For several years now I have done much of my hosting with Bluehost in Utah. They have always been reliable and I have been quite satisfied with them.

However, over the course of this year, their performance has been steadily declining. I am now thinking I need to start moving websites. I think they have become victims of their own success, and their infrastructure is not keeping up with their growth. I am experiencing both downtime, slow response to problems, AND a broken (and apparently really hard to fix) statistics gathering process, making it very difficult for me to track site performance.

Does anyone here wish to comment on the good experiences they have with their hosting sites? Or, perhaps, to comment on the BAD experiences they have had?

I have had a lot of bad experiences with a lot of different hosting services at all kinds of price levels; finding a good one is fairly difficult, sad to say.

Any comments appreciated.

I believe that always the coporate accounts get better service. Seems to be linked to their perceived clout. (I dont publish or manage any web sites).

End

I'm happy with mine, I host myself with my own 1U servers at a colocated facility. It's really the only way to go instead of sharing web services with 200 or more other people on the same server.

www.nearlyfreespeech.net

not used them but they seem to support OSS approaches, and stand for much the same things

This type of question is asked thousands of times on various mailing lists and forums. And you'll get a thousand different answers.

As you've experienced, budget hosting companies come and go, and their level of service waxes and wanes. Budget hosting companies are on very tight margins, and the only way to make money is to a) obtain as many customers as possible, b) minimize hardware costs, and c) minimize staffing costs. This sort of pressure leads to the inevitable curve of decline in service, support, and reliability.

So you have several choices:
1) find a new provider that is earlier in the curve and ride it as long as you can
2) stick with your current provider, hoping they get better
3) reset your expectations and increase your budget to business class
4) host your own

I've had problems with business class too. In fact, I haven't noticed much difference in quality of service between high cost and low cost hosting services.

I don't want to host my own, because quite frankly I don't want to deal with the security issues associated with a web server. Let someone else do it. While I am pretty sure I could lock it down and keep it secure, it is just one more thing I would have to attend to. I have enough things I have to attend to.

Absolutely.

And apart from the technical issues and that of knowledge, remember not many countries have this kind of physical facility or an internet service for practical self-hosting purposes. I doubt whether I could cost-effectively hire out servers or buy my own on a rack in a data center and secondly there is always a perennial bandwidth crunch and lack of decent power backup facilities issue with most ISPs which might be worse than hosting on a shared budget host located in the US.

People in the "First World" countries seem to have got used to the idea that anybody can buy and host their own server. In many places, this option is simply not available, otherwise I'd have done it myself.

All good and valid points. I suppose like all endeavors, there are the good, the bad, and the ugly. The luck is in finding the good.

jiml8 - what are yout basic requirements and nice to haves?

Some people have been very happy with Dreamhost. Perhaps they will be worth a look.

Before I hosted myself, I felt the same way. Then I soon realized that these hosting solutions generally don't keep up with security and their updates on a timely basis. I've recently dealt with a few hosting providers at a previous employer where we needed a few outside hosting for the company and clients in which they were still running Fedora Core 3 and 4. Apache, PHP among many others were severely outdated.

Also to mention when you host with these types of providers, they can have as many as 400-500 other users on there, which creates more vulnerabilities if they allow remote login access via ssh, etc. It's just opening a new can of worms for that one person to have a weak password which then affects everyone else they share a server with.

Also if you host yourself, you can lock down to suit your own needs instead of a hosting provider that might have to leave open ports and other applications that you may not even use, only making the server you're hosted on more vulnerable that might affect you if compromised.

I'm not saying go buy a server and rent some co-located space, but you can easily get dedicated servers where you are the root user with full control rather than letting some high school graduate administer your box that learned by reading scripts when you call in for support.

Trust me, the trade off for a few more bucks per month and full control by you is well worth it. I secure my own servers, most of it's automated even except the package updates which is probably once or twice per month on average, taking a whopping 10-20 minutes of time.

The service at icdsoft.com is second to none. I've been serving there for 5 years and they are really great. Excellent customer service and pretty cheap. Something like $120/year for 10GB; $72/1GB or something like that;

Standard LAMP servers. Some kind of accelerator - (they run faster than my development server).

If you use them, could you let me know so I can get a referral discount next time I renew?