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Hosting Companies: Are You Happy With Yours?
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I would be interested in hearing from some more e-commerce sites.
Folks that really sell hard and soft goods ... not just services.
What does any of that that have to do with what hosting company a business uses? What difference does it make what we sell? I`d be interested in hearing your explanation.
David Jackson
David is right. If you think about it, with 365 days in a year, 99% uptime means that the service is down 3.65 days per year! Not impressive at all. Downright unreliable in my book.
I have been heavily involved in the past in telecommunications / datacommunications as an engineer and the telephone companies have what they call "five nines" reliability - that`s 99.999% reliable, which means your phone is out on average about 52 minutes per year!
I consider a web hosting service with "three nines" - or 99.9% reliability - to be good. That means down about 1/3 of a day per year or 8 hours.
Gary
Oops, sorry, I made a mistake. 99.999% reliability means only 5 minutes of downtime per year. The 52 minute number is for 99.99% - or four nines - reliability.
Garygsamad4/11/2009 4:59 PM
I would be interested in hearing from some more e-commerce sites.
Folks that really sell hard and soft goods ... not just services.
Well, mine is an e-commerce site and whenever it is down I am losing money. I sell dozens to hundreds of online courses per day around the clock.
So here is my web hosting recommendation.
I started with a company that I won`t even name, that after only a moderately reliable 6 months, broke something that broke my connection to my credit card processor. After two weeks (!) of manually handling credit card transactions and with them providing no solution, I switched.
I`ve now been happily hosted for more than 4 years using Lunarpages.com. I highly recommend them. They`re not perfect, but they do respond quickly when there are problems. Their uptime reliability has been pretty good, somewhere between the 99% and 99.9% that I discussed earlier.
They are also great about automatically giving existing customers the best new pricing and services as they introduce them for new customers. For instance, moving from X Megabytes of free storage to Y Gigabytes of free storage, from X number of free MySQL databases to unlimited databases, etc.
I cannot recommend them more highly, and I`m running a successful online-only business that requires 24/7 access to the website for me to make money.
Gary Samad
ContinuingEdCourses.Net
If some hosting company hasn`t already promoted themselves as "friendly to" or "experts in" commercial sites, I`ll eat my hat! I`ll also launch a new division of my company.
I`m compiling a special report on hosting companies which I`ll be releasing this summer, and GoDaddy doesn`t even make the cut. To be honest, that surprised me, because it`s one of the most popular hosting companies out there.
But it`s not until you start digging deeper like I did that you discover the degree of customer dissatisfaction that exists with GoDaddy. It was quite stunning to me. Customers love their prices, but their customer service - not so much.
On the other hand, I couldn`t find anyone who had anything bad to say about HostGator. And believe me, I looked high and low. In fact, I`m still looking. That being said, all companies have their warts. It`s just that some have more than others.
David Jackson
Anyway, these are some of the questions I asked in my survey:
1. What hosting company do you use?
2. Have long have you used this company?
3. Are you happy or unhappy with their service?
4. Please explain your satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
5. Would you recommend your hosting company to others?
The complaints were pretty much always service related issues for all the companies. Anyway, after carefully analyzing the data, the ten companies that had the highest degree of customer satisfaction and the fewest complaints made the first cut. GoDaddy survived the first cut, because they had so many satisfied customers. I then cut the list in half through process of elimination to get my top five hosting companies. That`s when GoDaddy was eliminated - primarily because of the high number of service complaints they had, compared to the other companies.
By the way, I just received my first complaint about HostGator. According to the respondent, HostGator shutdown his account without warning, so he`s not a happy camper! I`ll have to investigate this further, to find out what happened exactly.
David Jackson
DavidJackson4/18/2009 3:40 PM
You`re viewing this as indictment of GoDaddy, and it`s not. At least, it`s not meant to be. There were other hosting companies that people simply liked better. Now I know that there are at least two loyal GoDaddy customers here at SuN.
David Jackson
DavidJackson4/18/2009 6:39 PM
David, I will say your response of asking if I`m an "employee" or "loyal customer" and enthusastic defense of them, a bit offensive. txwebman, my intentions were not to offend you. You have my sincere apologies. David JacksonDavidJackson4/19/2009 10:40 AM
txwebman, I just completed a thorough investigation of the negative responses I received about GoDaddy, primarily because of your passionate defense of the company. After digging deeper, I discovered a disturbing number of the complaints came from the same IP number. It appears the same person, using different e-mail addresses and identities was arbitrarily trashing GoDaddy.
I don`t know if it was disgruntled customer, competitor or what, but I discarded all of his reviews. When I discarded those bogus reviews, it dramatically altered the results and easily placed GoDaddy among the top 5 best hosting companies.
Just to be on the safe side, I`m going to double-check the IP numbers from all the reviews to make sure there aren`t anymore irregularities.
I just thought that you should know about this.
David Jackson
DavidJackson4/21/2009 11:39 PM
Will do. It`s probably going to be another couple of months before I launch, because I`m personally verifying hundreds of customer reviews for authenticity. The website, which is still under construction is called Reviews-by-Customers.com. And not only will I be reviewing hosting companies, I`ll also be reviewing website design, SEO, domain registration, anti-virus software, press release services and more!
David Jackson
Reviews-by-Customers.comBookmarked it...sounds interesting, best wishes! Thanks! By the way, I can give you a sneak preview of two just completed final results. At the last minute, GoDaddy was knocked out of the top 5 hosting by a surprise finalist. However, GoDaddy was clearly the favorite when it came to domain registration. Go figure! Again, those results are final. David Jackson
1. economy plan :10 GB Space Unlimited Bandwidth100 Email Accounts10 MySQL Databases2. deluxe plan:150 GBSpace Unlimited Bandwidth500 Email Accounts25 MySQL Databases3.ultimate plan:Unlimited Space & Bandwidth!1000 Email AccountsUnlimited MySQL Databasesfor each paid hosting they provide free setup,software,free storage and bandwidth.