When your website goes down, you lose money and traffic and sleep. Without hosting you got nothing. Our web hosts are our lifelines to commerce. There's no telling the damage done when you lose even a half day offline. Has this ever happened to you?
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"Your mission as a webmaster, is to determine which hosts are good versus which one is good for you. In order to do that, you first have to know what you want from a host" |
You log in and open the Help page for your host. You fill out the form for a Support Ticket. You click submit and hours later, nothing. Then you take a more purposeful step. You pick up the phone and call the company directly. You ask for Tech Support. You wait on hold a good ten minutes. Then you tell the tech that your site is down. The dude sighs, asks you to tell him your URL. You tell him and he puts you back on hold, for another five minutes. He gets back online and tells you everything is fine on his end. No follow up. No offer to help you through your problem. If you want answers out of this guy, you're going to have to drag them out. So what if you're bonehead? Your site was working and now it's not working. It may be your fault but jesus, what the hell ever happened to customer service?
Then comes the fun part. You get an email. They opened your support ticket. Only thing is, you site's back up online. You don't know why. It was down and now it's up. You're afraid to follow through on that support ticket because you're beginning to lose confidence in your host and you wonder if they actually know what they're doing. You fear that the fix will be worse than the problem. So you log in again and look for some sort of option, in your control panel, where you can cancel the support ticket. No luck. Then you get another email. Results from the support ticket. Nothing wrong. It's you. Fuck off.
I exaggerate. I embellish. But not much. I once had a host that deleted my site and didn't back it up beforehand. They were upgrading my shared server and...whoops! No apologetic email. No email warning about the upgrade. I wouldn't have known had I not tried to FTP some new stuff to my server. I was on the phone with that tech guy for almost a half hour before he had figured out my site was gone, gone, gone. I knew it was going sour when at first, he couldn't find a record of my account. Needless to say, I switched hosts within minutes of ending that call. Another 24 hours of waiting for my site to propagate. Arrgh.
Some hosts are shit. Most are not. Most hosts try to provide a honest, efficient service. Sometimes the screwup is you. Sometimes you have to accept that your host only answers phone calls and emails at certain times of the day. Sometimes you have to concede that mistakes happen. Your mission as a webmaster, is to determine which hosts are good versus which one is good for you. In order to do that, you first have to know what you want from a host.
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Adult-friendly webhosting is the most affordable on the Internet. You are never going to get a better mix of value and security than you can with an adult host. If you're looking for sweet prices, they come standard. If you are looking for hosts, well-versed in anti-spam, anti-piracy and anti-hacking, porn hosting companies have seen and dealt with all of it. If price is your biggest priority, you can go shopping for bargains but you'll end up sacrificing quality for a few dollars.
Any host can claim to be reliable. If your site goes down once, you chalk that up to gremlins. When your site goes down a few times a month, month after month, that's the definition of unreliable. That's a pattern. That means it's time to find another host.
I have a rule when it comes to choosing any new web-related resource: No Phone = No! Whether it's a sponsor, a content provider or a hosting company, if I can't find a contact phone number, I move on to another business. With hosting, this rule triple applies.
Phone support is absolutely essential when you're looking for a good host. Nothing is faster than speaking directly to the people on site, not email, not support tickets. IM is fast but phone is better. When your site goes down, you lose money. You don't have time to wait and you certainly don't want to be at the end of a backlog of customer problems. Aside from proper contact info, you want quick response. A few hours is no big thing. 24-48 hours is a very big thing. Since IT people tend to be on the cranky side, it's probably futile to expect angelic patience, still, it's very comforting when you get a tech that is willing to listen to your problem and walk you through to a solution.
At the moment, I have site accounts with two hosting companies. Both of them are good companies but for different reasons. One is a very large host with thousands of customers. They offer low prices, decent security and most of my not-important sites are hosted there. The other host is my trusted host. They've walked me through a few bad patches. They are always available when I need them. Their price is a little higher but their shit is tight. I sleep well knowing my sites are in good hands. My pages are up 99.5% of the time and that's what really matters.