Looking for a new host
I been with a bunch of different hosts over the past few years
- Hostgator (Good)- Reseller account, only positive things to say about them so far. Good phone/Chat/Email support. Great response time for there servers. ect...
- Dreamhost (OKish) - 1800+ domains on shard hosting?! decent email support, lots of features, funny newsletter, downtime every month, and ping time is getting slower each and every month.
- Media temple (Never again)- Complete and utter garbage, slow, lots of down time. Only used there servers for 2 months before moving.
- Hasweb (Bad) - Good for years and they botched a server move horribly. Lost everything; files, EMail, databases. ect... Luckily I had regulate backups, weeks of downtime and bugs afterwards. It was so bad that I didn't want anything to do with them ever again.
- Hostdime (Bad my association)- After my issues with Hasweb (sister company to Hostdime) I moved my domains away from there servers as well.
- GoDaddy (Annoying)- Never had a problem with there servers although I was only with them for a short period of time. The reason that I left was every month they would send me 10+ add on services emails, they would out right spammed me. In a single month I got +30 emails from GoDaddy on extra products that they wanted to sell me.
Currently Hostgator is at the top of my list and i have never had any problems with them so far. But I like to spread my websites across many different host just in case one of them goes down for any reason, diversity ect…
So I am in search of a new cheap shared webhost.
Things that I need
- Unlimited MySQL databases - A must have for settings up sandboxes and testing things.
- Unlimited e-mail aliases and Catch-All - Spam tracking
- Unlimited domains, sub-domains - Great for settings up sandboxes and testing things.
- Email, Chat support - I want instant gratification when something is wrong.
- POP3 (SSL), IMAP, - As much as I "like" your custom build web mail I would much rather download my mail to my own PC.
- SVN repositories - At lest one, it just makes my life easier.
- SFTP, CRON, MyPHPAdmin,
- LAMP style setup (Apache, MySQL, PHP5, ect) - It works and I don't care about anything else.
Things that I would like
- Phone support - Not a requirement as I prefer chat support. But it is nice to have someone to talk to when things are not working.
- Ruby/Python support - I am thinking about trying these languages out but my current host does not support it.
- The ability to see the current load on the server with history - Is it time to move to a new server yet?
- Opt-in emails about planned downtime - If I can't access my server I freak out, if I get an email telling me that I probably won't be able to access my server for a few mins at such and such time i'm much more calm.
Things I don’t care about
- Unlimited space - At most all my websites together are going to be less then 60gb
- Unlimited bandwidth - At most I would be using less then 100gb of transferrer a month across all my domains.
- On click installs - I don't care how many apps that I am not going to use that you support one click installs.
- CPanel - I don't care what frontend you have as long as you have one.
Things that I don’t want
- VPS (Virtual private servers) - I am not a server admin, I'm a programmer. I don't want to have to deal with upgrading the server software or dealing with any server issues. I don't care what Linux distro is install as long as it can serve my files to my users. I don't want to have to deal with server issues thats what I pay you for.
- Constant Add-on services emails - I'm looking at you GoDaddy, If I don't ask for it, I don't want to hear about it. Stop trying to up sale me.
Since I manly host very low traffic wordpress blogs and hobby projects I kind of don’t want to pay more than $20 or so a month, but then again I’d also love to never have to move again, so I’m flexible.
How about it? Any suggestions? :)
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