Categories
Website How To's

Best Hosting Options for Your Website

Per a recent post about BlueHost Hosting, I have started doing some research on other hosting options.  What I’ve found has been quite interesting.  I’ve discovered, and re-discovered, how important it is to select a proper hosting service for your website.  Here are some of the things to look for in a good hosting company:

  • Customer service: How easy is the company to contact?  Do they use live chat, phone, or just email? The more ways there are to contact and communicate, the better.
  • Extensive and easy to understand FAQ’s: most hosting companies have this but how easy are they to follow?
  • Bandwidth or Data Transfer of 50gb+/month
  • Storage: 50gb+
  • 99.9% Up-time Guarantee
  • Email:
    POP3 accounts
    Preferably unlimited email addresses
    Mail forwarding
    SMTP
    Spam filtering

For blogs and content management systems (CMS):

  • All of the above features
  • PHP 5.0+
  • Fantastico: the best thing about Fantastico that I’ve seen is easy installation of WordPress
  • Unlimited domains allowed
  • How many MySQL databases are allowed? Preferably unlimited
  • FTP access to your hosting space


One that I’ve found that I’m exploring more is Host Gator.  It meets all the requirements above and seems pretty user-friendly.

I’ll be interviewing them soon to find out more…Stay tuned!

Categories
Website How To's

I’m SO MAD about Bluehost!

Yesterday I was on the phone with Bluehost.com for over an hour and a half trying to get things cleared up with a couple sites.  I’ve been working with Bluehost for over 2 years and until about June of this year things seemed to be working fine.  However, in late June I started getting CPU errors multiple times per day.

One of the problems has been that I had a programmer build one of my sites who is now on a two year sebaticle.  He did some great things with my family vacation destination site but now those “great things” are out of date and really screwing things up.  I’m getting CPU errors over and over again, which is effecting business who knows how much.

What to do…?

I’ve submitted a project at Elance.com for a programmer who can help but it’s been really hard to find one I trust or can communicate with.

I’ve thought about changing to a different hosting company but am not sure how to do that or which are most reliable.

Does anyone know anything about the following:

Hostgator.com

MediaTemple.net

Thanks for the feedback – I’m so frustrated!