Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company? 456
v1x writes "I have had an account with my current web hosting company for a few years, with 3 domains being hosted there (using Linux/PHP/MySQL). Recently, all three of these websites stopped functioning, and upon checking the site, all my directory structures were intact, whereas all of the files were gone. Upon contacting their technical support, I was given the run-around, and later informed by one of their administrators that none of the files could be restored. Needless to say that I am looking for a different web hosting company at this point, but I would like to make a more informed choice than I did with the current company. I have read a similar Slashdot article (from 2005) on the topic, but the questions posed there were slightly different."
Reader mrstrano has a similar question: "I am developing a web application and, after registering the domain, I am now looking for a suitable web hosting provider.
It should be cheap enough so I can start small, but should allow me to scale up if the web site is successful (as I hope).
The idea is simple enough so I do not need other investors to implement it. This also means that I don't have a lot of money to put on it
at the moment.
Users of the website will post their pictures (no, it's not going to be a porn website), so scalability might be an issue even with a moderately high
number of users.
I would like to find a good web hosting provider from day one, so I don't have to go through the pain of a data migration.
Which web host would you choose?"
Better than shared hosting... (Score:3, Informative)
NearlyFreeSpeech.net (Score:5, Informative)
I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ [nearlyfreespeech.net] - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.
Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.
Hosts I use (Score:2, Informative)
I currently use 2 hosting companies for various things:
1st - BlueHost.com
I have the best things to say about BlueHost.com
No affiliation, other than very happy with the service and support.
2nd - Tech.coop
Unlimited!
The last one I want to mention is:
PriorityColo.com
http://prioritycolo.com/ [prioritycolo.com]
Why? Because they have the balls to tell "big shot lawyer companies" to STFU when they send shaky take-down notices.
Hope that helps! =)
Re:Things I look for (Score:5, Informative)
Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases
Be somewhat realistic. Not even Google provides unlimited storage space for their services. You get what you pay for.
Free trials. (Score:4, Informative)
It probably doesn't apply to either of your projects, but if you're starting from scratch, Google App Engine [google.com] might be a good candidate. Advantages: Starts out free, and it's by Google, so yes, it scales. When you have to start paying, it's pay-as-you-go like Amazon, but only for the cycles you actually use, since it's an entirely managed solution.
Like I said -- probably doesn't apply. It won't run PHP (that I know of), and mrstrano didn't specify what his shiny new app is being developed in. But if it's early enough, and if you're willing to trust Google...
Re:NearlyFreeSpeech.net (Score:3, Informative)
And while I'm at it, DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES go with aventurehost.com. Seriously shitty service, and they renege on what they promise their customers. A few years ago I paid them $200 for a "lifetime" hosting account that I barely used, mainly for DNS and mail and some dev work. As of the beginning of this year, everyone who had such an account was essentially SoL and they were charging $40/year (IIRC) to continue the subscription on the accounts. I told them in no uncertain terms I wouldn't be renewing, and they still kept sending me invoices trying to get me to stay with them. They're idiots when it comes to system maintenance, too, because after every "upgrade" or "migration" they do, they expect you to put in a ticket to get your account restored. Only reason I stayed with them as long as I did was that it was essentially free after I paid for the initial "lifetime" account.
Re:Things I look for (Score:3, Informative)
I also like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them either, but they've been making me happy for quite a while too.
There was one month when my site got a lot of traffic. Over 100 GB of bandwidth. It was handled smoothly.
I also like that they offer ssh access to your VM.
Re:Better than shared hosting... (Score:5, Informative)
Second the linode recommendation. The staff are responsive and even proactive if there is a potential issue with their servers, and the management system is simple without being restrictive. We recently started using our own kernel, because you can.
They score highly in performance benchmarks as well, which I can verify from over a year of managing 6 linodes, they're really fast.
http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison [uggedal.com]
Re:Free trials. (Score:3, Informative)
You can insulate yourself from App Engine lock-in by developing your app for Django, which is then portable to a standard server if App Engine turns out to be a problem.
I did recently drop AE for one of my projects because their urlfetch service was returning odd results, and database operations were failing multiple times per day.
Re:Things I look for (Score:1, Informative)
Lunarpages essentially has unlimited everything, for $5 a month. However, they don't have good support for a non-PHP apps (i.e. Python/Django, which is why I switched).
DreamHost (Score:5, Informative)
I have had a good experience with DreamHost [dreamhost.com]. Their support is snappy and helpful, and the people who work there seem generally kind. They have a fine set of dreamhost-specific howtos maintained on their wiki, and a powerful but easy to use panel for administration.
