Can Anyone Recommend A Good Web Hosting Company?

[Lisa]

I just got into an argument with my hosting company, as my blog control panel has been working at a snail's pace.  The idiot customer service rep insisted the problem was that I had too many Wordpress plugins and themes on my server, and that I need to get rid of the themes and deactivate all my plugins.  He said the back end of my site would operate faster. 

Anyway, I got rid of most of my themes, and I deactivated all but one of my plugins, and the site is still slow!  These people will do anything to admit that their servers are cr-p!  It takes forever to publish a post, and to log in to the control panel. 

So if anyone knows of a good web hosting company, please give me the name.

Thanks.

[Nolandforshalom]

I dont know specific ones but typically Indian webwosts(google Indian webhosting) are friendly, cheap, and dont care what your site has on it.

[Lisa]

Thanks.  Do you know the names of any?  Which one do you use for your site?

[Nolandforshalom]

http://www.weblinkindia.net/

I havent used it, but I have heard good things.

[Lisa]

Was the customer service person an affirmative action person?

I have no idea since I used their online chat function to communicate with the rep.

[White Israelite]

I do webhosting

our companys site is http://www.databeyond.com

[Lisa]

Thanks Cohen, I'll take a look.

[Boeregeneraal]

Customer Service is next to ALWAYS an AA

[q_q_]

web hosting is a technical thing. And not so focussed on designing web pages. They would typically not offer "themes" or advanced tools to help you design a website. (they might offer a web interface for uploading files.. But no real application for designing a site.

When one refers to a "good web hosting company", one typically means reliable. And one does not mean that they give you a nice user interface to design a web page. That would be considered a bad one!! Geek friendly and user friendly are two different things.

You can actually design a web page in Ms Word.. Save it as  type "HTML". Then you would upload it. I learnt the basics of HTML 10 years ago looking at the "HTML primers" on www.htmlgoodies.com  It was very short. It will teach you important fundamentals if you do not know them. Not advanced web design though.

Web hosting is just that - web hosting.   Blogs are often for people that cannot design their own page - and they offer free hosting.  Of course, geocities.com offers free web hosting, reliable too I imagine. Though perhaps not much space, and perhaps not that "professional" in that the site is www.geocities.com/....... But if it wasn`t for that, then more people would use it.
If your site is text and images, then it is fine.
If you want to link to audio or video, and free hosting, then, since free hosting would tend to have limited space, you could perhaps link to it on other sites like rapidshare. These are just options..

It does not look like you are looking for a "good web hosting company" though.  Not how a technical person would define that. And they cater for people technical enough to design their own pages, not merely using a primitive tool they provide.

Maybe you should post an example of how you want your site to look, and then I and others can suggest a way of designing it, and we can see how much space you require. Perhaps a reliable free web hosting company will suffice.





 

[Lisa]

Dear q_q:

My problem has nothing to do with my site design.  It's about their slow servers.  My control panel takes practically a full minute to load up.  It also takes a long time for me to publish a post and to edit theme files.  The hosting company insists that the problem is not with their servers.  When I called them up, the rep told me that my MySQL database was too large.  He told me to upload this plugin called wp-cache.  I did just that, and still no improvement. 

So if have any suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks.
Lisa

[White Israelite]

I do webhosting

our companys site is http://www.databeyond.com

Do you own it?

I can't discuss that yet, but I will be able to at the end of January

I have a lot of control within the company currently however.

[Boeregeneraal]

I do webhosting

our companys site is http://www.databeyond.com

Do you own it?

I can't discuss that yet, but I will be able to at the end of January

I have a lot of control within the company currently however.

well, G-D willing you will own it 

[Yisrael]

I have great experience with bluehost.com

They are a fantastic web hosting company.

Look at what they offer:

http://www.bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html

[Lisa]

Thanks Yisrael.  I'll keep that one in mind as well.

[q_q_]

Dear q_q:

My problem has nothing to do with my site design.  It's about their slow servers.  My control panel takes practically a full minute to load up.  It also takes a long time for me to publish a post and to edit theme files.  The hosting company insists that the problem is not with their servers.  When I called them up, the rep told me that my MySQL database was too large.  He told me to upload this plugin called wp-cache.  I did just that, and still no improvement. 

So if have any suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks.
Lisa

I have never written a website that uses SQL.. So my suggestions are limited. But
What is your site? We could see what hosts are used by sites with similar requirements to yours.

