.echarcha.com/

The server speeds are good. They have Zend PHP Cache enabled. Their support system and helpdesk is very good. They even provide support via ICQ. I moved my site on Friday within a hour!

Their rates are also very competitive and reasonable for a forum like mine which is more of a labour of love than a commerical venture.

Please share your experiences, if any, with hotstony.com

Thank you,

Sunit

[Marco]

Site5

Site5 - http://www.site5.com - Apex plan

My site on their servers: http://www.totallyre.com

Pros:

• Lots of features for a relatively low price
• Good, fast support
• Nice, clear control panel
• Good uptime... my site hasn't been down so far
• Shell access at request
• Up-to-date server software (latest Perl/PHP/MySQL

Cons:

• The bandwidth meter in the control panel has been broken for as long as I can remember...

My experiences with them have been great so far... support questions have been answered very quickly and my vBulletin has been running without any issues at all. Gzip support is nice too, saves me quite a bit of bandwidth.