They run linux boxes with the full complement of command line tools (with compilers and everything!), and the only restriction is no persistent processes. If you want to do that, you can buy their pricier private server option which gives you your own private server instance.
They have some great terms of use (as far as storage and bandwidth are concerned), and their prices are reasonable. I got a great deal a while back on two years of hosting, and now I'm hooked on the service.
Make sure you go over the contract very carefully (Score:5, Informative)
Hoo boy, the stories I could tell. Actually, I can't, because the hosting provider threatened to sue us if we named them publicly.
OK, first, if there's more than a couple of servers involved, and your business depends on it, use two or more different providers. If you only have one provider, it puts them in a position to screw you. When we terminated our relationship with our provider, they held our data hostage until we paid them an additional $15,000 to put our servers on line again long enough for us to copy our data.
Which brings us to: DO YOUR OWN BACKUPS. Service providers either don't do them, or they don't do them right. The world is full of horror stories of customers paying the data center extra for backups, and then finding the backups were never actually done. And even if they do do backups, they maintain control of them, which puts them in a good position to extort you.
Remember, the practice of holding your data hostage goes back a long way. Happened to my father's company back in the 70's mainframe days. It still happens.
Most important of all: have a professional go over your data center contract with a fine-tooth comb. The default contract they'll give you (or at least the one they gave us) is highly abusive.
For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling. There is no early termination. If you so much as upgrade a single disk drive, the contract is automatically renewed for another 18 months.
Here's a doozy: our contract specified that if a server went down, they would either fix or replace it within two hours of determining the problem. The catch: they merely have to say that they haven't determined the problem yet, and then they don't have to replace anything. Our main server was kept off-line for a month this way.
Don't lose your files... (Score:5, Informative)
what to avoid (Score:2, Informative)
Things to avoid tend to be better indicators than things to go for. I'd avoid:
* Companies that aren't open about issues. If there isn't a public forum, status RSS feed, status twitter account, etc. BAD NEWS
* Companies that offer unlimited anything. By definition, unlimited means that they are overselling and while things may be great now, they'll suffer in the long run
* Linux hosts that don't give you SSH access. CPanel/Fantastico/Whatever do plenty of things, but there is no substitute for having shell access
* Anything at all that makes you feel funny. There are _plenty_ of options out there and if something doesn't feel right, you're better off going somewhere else.
* Companies that won't respond to you personally for pre-sales questions. When I was looking for colo space, this turned out to be the most important factor. The better they communicate with you before they have any of your money, the better off things will be in the long run.
* Anything that seems to be too good to be true. i.e. If you have a need for a lot of disk/bandwidth/cpu, and "unlimited" is $5/month, BAD NEWS
I run ithought dot org and host a reasonable number of sites, and try to adhere to all of the above. One thing you won't be able to find out easily with hosts is something I do: I won't accept customers that seem like they aren't a fit for the hardware I have. Shared hosting is what it is and if a customer is going to drive up the load on servers such that it affects other customers, but doesn't want to pay for dedicated hardware or a VM, their actions shouldn't hurt other shared hosting customers that are only using a very small amount of resources.
Most of the cloud stuff is plenty nice if you want to manage it (S3, SliceHost, etc) but don't underestimate what is involved with keeping server OSs up to date, tuned, and monitored. If you're core competency isn't tweaking server software you should let someone else worry about that for you until it makes sense for you to hire an Operations person/team.
Finding a web host (Score:2, Informative)
I usually check out webhostingtalk.com to find reviews of web hosts, offers, and more. I would definitely suggest you check them out. I personally chose mddhosting.com for my website.
Some other things to keep in mind: you get what you pay for... So unlimited of something means they are skimping elseware. Also remember to always keep your own backups. Even if your host does keep them, which they probably don't, it is a pain to get files restored for you. It also is nice to be able to leave without begging for your files.
As for custom infrastructure and scaling... Chances are that most hosts put you on a typical shared cpanel box and anything special is going to require you to get a VPS or dedi server and set it up and manage everything yourself. It just isn't realistic to add features or special software for a single user. And that doesn't even get into having to support this new stuff, or deal with the security implications.
Re:Better than shared hosting... (Score:3, Informative)
100X better than simply web hosting... Linode [linode.com]
Agreed. Though running services can be bad for beginners, its a lot more adaptable than getting someone else to do it. The amount you can do with any VPS is far and beyond what any shared hosting will do, but keeping it secure is important.
