Week in Review

[kate_nepveu]

Wednesday: file brief with the Supreme Court that I researched, helped draft, and helped recruit signatories for.

Thursday: file brief with the Second Circuit that I wrote and then re-wrote at the last minute (see Wednesday).

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: collapse and recover. Have sinus headache. Do laundry, watch anime, curse at web host.

So I've had it with my web host (Affordablehost.com) and I'm getting a new one. I understand that sometimes servers go down, even repeatedly—but when I submit a support ticket saying, "24 hours ago, you put up a bulletin saying, 'this problem should be fixed with 15-20 minutes.' It's still not fixed for me, and the bulletin hasn't been updated. What's the status?" Then I do not want to get a response saying "check the bulletin," especially when that bulletin still hasn't been updated from yesterday's 20-minute estimate!

After looking at several review sites, I've narrowed it down to BlueHost, Lunarpages, and HostGator. All offer the features I want and far more bandwidth, storage, etc., than I'll ever need; all appear to have very good reputations for service. HostGator is more expensive, but otherwise I don't seem much to choose between them. Anyone have any experiences with these three that they'd like to share?

(Tomorrow I will test their support by contacting them with a question about transferring over, but that's for tomorrow.)

Comments

[indigowombat.livejournal.com]

No comment on (or experience with) any of those. I've been using Warped (http://www.warped.com/) for going on 6 years, and been very happy with them. Not everyone's heard of them; their business expands mostly by word-of-mouth, I believe, so I like to pimp them when I get a chance. If you've already looked at them and discarded them, please disregard. Just spreading the word in case you hadn't come across them.

[kate_nepveu]

I hadn't, but having to pay extra for more than 1 e-mail account and for MySQL crosses them off my list.

(Also, I'm figuring that while any individual reader might have good experiences, the better test is a broad range of support experiences, which is why I went with sites that were mentioned on several review/compliation services and asked for information specifically on them.)

[indigowombat.livejournal.com]

Okay. Sorry for data outside your requested range. Just wanted to give them a shout-out.

[aor.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about those three, but I've been with pair.com for years, and have never had a problem. I get no traffic of any consequence, though. Mainly my email redirects through them. The appear to be more expensive than average.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, that's a lot more expensive--I need PHP and MySQL, as well as several e-mail addresses and FTP logins.

I'm really hoping to stick to those three, since they got good reviews across a range of sites.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I was going to be all, "They look like they're $18 -- how much cheaper can that sort of hosting be?" And then I looked at the ones you mentioned, and crikey! $7 a month for all sorts of elaborate features and limits? That seems preposterously inexpensive...

[kate_nepveu]

Doesn't it? And yet it seems to be the new standard. Hey, I'll take it . . .

[kate_nepveu]

(I mean, yes, overselling and all, but I'm not likely to push those limits so really, as long as I have a half-dozen e-mail and FTP accounts, PHP, and MySQL, I'm good . . . )

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I sort of suspect that anyone who gets even close to those putative limits would get dismissed from customerhood rather quickly. Even so, though, that's still frustratingly cheap.

("Frustratingly" because Panix's disk and bandwidth allocations are draconianly strict, for more money than those places charge; but Panix's services are (presumably!) so much better that I don't want to just switch to a discount hosting place.)

[kate_nepveu]

Good articles on overselling etc. here: http://whreviews.com/

Apparently it's more likely to be CPU/RAM usage that gets you kicked, which I may be asking HostGator about (e.g., "is a comment spam attack going to push me over the server resources allocation?").

If you like Panix, I doubt there's a reason to switch.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Interesting site!

As for Panix, when I say draconian, I mean it: 75MB of space, and 250MB of transfer. It works for me (as long as I empty out my spam traps at least every two days), but only barely -- and if I wanted to put up any pictures on the web, yeah, no. But I really really don't want to trust my email to anything less reliable, so. I toy with the idea of setting up a second domain just for hosting bandwidth-intensive stuff, but can't quite justify paying double hosting fees every month.

[kate_nepveu]

If you weren't pseudonymous you could get a paid LJ and use the Scrapbook. Or I think Flickr is free, isn't it?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You might want to stop by Webhostingtalk.com (http://www.webhostingtalk.com)--it's a huge forum site for discussing webhosts.

[aor.livejournal.com]

It turns out that the owner of my hosting provider (pair) posts there frequently. Based on reading his posts, and a number of other posts, I remain extremely happy with my choice.

Looks like the three providers mentioned here get moderately positive opinions.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks--will do.

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

I'll be following this with interest. I need to make some webpage decisions. Although when I see stuff like 2500 emails I think that maybe I can go with smaller!

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, those numbers of e-mail accounts are kind of silly--the quantity of people who need or will use that many is vanishingly small, so it costs them very little to offer it. (If you're a business and need that many, you already have your own ITS department.)

My site uses about 200 MB of disk space and about 12 GB of bandwidth a month, which is a bit high for a personal page, I think, but the NetHack pages get a lot.

(Actually that's more than I thought, because it's been a while since I checked traffic. Must see where the jump came. It can't all be comment spam . . . )

[gtrout.livejournal.com]

I've been very pleased indeed with tigertech.net (http://www.tigertech.net/). Very cheap, plus excellent support that invariably goes way, way beyond the terms of service.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

I have hosted with Lunarpages for going on three years. I do not recommend them. (The reason it has been three years is complicated. I should have quit after the first year, but Real Life got in the way of me migrating my site each time annual renewal came around.) I plan to migrate my site to a new provider in June, so I am safely gone by August, when my site fee comes due in.

[kate_nepveu]

I have found that their TOS is Stupid [*], so have crossed them off my list. Weekends apaprently make my brain stupid for not checking it sooner.

They don't pro-rate refunds? Another reason to cross them off, then.

[*] "You agree not to make any inappropriate communication to any Newsgroup, Mailing List, Chat Facility, or other Internet Forum."

[aor.livejournal.com]

Not to spam your entry or anything, but I spent way too much time reading webhostingtalk.com last night. The saga of affordablehost.com was terribly interesting. The original people, who sold it to dotcanada / light speed last year (and express regret over doing so), still do business as axishost.com and apparently still have a stellar repuation and good service. And you can't move your account to them, because the sale of the affordablehost.com business included a non-compete clause.

You might know that already; I'm just sharing.

[kate_nepveu]

Actually, I recently got e-mail from Tina Peters saying that the non-compete clause had expired.

I was thinking of going somewhere bigger, but OTOH I was perfectly happy under that management, so I'm going to let the question lie fallow for a while now that I'm just down to HostGator of my original three and wait for time to give my some perspective (BlueHost prohibits not just hosting adult sites but linking to them, and while I don't, I don't like that provision).

(Also since I'd like an export of my MySQL database for the Movable Type installation, so that the re-install of MT will go easily, and the fucking MySQL restore isn't done yet on the server with the hardware failure on _Saturday_. And now another of their servers is having MySQL problems--it's definitely time to leap.)

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Does slash fanfic count as adult content?

[kate_nepveu]

Not the stuff I've linked to,

But any site can change hands without someone knowing about it, and suddenly a years-old link now goes to porn. Which is why that TOS makes me unhappy.