You could of course try a newsgroup, e.g. accessed through www.google.com/groups
use a junk or munged email address to avoid spam. They may many expert user communities there on different newsgroups.

some "groups" are not newsgroups, they are Google Groups, and probably do not have technical people there. Others are just all spam. Many are excellent though

People ask similar questions
for example
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.databases.ms-sqlserver/browse_frm/thread/7f59a96aff5ac178/3752dd12aad46216?hl=en&lnk=st&q=what+is+a+good+web+host+sql#3752dd12aad46216

that was from this newsgroup comp.databases.ms-sqlserver

I do not know if that newsgroup is relevant to you..or if that archived question is. But you can ask your question to technical communities like that, and you should get some good answers.. And you can search newsgroups for answers to questions like that.

do not register with your real email address though, it will get smothered with spam.
Use a junk email address, and better still, munge it e.g.    [email protected] , so people know to respond to you privately.  Mungin email addresses is standard practice on usenet. But responding privately is not popular on usenet, the idea is people ask a question, answer is public, everybody benefits.

[Lisa]

http://www.theurbangrindblog.com

[q_q_]

http://www.theurbangrindblog.com

pinging them, getting their ip, putting it into the ARIN website

They use this web hosting company

http://www.bluehost.com/

see my amended post above which mentions a suggestion as to another way to get answers and information on technical questions.. The more ways the better!

[q_q_]

My mistake, I guess that was your blog.. !  (you could check what hosts others use though)

But, the mistake has drawn some good findings..

These guys don`t like bluehost, and have a similar complaint
http://www.v7n.com/forums/web-hosting-forum/28693-bluehost-com.html
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=214117

These look like forums where people discuss good webhosts, and they know how bad bluehost is, so they probably know exactly where you are coming from and going to, so those forums are well worth a shot. Probably better than usenet. Because they are so specific. And web forums tend to be quite friendly and helpful.

[Lisa]

Thanks q_q.

[LindaSoG]

My site is on Hosting Matters at the moment. I've been there about 18 months or so.  Site runs well, I've not heard any complaints about loading and have had little down time.  HM hosts several large blogs however, and every now and again, we've all gone down due to a hack attempt on someone, but not for long and only 3 or 4 times.  My biggest complaint was that they altered my scripts a couple of time to shut down my trackbacks but they haven't done that for a while.

I set a blog up for a friend of mine on powweb a couple of months ago, prices are very reasonable and Hosting Matters is not cheap.  He has a large blog, heavy on the graphics, with lots of traffic, and he's never been down that I'm aware of.  I've been thinking of moving over there myself, but moving the blog is such a pain.

I'm running movable type, not WP.  I find that WP blogs tend to run a little slower than MT blogs in general.

I visited your site yesterday and it was so slow that I gave up!  But this morning, just now, it loaded right away.

[Lisa]

Thanks for the heads up, Linda. 

I was doing lots of tweaking to the blog.  At one point, I was so fed up that I decided to try exporting it to Expression Engine (using the free core version).  But I could not import the Movable Type file into EE.  I also tried importing it to Text Pattern, but that didn't work either.  (Besides, with Textpattern, you need to know a fair amount of CSS.) 

My friend Vilmar (of the now defunct Right Wing Howler) emailed me this morning saying he was getting strange error messages when he tried commenting.  So I adjusted the Spam Karma 2 settings which seems to have helped. 

But anyway, I'll check out Powweb.  Their prices seemed reasonable the last time I checked. 

[JTFFan]

http://www.theurbangrindblog.com

pinging them, getting their ip, putting it into the ARIN website

They use this web hosting company

http://www.bluehost.com/

see my amended post above which mentions a suggestion as to another way to get answers and information on technical questions.. The more ways the better!

Bluthost sounds good

[angryChineseKahanist]

Lisa, your blog is quite large. I'm sure it takes some resources.
All of these web hosting companies host about a thousand websites on a single machine.
Most of the websites are not very active.

You can either pay up for more CPU power or you can host your own.
What's your knowledge level?

PS: blogger.com is free.

[angryChineseKahanist]

I do webhosting

our companys site is http://www.databeyond.com

Are you good at networking?
I have quite a network at home, but it gives me a headache.

[Lisa]

Dear Angry Chinese Kahanist,

I used to be on Blogger, but decided to go with my own domain and paid hosting due to Blogger constantly being down.  I think the problem with my blog was too many plugins and themes were installed on my server.  So I removed all but the most essential plugins, and I did several test posts to ensure the plugins didn't slow down my navigation with the control panel. 

In terms of getting my own server, I don't have the traffic or the money for such a thing.  But I appreciate your feedback.