I've now got two Linodes [linode.com], one in the UK and one in Atlanta, and they're both excellent. Great value for money and speed. Only had one 2 hour period of downtime and they were keeping everyone very well informed. Their support staff are excellent and I can't recommend them enough. Upgrading a linode [linode.com] and their pricing for it is just too easy. Bandwidth and latency, even for running small gaming servers is awesome!
A warning about 1 and 1 (Score:2, Informative)
Rarely do I go negative on the Internet. Things said on the internet stick with you forever, but maybe just a warning.
The company 1 and 1 seems to be using a collection agency to leverage money out of previous customers. While they may not be breaking any laws, but they are definitely taking advantage of their customers.
Google: "1 and 1" nco
There are pages of people who have fallen victim to this company.
A good narrative that describes almost exactly what happened to me...
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/1-amp-1-internet-inc-c161434.html [complaintsboard.com]
Sorry to post anonymously, I'm not really a coward, but with a company like this, you just cannot be too careful.
Re:Things I look for (Score:3, Informative)
My choices (Score:2, Informative)
For small LAMP sites (less than 10K visits per month)
Bluehost, ($7 per month)
For Medium LAMP sites (20K-50K visits per month
Media Temple Cloud ($20 or more per month)
For Bigger LAMP Sites (50k+ visits per month)
Rackspace Cloud ($150 per month)
The last two have their issues at times, but they are way better than managing your own server. If you like sysadmin work (and I don't) get a Rackspace cloud server or Media temple DV server, but I like the cloud and grid options. They scale automatically.
Research your choices (Score:3, Informative)
When you're going to get a new host, and it's not a name company (hostgator, dreamhost, etc.) do your research. There are a ton of resellers selling stuff from other resellers. It's like the Amway of the Internet. Look at the whois for your new host. If it's hidden behind one of those obfuscation services, it's a red flag. Look at the name servers. If it's the same as the host (ns1.host.com) it's a plus. If it's something else, go look at the website of the name service...you'll probably find it's where they're re-reselling hostspace. Try to get upline as much as possible, since if one of those people forgets to pay the bill, you're screwed with no (worthwhile) recourse.
I would suggest not going with IXWebhosting. They've been hit with injection attacks for over two years on an almost daily basis. I was with them for years until they were compromised. They will also blame you, saying your website was insecure...except I had fifteen domains that were parked with a single HTML page that just said "go away" hacked.
Make sure they're available 24/7, and that they answer the phones. My current VPS host (InMotionHosting) answered the phone at 1am and placed my order.
Watch out for all the "review" sites. Do a whois and you'll find many are owned by the hosts that get top billing. At the very least, every host review should have some negative hits from a disgruntled webmaster. Look for the ones that lay it all out, warts and all.
Never ever expect your host to back up your website. If it's not in your possession, it doesn't exist, unless you're lucky. Cron jobs are nice for dumping databases to a backup.
I personally like dedicated IPs. Since it seems you're multi-hosting, see if shared or individual IPs are available. Also, check to see if wildcard or sub-domains (space.host.com) are available.
Best of luck to you.
Re:Things I look for (Score:3, Informative)
I gotta tell you dude, you have some very strange priorities.
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
That's not my experience. And in any case, choosing a host with such a minor issue as your prime criteria... jeez.
I just bailed on JustHost, which is a Linux only company. They pulled all kinds of sales gimmicks on me. I would have tolerated them if they provided better service.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
Are you under the impression you have to get domain registration and hosting from the same company? Because you don't.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
They have these things. Installing them is not rocket science. It's more important to know what version they have. It's a royal pain to have your scripts break on you because your provider hasn't gotten around to upgrading.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
As I mentioned before, you don't have to keep hosting and registration at the same company. All you have to do is tell your registrar to use the DNS servers belonging to whatever host you use.. I'm pretty sure they all make that pretty easy — if you don't you shouldn't use them.
I abandoned Dreamhost a long time ago because of their regular outages [google.com]. (What sucks is that Dreamhost is the best by every other measure. But if the system is down when you need it to be up, nothing else matters.) I still keep my domain there because it's only $10 a year, and their web GUI for managing it is first rate. One reason I switched to justhost was their promise of free domain registration. Then I discovered that justhost charges $10/year just to anonymize my WHOSIS record! Fortunately, they also botched my domain transfer....
