If you make money through the internet or just run a few hobby websites then no doubt you will have used quite a few hosting companies over the years. I’ve used about 10 different companies in the last 7 or 8 years and my usual thinking when staying with a hosting company was ‘if it aint broke, don’t fix it’ ie. I’ve only moved host when either when the company couldn’t do what I needed or when their support was really bad. More often or not I have moved host because of downtime or bad support.
There are a lot of things you need to look at when choosing a hosting company but for me the main ones are Price, Uptime and Quality of Support. The reason I left my last hosting company Servstra was due to a ridiculous amount of downtime, my sites were going down on a weekly basis and they couldn’t resolve it and didn’t even seemed interested in trying.
WiredTree
Since last July my server has been hosted with WiredTree. Although they do offer Virtual Private Servers, their main area of business is Managed Servers. I haven’t written many posts in my blogs raving about a company however in the 9 months of using WiredTree I am struggling to say a bad word against them. Not only has their never been any downtime, their response times are super quick. Whether my request was trivial or even if it was late or early the average response time for a support ticket is about 5-10 minutes. They really are a great company to host your websites with and I don’t see me leaving them at any point in the future.
WiredTree are not perfect though (what company is?), their biggest flaw is their price. Compared to other hosting companies which offer managed servers with similar specs they are very expensive but as with all things in life, you get what you pay for.
Here’s a breakdown of the package I ordered last summer :
Hardware
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 ** (Free Upgrade to E6420) **
2GB ECC DDR2
Primary Disk:
250GB SATA II 7200 RPM 16MB Cache
Backup Drive:
250GB SATA II 7200 RPM 16MB Cache
Additional Options
Control Panel : cPanel / WHM
Public Port Speed : 100 Mbs Public
Private Port Speed : 100 Mbs Private
Public Bandwidth : 2000 GB Transfer
Support Services
Fully Managed
24×7 Phone and Helpdesk
24×7 Proactive Monitoring
Proactive Updates
ServerShield Hardening
$299/month
$0 setup
At the time I decided to pay $199 for setup as it dropped my monthly fee down to $269 (which after 6/7 months proved to be a wise decision!).
Why I don’t mind paying a bit more
When I first starting building websites price was one of the biggest factors in choosing a host however once I get more established and started to make a living through the web my requirements changed. When your internet income is your bread and butter then you need maximimum uptime and not only that, when there is a problem you want it resolved as quickly as possible. That’s why I don’t mind paying a bit more. Of course, it’s good to have peace of mind knowing that any problem will be fixed when you need it to be.
I’m sure that there are people out there who have had problems with WiredTree however, touchwood, in the 9 months of using them support has been excellent and I have no qualms about recommending them to other webmasters.
Link : WiredTree