Web hosting

From time to time people ask for advice on good web hosts. I’ve not been able to really comment for many years because I’ve hosted all my own domains on my own servers. Recently I decided to move some of my domains onto a shared web host service. It wasn’t that my own servers couldn’t handle the domains, but I wanted to provide some separation between the ‘weather’ domains and a bunch of others that I run for myself, family and friends. Splitting the private domains away would help to improve security of the weather domains by moving some of the potentially less secure stuff elsewhere.

I did some digging into potential hosting companies. I wanted a fairly big one because years ago I had some bad experiences with smaller companies that seemed to be run by one man and his dog, and the man seemed to spend 364 days per year on leave. I also wasn’t looking for free services, or even very low cost services. I was prepared to put a bit of money behind a solution, but not a huge amount.

Once you start to look at the available offerings you see a trend. Most seem to offer the earth…unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited loads of stuff. However, once you read the T&Cs you find that the unlimited space is only unlimited for HTML pages. If you want to put any image files on the site, you can’t have more than 10 and they must be less than 10k each. Bandwidth is unlimited but only for up to 3 visitors to your web site per hour. OK I might have exaggerated those examples a little but you get the idea.

I also wanted the web sites to have SSL protection and then you find that many hosting services won’t let you use free Let’sEncrypt certificates. Why not? Well they sell certificates and the free ones reduce their income. OK, I get the fact that a free cert doesn’t give you the same functions as a more expensive one, but all I need is the functions you get for free.

Eventually I came across Hostinger and they seemed to offer everything I needed. Unlimited does have some limits, but nothing too bad for what I wanted to do and I can use LetsEncrypt certificates. I signed up for a Business account, so most definitely not free, but pretty good for about

Thanks, Chris, for the excellent tip! This is definitely a well-run internationalized host because when you click the flag at the upper left-hand corner you can see all of the languages and locales they support. (I initially thought they were local to you when the price quote was in British Pounds, but that’s not the case at all.)

I’m going to have to consider them as an alternative when the time comes to find a new host.

In some ways it’s unfortunate that you’ve not needed to contact support as one of their 29 million 8O clients. In my experience that’s when you really find out if you have signed up with a good host :wink:

Looks interesting. I was with Ariotek here in the UK who were excellent however just about a year ago they were taken over/merged with Krystal here in the UK. My account was moved over and I thought as I had just paid for a year I’d give it a year to see how it went. Well nearly a year on and I’m still with them, trouble free and on the couple of occasions I’ve needed their support it has been fine. I only have 3 domains and one website so not a huge amount, they also handle my email and their spam trapping seems very good as I rarely see any spam nowadays.

Stuart

I second Stuart’s post. I too was originally with Ariotek but was moved to Krystal on their merger. Support and performance have been great. Any issues have been quickly solved.

Chris

Another endorsement to the above two posts. I went with Ariotek, initially on someone’s recommendation here on the forum, and have followed them through the move to Krystal. Hardly ever have had any problems, and when I have, they were quickly dealt with by the support staff. The migration to Krystal has given me a larger amount of GB’s for the same price, so I’m happy at the moment.

I think the 29 million is the marketing manager’s take on the numbers. Each new domain you add creates a new hosting account (linked to the master account), so I now have 7 accounts. I suspect the 29 million is the number of accounts/domains rather than individual customers. Maybe due to my IT background I tend not to use Support too often, maybe once every 2-3 years, so it doesn’t worry me much, although I can see that others might need more assistance. After filtering out the best/worst of the reviews the overwhelming majority seemed to suggest that support response time was pretty good. Difficult to test before joining and even then difficult to test with a real issue.

One other thing I forgot to mention is that with the lunacy with Net Neutrality going on in the US at the moment I specifically wanted a hosting company who had servers located outside the US, or offered non-US locations as options. That shrunk the list of options fairly quickly.

They claim less websites than clients :lol:
29,659,751 Existing Clients

20,000+ New daily sign-ups

24,894,152 Websites go online

Good point! We’re all wondering just how that will work out :roll:

They also offer other services besides websites (domains), e.g. VPS. So that probably accounts for the difference between websites and clients.

I had to raise two tickets today. Neither was earth shattering (related to transferring a domain to them). Both issues were resolved without any further input needed from me within 3 hours. When you raise a ticket they say you will get a response within 24 hours but it seems that they don’t push that to the limit.

Have been with Hostmonster for a few years now. Have not heard from them back about the free https certificate they emailed me was coming soon. My host account is up for renewal next month. I switched to them after not being happy with GoDaddy. It has my website, wordpress blog and The Next Generation genealogy php site http://www.hostmonster.com/track/dsscheibe