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Once again, you don't have get certificates from your provider, though it is handy to get them that way. But what's really important is that the provider understand certificates. Typically, they'll mess up the certificate you need to access your email server over SSL, which can be a pain to deal with.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
It's also helpful if the web apps you need are supported....
ICDSoft (Score:4, Informative)
The one company that I recommend to everyone when it comes to shared hosting is ICDSOFT.com It will be extremely hard for you to find a bad review on the Internet, simply because their service is impecable...
I've used them for a year until I switched to a dedicated server and each time I had a question their tech support answered within 5 minutes with precise answers.
The main think about them is that they're not oversold - each account can hold only one website, you get only about 100-500 GB of bandwidth, 10-50 GB of disk space and several databases and free webmail/pop3/smtp with limited number of email accounts, and each server had their own RAID 5 setup. When I had the website hosted there my server had about 120 websites hosted on it.
This is actually great especially when you start your website as you'll know the server won't be overloaded, you won't have 10.000 websites on the server with all files being retrieved from a NAS (as Dreamhost does) and you won't have the accounts of 400-1000 people who abuse the "unlimited bandwidth and space" feature and stream music to their office from the hosting account or basically people that have Youtube clones on shared hosting accounts (as it happens on Dreamhost)
Most people when they see they get only a few hundred GB of bandwidth they go on looking for hosting companies with unlimited bandwidth, but in reality for a startup website on a sharing account even 100 GB of bandwidth is enough. If your website becomes popular enough to go over 100 GB of bandwidth used, you'll afford to get a 60$ a month server with 2 TB of bandwidth and 200 GB of disk space.
I've also used Dreamhost.com and Site5.com for a while, between ICDSoft and my own dedicated server, mainly because it was a good deal - used coupons to get one year for something like 10$. Site5.com was just slow, the control panel sucked....
Dreamhost was slowish, overloaded (the server I was on had about 12000 websites on it), the quality of the websites is lower (blogs which are not optimized therefore abusing PHP and MySQL servers) and the NAS where this web server was retrieving from was shared between about 5-6 web servers so you can imagine a 1gbps link from a NAS was used by about 100.000 websites. Also, their servers and hardware have issues all the time - there's no single day where one of their NAS would not crash, or one of their websites would die or the email server shared between 20-30 web servers would fail and so on... you can check dreamhoststatus.com to see how often they fail.
A different viewpoint (Score:5, Informative)
1) Failures will happen. Design for them. Have at least two hosts, in significantly different physical locations. If a host gets hacked, if their backups were silently failing, if they go out of business without warning like RedONE did, if they get hit by natural disaster, et cetera; there just isn't anything you can do to isolate from that. Redundancy is key.
2) Ask hosts about their backup policy and strategy, as well as their redundant disk setup, before you get started. It's not a perfect answer, but it gives you a decent sense of how on the ball they are - if they're spending for the extra disk space, then they're probably not cheaping out other places either.
3) A week or two in, request a backup restore. You don't have to make up a failure or anything; just say you've had problems with hosts lying about backups in the past, and you want to make sure you're on good ground. Make some changes to your setup beforehand every 10 minutes on a cron, so you know how old the backup is when it's restored.
4) Ask about gotcha policies like how they handle over-bandwidth (free day, shutoff, charge per unit, etc) and so forth. That'll give you a sense of how they'll behave if/when problems happen.
5) Expect problems to happen. The engineering overhead of replication isn't that big these days, and the cost of not having it is immense. Furthermore, in addition to replication, which secures against failure, also have backup, which secures against attack. Backup can be by FTP to one of those cheapo shared hosts that don't care about disk space, but it needs to be at a distinct third location.
Basically, don't try to find a host that won't have problems. You'll find Santa Claus sooner. Parts fail, people make errors, people do shady things, attacks are made, natural disasters and backhoes happen, et cetera.
Just have a contingency plan in place. If you can handle a failure, it's no longer a critical problem. It's usually cheaper to have three normal hosts than one super duper bullet proof host. Leverage economy. The internet is designed for handling the failure of cheap parts through massive redundancy.
Leverage that. It's the smartest thing in network history.
Dreamhost (Score:4, Informative)
Dreamhost is based in Southern California and even better, their tech support is based in Southern California. They're also an employee owned company.
They offer a pretty wide range of services from shared hosting on up to your own servers. Their tech support is fantastic... once when I had a problem with my shared hosting account, their tech support person emailed me back about the problem BEFORE I received the automated "someone from tech support will get back to you as soon as possible" email. (the automated email came about 15 minutes after I submitted the ticket.)
