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General: Reliable, Afforable & Well Specced Hosting Needed

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    Member
    • CommentAuthorGreg
    • CommentTimeSep 12th 2009 edited
     
    Hi Chris & all the other iModders

    I am getting regularly frustrated with my present hosting company, and am seriously considering moving my personal sites, and the small handful of sites that I manage for folk.

    We've had a few too many site outages due to server issues (mostly with the two .com sites that are hosted in the US), their support service is woefully slow, and then lacks a significant measure of "customer-centric service" that I need - abrupt, short, overly technical or non-existent explanations of problems, etc. Their billing system is a little sketchy, and they have failed to renew .com domains in time in the past, resulting in all sorts of issues.

    On that basis, I'd be happy to hear your suggestions and possible positive experiences with alternative hosting companies. I need a solid Unix-based reseller package with WHM and CPanel availability, multiple domains, a fair bit of file space (one of the bigger sites is a student support site that hosts a pretty large collection of pdf format documents), and a decent bandwidth allowance. Obviously, they'll also need to be able to accept/allow/help me transfer the existing .co.za and .com sites.

    Opinions on whether to take local or international server options, and whether there is any benefit to finding a totally foreign hosting company as a replacement.

    Happy Saturday!
    Greg
  2.  
    Administrator
    • CommentAuthorChris M
    • CommentTimeSep 14th 2009
     
    Well, I use HostGator for all my hosting and I'm quite happy - Naturally I am using them over and above Hetzner, purely because of cost. What I can tell you is that if I had the money, I would host every single site I own or manage on Hetzner - they're truly brilliant!

    So money aside, Hetzner, money important, HostGator :)

    I've used HostGator for about 5-6 years and have had perhaps 2 problems the whole time and they were understandable problems, which were quickly cleared up. Another useful thing is their online support, which is darn good..

    I hope that helps mate!
  3.  
    Member
    • CommentAuthorGreg
    • CommentTimeSep 14th 2009
     
    Helps muchly Chris, thank you!

    That $7.95/month deal sounds very tempting indeed. BUT....
    1. Do they host .co.za domains? I tried the domain tool in the demo control panel, and got a message about not being able to register .co.za domains. How did you get around this?
    2. And what's the difference between "domains", "addon domains", "parked domains" and "sub domains"? I've never managed to understand this clearly.
    3. The web hosting package has unlimited disk space, bandwidth and domains, but the reseller packages all put limits on these, (although they are very big limits!) for a lot more money. Would the bilk of that be due to the ability to "white label" things, and give customers their own cpanels?

    Have also look at Hertzner after hearing many good things about them too. And you're right: if it wasn't for the pricing, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
  4.  
    Member
    • CommentAuthorwogan
    • CommentTimeSep 20th 2009
     
    Greg: Dunno who you host with. Locally, I use www.serv.co.za, and they've been great on all fronts. But then again, I am a techie myself, so my support demands (as low as they are) have been met with ease.

    It really all depends on the level of control you need. I've heard HostGator.com and BlueHost.com mentioned for simple cPanel-based hosting, and ThePlanet and MediaTemple for higher end technical hosting.

    It all depends on the level of control you need, the amount of technical skills you have (or are willing to learn), and the amount of time you have on your hands.

    As of right now, I'm in the process of cancelling my cPanel hosting account and moving over to full VPS. I host at VPSVille.ca, and they've got some really good deals on the smaller VPSes. By "smaller", I mean 10gb/200gb @ $12/month. The caveat is that it's SSH access, which means you have to be good with commandline.

    They also offer standalone WHM/cPanel hosting. You're responsible for everything that's not the VPS hardware, but you also have the greatest degree of freedom. http://www.vpsville.ca/cpanel-vps (Pretty reasonable prices, too).

    1. For co.za domains, you really need to take charge of them yourself. Everything is done via email to uniforum (co.za), and it's not that hard to get started. The only technical requirement is that you add the domain to the DNS server and get 2 nameserver addresses before you register. This isn't tricky.

    2. A domain is a named address that points to a particular IP address (arcane.co.za : 76.74.137.60).

    An addon domain lets you add a new domain at the same IP address, but have it serve files from a seperate folder, effectively creating a different site from the same IP (onlink-irc.net : 76.74.137.60).

    A parked domain simply sits over another domain - like webafrica.co.za sits over webafrica.com. Note that the URLs are different, but the site itself is the same, served from the same IP (196.220.58.8).

    A sub domain lives under a main domain, effectively partitioning a domain into multiple sites. About.com has different subdomains per topic: goafrica.about.com, acne.about.com, etc

    3. No idea - whitelabelling should be a standard feature of a reseller account, but i've never resold hosting, so I wouldn't know.

    Hetzner, meh, I've heard alot about their support and how stable their servers and things are, but I've gotten very acceptable levels of support at much, MUCH lower prices from other hosts, plus there's just about nothing they won't answer in their freely-available support forums, so, meh.
  5.  
    Administrator
    • CommentAuthorChris M
    • CommentTimeSep 20th 2009
     
    Greg - Have you decided yet?
  6. Member
     
    Greg, check out http://www.gridhost.co.za . Their support is fast and their server speed does not look too shabby
  7.  
    Administrator
    • CommentAuthorChris M
    • CommentTimeOct 7th 2009
     
    @pietpetoors - Please won't you share some more information about them, I want to avoid a link dropping post and rather pull the information into this forum?
  8. Member
     
    I do not know much about them. I was looking for affordable hosting and most of all an automated .co.za domain registration process. Was referred to them by a friend so I have been using them for two months now. Had no hassles so far, their server seems to be faster than my current server and their support is very good. As I said they have a fully automated .co.za domain lookup and registration, credit card billing and video tutorials to help any newby get started with his cpanel. Their entry package is R8.95 for 50Mb of space which was ideal for what I want to do with it.
  9.  
    Administrator
    • CommentAuthorChris M
    • CommentTimeOct 7th 2009
     
    Automated domain lookup is excellent, that's definitely a reason to use them! Another site - your.co.za is also great for that.

    I'm curious about two things:

    1. Credit card billing? As in, they accept credit cards?
    2. R8.95 for 50MB space, what about bandwidth?
  10. Member
     
    Apparently debit order costs are too high, so they can only offer the R8.95 when you pay by credit card.
    I guess the R8.95 package is only to lure you into their web because they make their real money on the bigger packages, reseller and VPS packages.

    Their entry level bandwidth is un-metered.
  11.  
    Administrator
    • CommentAuthorChris M
    • CommentTimeOct 7th 2009
     
    Definitely!

    One thing that people forget a lot of the time is that you don't need a lot of bandwidth if you're getting targetted traffic - acquiring thousands of hits to a website is easy, acquiring thousands of targetted hits to a website is hard. So at the end of the day, it's only a few hits that you really need, provided you convert them all. Ideally, we would then want to start increasing the traffic - but we all know this already ;)

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