Posts Tagged ‘hosting’

Web Hosting – why you should avoid Hosting.com

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

My web hosting company used to be called HostMySite.com until few years ago when it was bought out by Hosting.com.  I have Linux basic plan.  Since Hosting.com took over, the quality of service has gone down dramatically.

Now I will abandon ship soon.  Do not buy from hosting.com.

Here are the specifics:

  1. Every time a new client signs up, several features on the control panel don’t work, like directory browsing.   I have to call and have them fix it.  This seems like a setup script issue, and I’ve notified them, but it’s not fixed.
  2. Database time and server time are off.
  3. I’m noticing that in some cases PHP Session variables are overwritten by global variables.  A serious systematic problem that poses security threat.  This a problem with hosting.com’s installation of PHP, not PHP itself.
  4. Their PHP installation does not parse ISO characters properly.  It was fixed only after I asked them about it.
  5. They stopped supporting on-click WordPress install, which is fine for people like me but not for many others.
  6. Tech support wait time has increased.
  7. The features and capacity are dismal when you consider the above-average price,  faulty setups, and security holes.

I don’t mind paying above average for good service.  I also don’t mind having troubles for cheap products.  However, hosting.com is sub-par quality at above-average price.  Stay away.

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New site launched – AENA

Friday, June 26th, 2009

A project of mine launched today: www.aenac.com.   It was in collaboration with Adelheid at CZA Design.  She does the design, I do the  coding.

A Page from AENA

A Page from AENA

We had quite a difficult time with the client’s hosting service.  The original hosting company ran PHP4 by default, which was okay because you can let it run PHP5 by using .htaccess file.  Also their idea of preventing directory listing was to put a blank index.htm file into every directory…  that’s just wrongheaded.  The biggest problem was that MySQLi was not supported, so I gave the client an option of editing my code, but they found a new hosting company.  With the new one, something was screwy with the FTP connection, which kept dropping connection on me.  After providing them log files, screenshots, etc, the support gave me the following ultimatum:

It might be the issue with the network connection which you have used. Hence, I suggest that you to try to use different network connection and try to connect the FTP in different computer.

Also, please make sure to disable the firewall connection and disable the antivirus and try to upload the files again from your end. Please let me know if the issue persists.

Hmm, if I have no problem connecting to 5 other hosting services, why would this be my problem?  Why would I ever want to disable my firewall and antivirus?  Thankfully they had a decent file manager through their control panel, so the problem was averted, but using FTP is so much easier.

I always recommend my hosting company Hostmysite.com even though I get no kickbacks from them (unlike people who recommend DreamHost…) and it’s not the cheapest service around.   Their support is awesome –  a real person picks up the phone when you call support!  No navigating through the maze of phone system.  It’s a cliche but so true — you get what you pay for.

Anyway, enough of my gripe.  In the end it worked out; glad to have it live.

Update August 2010 — Ever since hostmysite.com was purchased by hosting.com, the quality has deteriorated drastically.  I no longer recommend it and is considering moving my hosting elsewhere.

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