Avoid NearlyFreeSpeech.net (Score:5, Informative)
Nearlyfreespeech is not for everybody. I used to recommend them, but not anymore.
Here are the advantages:
* low cost, especially for tiny sites
* SSH included, no bullshit regarding that
Disadvantages:
* php and mysql performance is very slow. the servers are overloaded
* ssh is very slow. there is lag between every command. This is especially noticeable when using sshfs
* sometimes there is lag for simple page loads
* no cron, no https, several little things you may have come to expect from a host are not provided by NFSN
* reliability: a couple of times a year, NFSN will make some arbitrary change that may cause your sites to go down. The first time, the permissions on all of my files changed in such a way that the web server could not access them, and I had to manually change them back. The last time, symlinks stopped working, and I had to find every one, delete it, and recreate it.
* reliability: I don't think NFSN even has 2 9's. (ie less than 99% uptime). When NFSN is down, they still charge you for storage, but not bandwidth. This is fine for them, but might not be for you.
* NFSN is a one-man LLC, named Jeffrey Wheelhouse. If you ever need to deal with support, you will notice that this guy is a self-righteous asshole. Just look at the forums, and his responses. I wouldn't usually consider this a problem, but because NFSN is so buggy, you will have to deal with this man eventually.
Go dedicated. (Score:4, Informative)
Shared hosting is like like living in a small house with fifty strangers. All of you have a job that requires you to go in and out all the time. And there is only one door.
Go for a cheap dedicated and unmanaged server and carefully manage your own backups. Watch out for 95% billing if you have any real traffic needs. Look for reviews in forums like webhostingtalk, not review sites. As recommended by an earlier commenter, look at the nameservers and make sure you are buying from the actual provider and not a reseller. Look at the upstream providers of your selected server provider, tier-1 ISPs are good, as well as lots of bandwidth between your chosen ISP and the internet, and a good SLA. Avoid "shared 100mbps". Look for extra costs you may have to pay before actually making a contract - For example, many providers will charge ridiculous amounts of money for extra IP addresses or extra domains in some stupid exclusive control panel (*cough*Plesk*cough*). A good domain name registrar is name.com. A bad domain name registrar is godaddy. Buying your domain name from your server host is unthinkably stupid.
Re:Avoid NearlyFreeSpeech.net (Score:5, Informative)
I second the motion to avoid NFSN. Sometimes cheap can be really great, like Google search. But NFSN is just plain cheap. Also, NFSN has recently raised their prices, so even medium sized sites will end up paying the same amount they would for a decent service, but I doubt that NFSN has improved their service at all.
Re:A2 Hosting? More technically competent? (Score:3, Informative)
Linode.com and Hostgator (Score:4, Informative)
I DEFINITELY recommend linode.com which gives you root and your own distro. They have kept expanding your hard disk etc. for free periodically for years, and keep developing new things for its users. You ssh in and can install anything you want, and can organize disk images, reboots and dns from dashboard.
However you wouldn't want to host a simple very high volume site there, so I have hostgator as well. I haven't pushed it, but their baby account seems quite good. It is the opposite of linode, being high capacity and lower functionality but even then it has quite a lot of good stuff. Cpanel based but with ssh too.
Re:Things I look for (Score:3, Informative)
You're absolutely correct. I work for a hosting company (though our typical customer is in the gbit/s range), all I can say about $150/TB is that it's the kind of thinking that lead to the OP losing his data and having no backups.
Even our shitbox bottom of the barrel machines (top of the line a couple years ago) we blow out at $99/mo w/ 10mbit come with a 4 disk RAID5 array, typically using Adaptec or LSI (real LSI, not 3ware) controllers. That alone is $400+, add 4x disks, cost of spares in inventory, etc and you begin to understand why *good* hosting costs more -- that's only the disk subsystem!
Re:NearlyFreeSpeech.net (Score:3, Informative)
That's what I meant about nearlyfreespeech's reliability. This sort of thing happens to them all the time. I doubt that it has anything to do with linking to them in the Slashdot comments.
What do you want in a web host? (Score:2, Informative)
At one end of extremes, we have VPS / Cloud providers, Collocation.
At the other extreme we have providers who design your site and handle all the administration for you, editing, domain registration, e-mail servers, DNS management, Backups, etc.
Full service with control panel for everything VS administer-it-yourself using standard OS tools, Linux command line, etc.
Shared VS Virtually-Dedicated VS Dedicated.
