I’ve used a variety of different hosting companies over the years as well as hosting in-house myself. Some of the companies I’ve used are no longer around, some others are but I wonder how, and the rest stand head and shoulders above them all. You can probably guess which is which but maybe this brief review will be useful to others looking at hosting solutions.
Firstly, 1&1. They are cheap, there’s no denying that, £19.99/month (+VAT) for a 1GB RAM, 20GB HDD 2k8 R2 VPS with unlimited traffic. Full remote desktop access and fairly straight forward to get it up and running. but, the support is useless, no SLA’s, they have the most miserable support staff I ever had the misfortune to speak to and although uptime is generally OK, when there’s a problem there’s zero communication and status pages are never updated. So if you don’t really care about server uptime and need a very cheap Windows server, then this is the VPS for you. I actually still have a contract with 1&1 although I’m slowly phasing it out, I have only one site left running there which should be moved in the next couple of months. I had some ASP and ASP.net sites originally with MSSQL but now everything has moved over to PHP with MySQL I no longer need the Windows box.
I also had a GoDaddy Virtual Server once upon a time, again a Windows VPS, they are also at the low end of the scale when it comes to prices, but again you get what you pay for. I was paying about £30/month for a Value 2k8 server with 2GB RAM and 30GB HDD (1TB/month Bandwidth). Again, No SLA and awful customer support and communication. On the plus site the Godaddy girls are nice to look at, but I can’t think of anything else nice to say I’m afraid. GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons likes shooting Elephants, which didn’t sit well with me so I cancelled everything immediately. Some of my clients still have a few domains via GoDaddy, personally I prefer 123-reg as they don’t shoot animals.
Rackspace, now this is totally the other end of the scale but they are seriously seriously good. They pride themselves on fanatical support and although I’ve never actually had a single problem in the 6 months I’ve been with them now, they are lighting fast at responding to any queries. They are not cheap, but you need to work out how much your time is worth, and if that time is spent well on the phone to 1&1 support and explaining to clients why certain web services are continually down. I decided my time wasn’t well spent, rather wasted, and so took out a dedicated server contact with Rackspace, via Di Schofield. I pay roughly £800/month for a Managed Cisco Firewall and a Dell PowerEdge 2950MKIII Server Intel Xeon L5335 2.0GHz Quad Core CPU with 2K8 R2, ~500GB RAID5 HDD and 32GB RAM. This includes all backups, anti-virus, additional IP’s, 100% SLA, the works. Perhaps a little over-specced for what we need but it’s nice not to have to worry about it, ever.
EvoHosting, the smallest of all the companies I’ve mentioned, but for value for money these guys really are awesome. No VPS here, just Web hosting for PHP and MySQL but it does what it say on the tin. the cPanel is a nice little touch, full of useful stats and easy to use, they also continually keep customers informed of any updates and outages on their blog and twitter feed, responses are also very quick. The packages are very reasonably priced, £8.99/month (+VAT) for 6.5GB HDD space, Unlimited bandwidth, 15MySQL databases, 15 websites and a stack of other features. I had a couple of teething problems for a few hours the other week, but other that that they have been superb.
So, there you have it.