We use Future Hosting, They've responded to every ticket inside of 10-20 minutes (24/7) so communication hasn't been an issue. As far overselling, we use dedicated and semi dedicated solutions so, overselling isn't really an issue either. How ever most shared hosting plans are vastly over sold and space + bandwidth isn't the issue (those are cheap) it's cpu and ram resources that cause the problems.

I'm looking for a reliable web host...anybody have got recommendations, please PM me.

I would give my main host "hostnine" a 9 out of 10. They are a great hosting company and have great uptime and customer service, they are just sloppy with there server upgrades.

I'm with SliceHost (http://www.slicehost.com/). For my needs, they are absolutely awesome. For $20 a month, you get a 256MB, 10GB disk, VPS slice.

Their customer service is great, and I've never had problems with their hardware or bandwidth.

As for the price, if you have more than one site, you can host them all on a single slice. So, in the end you may end up paying only a little more than what you'd be paying for super cheap per-site hosting elsewhere.

i cant comment, since i own a web hosting company. all i can say is, that you do your research

I was looking for web host last week and I can tell you what I don't like about web host:

Web host that tells you a low price and then hide somewhere (usually at the last step of a checkout) that this price is available only for paying 3 years in advance.
If that's not all, they then slap you with a $50 "setup" fee if you are paying monthly.
I never choose a host that hides information like this, even if everything else is right. Who knows what they will sneak up next.

Web host that, if you ask for SSH access, gives a respond that sounds like "you are a potential problem" and asked for all your government issued ID and photo. For goodness sake, if web host can't secure their server, stop treating everyone as terrorist.

Web host that answer question with a standard template, DESPITE information being provided further down the email. They just read the first few words and decide, "This is respond template 999", fire the email, next support ticket. No wonder they keep going round the circle in support tickets.


So ... I'm still searching for that elusive web host. If know one I certainly love to hear about it.

Web host that, if you ask for SSH access, gives a respond that sounds like "you are a potential problem" and asked for all your government issued ID and photo. For goodness sake, if web host can't secure their server, stop treating everyone as terrorist.

Problem is giving someone SSH access is potentially unsecuring the server. Even with jailed shell access the potential for "accidental screwups" is fairly high.
Trusting users is always a dangerous occupation

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Problem is giving someone SSH access is potentially unsecuring the server. Even with jailed shell access the potential for "accidental screwups" is fairly high.
Trusting users is always a dangerous occupation

Do not disagree ... though it's the attitude and perception that can turn a pre-sale chat one way or another.
And how does holding in hand some ID helps anyway? If the host don't trust me with ssh, I don't trust them with a copy of my ID, who knows how many part-time staff have access to that information.

Originally Posted by opensourcer

And how does holding in hand some ID helps anyway? If the host don't trust me with ssh, I don't trust them with a copy of my ID, who knows how many part-time staff have access to that information.

That's fair comment, especially for the bigger hosting providers. I'm not sure how having some form of id helps either.
Knowing who they are, isn't likely to demonstrate that they know what they are doing.

Some of the customers we have can screw things up big time just using cPanel or Plesk . Goodness only knows what they could do with shell access!

I have got two shared hosting accounts, one with Hostgator.com and another with Hawkhost.com. I have been using both of them for over an year now and have never had any problems. I have seen many people post on forums that Hostgator oversells but as long as it doesn't cause any troubles to your site, it's okay with me.

And coming to their support, the response time of both of the companies is good. But since I have used their support only a few times each, I can't tell more about it. I rank both of them 10/10 since I haven't had any problems with them so far. One thing I don't like with Hostgator is their inode (FYI, a inode is one file created on the server when you upload, change files on your account) limitation, they ask you to limit your inode count to 250,000 for their Baby hosting plan. If it exceeds that count, you may run into the trouble of getting your account suspended.

What's the use in offering over 500GB of disk space when you are limited by inode count? With 250,000 inode limitation, I guess you can host around 100 or so wordpress blogs with some good number of plugins and themes. Then again, 100 blogs is a big number to be hosted on a shared hosting account. A normal webmaster never gets to use that many blogs unless he is working on a big project, in which case he should either go for a VPS or a dedicated server. The CPU resources usage terms and inode count limit kind of terms suggest you not to get fooled by the amount of disk space and bandwidth offered by hosting providers.