You should expect to pay a good bit for every single service that you want done well and that you care about.
If you are paying $10/month and expect your hosting provider to do everything for you perfectly, then we have a problem of ridiculously high expectations.
$10/month shared hosting is just great for a personal web site. Hosting an e-commerce site on such a host, I regard as lunacy.
You should expect to pay for:
[For $10/month, probably it is reasonable to expect UPS protection on a shared server, not much more than that]
Security cannot be understated. If your web site exists on a shared server, you are at greater risk. Your site will be more secure if a dedicated server is used, and physical safeguards are required to gain access to the rack your server is hosted in.
Re:Avoid NearlyFreeSpeech.net (Score:2, Informative)
Put gently, you don't know what you're talking about. Either that, or you're not thinking of the same company.
php and mysql performance is very slow. the servers are overloaded
Except you're not on any given server. You can't "be on an overloaded server", because your site isn't static -- it's not assigned to a single server.
As for performance, I've had no problems running a large (several thousand active users/day) MediaWiki installation on it for several years. sub-1 sec page loads, all the time.
ssh is very slow. there is lag between every command. This is especially noticeable when using sshfs
That's entirely dependent on your location. Far away from the host? Laggy SSH. Near the host? No lag. Simple as that. As for SSHFS... well... that's not really a defect, given that the explicitly caution you that their SSH implementation isn't intended for that sort of thing.
sometimes there is lag for simple page loads
Rare, but it happens. It's shared hosting. If you need to discount any host which occasionally has sub-optimal performance, you probably shouldn't be looking at shared hosting in the first place.
no cron, no https, several little things you may have come to expect from a host are not provided by NFSN...
... and many things that you wouldn't expect are. That's only really a big deal if they were hiding the limitations, or if they weren't up-front about them. They offer an unusual service, to be sure, but they're completely up-front about what they do and do not support.
reliability: a couple of times a year, NFSN will make some arbitrary change that may cause your sites to go down.
Bullshit. It's happened once that I can remember (since I started using them in 2004), and even that was solely because it was a scenario that required immediate action (security.)
I don't think NFSN even has 2 9's. (ie less than 99% uptime). When NFSN is down, they still charge you for storage, but not bandwidth. This is fine for them, but might not be for you.
Again, bull.
Reliability-wise (to respond to your claim with another, equally-meaningless, point of anecdotal evidence), they're better than most shared hosts (key word being *shared*).
Yes, you're right about the fee structure re: outages. Guess what? That's exactly how every other shared host works. Don't like it? Don't go shared (or get an SLA).
NFSN is a one-man LLC, named Jeffrey Wheelhouse. If you ever need to deal with support, you will notice that this guy is a self-righteous asshole. Just look at the forums, and his responses.
NFSN has several contract employees. If you ever cared to take your own advice, and read the explanation of who makes up NFSN, you would know this.
As far as the self-righteous asshole part goes, that is (in my experience), false. Is the guy opinionated? Sure. But the only times I've ever seen anything that could possibly qualify as the behavior you described is when he's dealing with someone who is verbally abusive, abusive to the service, or incapable of reading the documentation yet insistent on bad-mouthing the service and the provider repeatedly. In light of your post, I can guess why you have that opinion of NFSN...
Now, a quick note on the service: it's not for everyone. It supports a lot of cool stuff, and lacks some stuff you might want. It's definitely more of a "self-catered" option; if you want a host to hold your hand every step of the way, it won't be a good choice. If you expect 100% reliability, an SLA, etc. it's not for you ('course neither is shared hosting...)
Who is it for? People who want a host that will actively refuse to take down sites for any reason other than illegal activity. People who like a host that states: "[W]hile we aren't lawyers, neither are we idiots. We can tell the
Re:Dreamhost (Score:2, Informative)
I was with Dreamhost a few years ago, too. I switched away to a VPS around the same time some doofus there ran a script that charged everyone for a full year's worth of hosting
I've been with dreamhost for 10 years and I was effected by that, but it didn't really bother me because they sorted it out quickly and the card was re-credited pronto. They had another nightmarish dns disaster a few years back that took them a couple of days to sort out - but look, stuff happens, and I've always appreciated their honesty and regular status updates.
Fact is, if your website is mission-critical you shouldn't be going with shared hosting anyway - but for my purposes (personal and a not-for-profit club site) it's been just fine. The support is excellent - I have just been emailing with them over the last couple of days about some plans for the club site, and I even got responses back over the weekend.