What makes a good host!

Hi gang,
I was perusing the web hosting forum and came across the Hosts To Avoid thread... which sparked this thread.

I think we've all had problems at one time or another with web hosts. Bad support and poor system management is what forced my partner and I to start our own hosting company. Over the past several years, I've started to notice a trend and I wonder if you have noticed it too.

It seems like most of the hosts that people complain about are fairly large businesses. In fact, every time my partner and I have been burned, it was by a large and impersonal hosting company. Since I am obviously biased, I'd like to ask everybody a question.

Would you rather host your site with a large hosting corporation or a smaller company (not a reseller but one that owns their own servers) and why?

I personally prefer smaller more personal hosts to the big guys and here is why:

* They are typically more competitive.

* With the smaller guys, the owner is typically one of the people running the servers and answering the phones and is normally easy to get a hold of. If you are talking directly to the person(s) who calls the shots, you have a better chance of resolving any problem you have.

* They are more affected by individual sales which really does wonders for customer service and again plays up their competitveness.

* It's been my personal experience that smaller companies have people who are happy to be running the business... not a bunch of ticked off people who answer phones all day and have no direct ties to the well-being of the company besides receiving a paycheck.

* You can typically receive more help from contacting a smaller hosting company than you would contacting a larger one. I know that I have helped debug, create, and set up some of our client's PHP scripts because I know it will make them happy, and happy customers rave about you to their friends Have you ever tried asking the customer support rep of a big company why your while loop doesn't exit? LOL

What do you think?

You're points are all valid, providing the owner of the company is actually technically literate and has the experience to administer the servers properly.

With the proliferation of dirt cheap dedicated servers from vendors like rackshack and nocster the market is being flooded by teenie hosts who lease a server and for $80-120/month, fill it with users who are paying $5/month for insanely large packages. They then bail out when the support burden gets to high and they realize those dirt cheap packages don't bring in enough money to deal with it. They shut the box down and their clients are left swinging in the wind.

Obviously this is a personal pet peeve of mine since it gives the industry a bad name and tends to turn users away from the smaller hosts like us to the "big boys" because they know they are not going to just up and bail on them.

Personally I think great support and open communication channels between the host and the clients is the best foundation you could possibly have in this industry. Clients understand that outages happen, hardware fails etc and they tend to understand if you are open and honest about any outage. You'll also find they are more tolerant of smaller issues if they know what is going on.

Well put! I can't recall the number of little companies i've seen that give away hosting for pennies then end up tanking. I also think that there are plenty of equally inept large hosting companies out there.

I think I read somewhere on this board where somebody said something to the effect of:
"they offer only a 99% uptime garuantee!"

It's been my experience as well, that everybody (from the huge to the miniscule hosts) experiences outages from time to time. It's not really a question of if the service will go un-interrupted, but of how the company handles service interruptions when they do occur. I agree, it all seems to boil down to customer service and communication.

Funny you stated this, just recently we had one of our resellers decide they no longer want to offer hosting, so we took over their server and upgrading all the hosting clients to our rack rate. It's tough when you get these type of hosting companies in the market, because in the end, we end up doing all the support for them.

We're not a large (staff based) company in vegas, at least not yet. We're 3 1/2 on full time staff (partners and 1 network admin (pt)) and the rest are outsourced. Support is run by all of us, I'm 2nd string, so all support emails and calls go to the boys, I get the software and marketing issues (other than ensim..)

Smaller doesn't always mean low prices, we are at the average rates, but it does include 24 hour support, on-site support (email) as well as regular updates amd maintenance to servers (software, etc... ).

Any hosting company that gives valuable support is the way to go...

~k