Advice on website hosting please?

neilmac

neilmac

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Neil McLeland
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Hi all,

I think there is a wealth of knowledge on this forum for all website matters so I wondered whether I could get some advice and, perhaps, recommendations on where to go for a suitable (and sensibly priced) hosting company.

At present I have 5 domains. 3 of these are for one business (.eu, .es & .com) and 2 are for another (.co.uk & .com).

Now in the case of the first business the .eu and the .es point to the .com and in the second business the .co.uk points to the .com. Each business needs to be able to have a few subdomains added.

My main target customers are within the UK although some come from Europe and beyond.

Hopefully I haven't made this sound too confusing :shrug:

Any advice greatly received as Google searching this sort of thing just sends me round in circles and I would much rather go on personal recommendations.

Thanks in advance,

Neil
 
Without sounding like an advert, www.daily.co.uk have fantastic hosting plans and customer service like I've never known before.

I host all my websites with this company now using a Resellers Account.

DO NOT USE 123-REG.CO.UK THEY ARE TERRIBLE!!!!!!!!

When I started, I had a few confusions with holding pages. I hate phoning people, but I phoned them and the answered within a few rings and had the problem sorted in no time.

They are very good.
 
I have several websites with Titan Internet. They are very good with excellent customer service, excellent uptime and very fast transfer rates.

Their space and bandwidth allowance is fine for most normal websites (many give you tonnes of space which you never use) but not so generous for photography websites.

I also have a website with 1&1. Cheap but not as good in every other respect. I will be moving soon.
 
Slapo said:
I can't help with British hosting companies, but perhaps it would be worth mentioning how many customers do you expect on your website and whether you have any server side software with special needs.
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I would expect 50+ unique visitors to each site daily as a minimum (both sites have only been live for about a year so its early days to judge) and I have no special needs, if you mean online payment etc. If that helps.

mattyh said:
Surpass hosting do just fine, I've got various stuff installed with them, had very very little downtime, and it's reasonably priced too (I've got the $6 a month Power package). Unlimited subdomains, 10 addon domains etc etc.

www.surpasshosting.com
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They look interesting. The only niggle I have is that they are USA based as are the company I use now. I had heard that search engine results would be better with UK hosting - but that could be a load of old ***** as there is a fair amount of hot air bandied about on the internet :thinking:

Cavking said:
Without sounding like an advert, www.daily.co.uk have fantastic hosting plans and customer service like I've never known before.

I host all my websites with this company now using a Resellers Account.
Click to expand...

Now, they look pretty good - I'll look into that further and may PM you, cheers!

Oh, and I have NO INTENTION of using the other crowd - their reputation precedes them :bang:

Thanks, keep em coming please....
 
neilmac, do the research by yourself :) there are many good valuation, you need to pick which one that suit your requirements.

you could get at least £2 per month for the best website domain, all you need is to do research :)
 
d_pipa said:
neilmac, do the research by yourself :) there are many good valuation, you need to pick which one that suit your requirements.

you could get at least £2 per month for the best website domain, all you need is to do research :)
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Hmmm..... I think that's what I am doing :thinking:

Searching (or researching) blindly is a total minefield, but knowledgeable advice, such as on here, is much less painful.

Thanks anyway ;)
 
Ok I have used lots and lots of different hosts over the years and here is what I would recommend!

If your going to run a web intensive business and need round the clock support, 100% guaranteed uptime and fast fault resolution then www.rackspace.co.uk is the way forward, but be aware they are not cheap (we host my companies websites with them, with 100,000+ visitors/day)

For good quality and reliability at very affordable pricing I would strongly recommend www.tsohost.co.uk, very cheap, very expandable and fully functional, fanatical support (above and beyond what you would hope for).
 
I use *Streamlinenet for my sites under various packages. I am down to three sites now. The only time I have had trouble with them is that they some liked to charge me for extras whether I ordered them or not (but this was a few years ago) and since then I have always paid by cheque and this solved the problem. One of the things I like is that there are no (within reason) bandwidth restrictions.

* I included my affiliate link so I get a credit if you do sign up, if you don't want to use my link then just google Streamlinet.
 
neilmac said:
Now, they look pretty good - I'll look into that further and may PM you, cheers!
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No probs, definately look them up, I have my clients websites on the servers too and never received one complaint.

Everything Ive needed to do is there is the control panel.
 
Kerioak said:
I use *Streamlinenet for my sites under various packages. I am down to three sites now. The only time I have had trouble with them is that they some liked to charge me for extras whether I ordered them or not (but this was a few years ago) and since then I have always paid by cheque and this solved the problem. One of the things I like is that there are no (within reason) bandwidth restrictions.

* I included my affiliate link so I get a credit if you do sign up, if you don't want to use my link then just google Streamlinet.
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Cheers for that, they are one of the companies that I came across via Google and I have bookmarked them for more detailed research - I'll use your link if need be. :thumbs:
 
dmccabe said:
100% guaranteed uptime and fast fault resolution
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I would consider that as an impossibility, generally its 99.999% but you wont notice when the website is down - therefore the consider it as 100%. Plus, if its 100% uptime, they wouldnt need and fast fault resolution system.

How are they able to justify claiming no breakdowns whatsoever? Even the biggest, fastest, latest computer stutters every now and again.. :nono:

Tut tut.. :)
 
Yeah, but I've seen some firms boasting a backup server, so if the main one goes down it instantly switches to the backup server so it may be offline for a minute?
 
Adam. said:
Yeah, but I've seen some firms boasting a backup server, so if the main one goes down it instantly switches to the backup server so it may be offline for a minute?
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Which would be considered as 99.999% :)
 
I use www.34sp.com, fast customer support, ftp or frontpage extensions, pop email, plesk admin log in control and webstat, and also 34sp customer log in account control.
 
Steer clear of 1&1 whatever you do! I am on the look out for a new host at the moment too as mine is getting slower and slower, shame they are so damn cheap really or I would complain more :p
 
neilmac said:
I would expect 50+ unique visitors to each site daily as a minimum (both sites have only been live for about a year so its early days to judge) and I have no special needs, if you mean online payment etc. If that helps.
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Well, shared hosting should be able to handle that few visitors without a problem if it's any good.

What I also meant when I was asking about special need was:
- do you have an e-shop (i.e. an e-commerce solution) already done?
- do you need PHP, ASP.NET, Java jsp, Adobe Coldfusion or something else to run on those server?
- which database system is your solution being prepared for?

Most web hosting companies offer plans for PHP+MySQL or ASP.NET + MS SQL/MySQL.

That could help you choose as well.
 
Cavking said:
I would consider that as an impossibility, generally its 99.999% but you wont notice when the website is down - therefore the consider it as 100%. Plus, if its 100% uptime, they wouldnt need and fast fault resolution system.

How are they able to justify claiming no breakdowns whatsoever? Even the biggest, fastest, latest computer stutters every now and again.. :nono:

Tut tut.. :)
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Hey dont take my word for it: http://www.rackspace.com/whyrackspace/network/index.php

100% Network Uptime Isn't Wishful Thinking, It's A Guaranteed Reality

We know that every second your network is down you're losing opportunities, revenue and the confidence of your users and visitors. So we decided to do something about it. We designed and built the Zero-Downtime Network to minimize downtime and we are so confident about its capabilities that we guarantee we will give you money back if it goes down. And it works so well that we guarantee it.
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complexconfiguration-1.gif


Dedicated servers costing almost £1,000/month it wants to be 100% guaranteed.

Obviously though the guarantee doesn't cover things like you screwing up your server config. We have had down time but it was when our developers were running all our sites from one application pool and one of the sites had bad code, which then brought all our sites down. Even then though RS support were on it in minutes restarting IIS and letting us know where the problem was.

However the point is moot seeing as the OP has already said they are a bit too big for what he wants.
 
Money can buy lots of layers of redundancy, but any hosting service can go down even Rackspace's.

Neil, you say what your budget is nor how critical your hosting requirements are to your business so I'm going to assume you want a typical small business set-up with good technical support and are willing to pay for a good service.

With that in mind, I'd suggest taking a look at clook.co.uk. The service is robust and as long as you're happy with online support, it's available around the clock. You can get some feedback from existing customers via their forums. I've been with them for a few years and have both a reseller and VPS account with them.

I would advise against fuzioned. They're cheap 'n' cheerful, but I find them lacking when it comes to implementing change without impacting service.

Search engines and localised hosting... It makes sense to go with UK hosting, if you're targeting a UK audience, but I don't think hosting location is as big a factor as it used to be especially if you've got a .uk domain anyway.

If you want to do some background digging on a webhost then http://www.webhostchat.co.uk and http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ will be good places to start.
 
DigitalRelish said:
Money can buy lots of layers of redundancy, but any hosting service can go down even Rackspace's.

Neil, you say what your budget is nor how critical your hosting requirements are to your business so I'm going to assume you want a typical small business set-up with good technical support and are willing to pay for a good service.

With that in mind, I'd suggest taking a look at clook.co.uk. The service is robust and as long as you're happy with online support, it's available around the clock. You can get some feedback from existing customers via their forums. I've been with them for a few years and have both a reseller and VPS account with them.

I would advise against fuzioned. They're cheap 'n' cheerful, but I find them lacking when it comes to implementing change without impacting service.

Search engines and localised hosting... It makes sense to go with UK hosting, if you're targeting a UK audience, but I don't think hosting location is as big a factor as it used to be especially if you've got a .uk domain anyway.

If you want to do some background digging on a webhost then http://www.webhostchat.co.uk and http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ will be good places to start.
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Thanks for that Will, some useful info there - especially the forum sites :thumbs:

I have been with an apparently large US company for the last year (recommended by a friend who also uses them) and they are very cheap ($33 a year) for my small requirements. Obviously in the real world cheap is not everything and their support leaves a lot to be desired... I seem to have needed this more and more lately as there have been a few (too many) issues of subdomains not working etc.

The support emails seem to be standard answers which might as well finish off with "have a nice day" as they tell you everything has been tested and all is well when clearly it's not.

So I am now at the stage where I will move away from them, pay a bit more - probably around £100 a year and hopefully end up with a good setup.

With the help of the good people here I can do my research with a bit more understanding and direction.

Cheers, :thumbs:

Neil
 
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