So...hosts, you say?

[Jondot]

I'm now looking at my options for future hosting, as my contract (haha, makes me sound like a solo artist...) with my current hosts is due to end pretty soon, and I'm getting pretty tired of the one-man-band approach to hosting.

Basically, I've been reading over some recommendations here, and Powweb seems to stick out as the best choice. I'm very tempted to go order a package while they've doubled the space and bandwidth, but I wanted to ask a few questions first.

Firstly, how do you rate the support staff? Are there plenty of them? Do they get stuff fixed pretty swiftly?

Secondly, how prone is the service to hackers, spammers and anything else like that? My current host seems to be riddled with illegal activity which leads to regular downtime while they drive them out like mice from a a maze of cheese...

Lastly, what kind of control panel are you offered? Looking at their features, it seems to me that they're offering their own replacement for cpanel x. If so, is it fine to use?


Thanks

 

[Burnout]

I used to administrate about 10 Powweb accounts, as we resold them to customers before attaining our own web server, so I think I can be of some use.

Firstly, how do you rate the support staff? Are there plenty of them? Do they get stuff fixed pretty swiftly?

They're 'okay'. They have tens of thousands of accounts, and due to the shared hosting setup, there is downtime every now and then. All in all I didn't have too many problems with the accounts, but when I did have to contact customer support it took an hour or so.


Secondly, how prone is the service to hackers, spammers and anything else like that? My current host seems to be riddled with illegal activity which leads to regular downtime while they drive them out like mice from a a maze of cheese...

Like I said, it's a shared hosting solution. Your server is shared with hundreds of other users, and if the wrong user does the wrong thing, it could affect all of the users on that server. The one 'common' problem I remember was certain clusters getting hit by DDoS attacks. Six months ago or so they did a lot of updates and changes though, so maybe they fixed that (I personally can not say either way). Downtime was generally minimal.


Lastly, what kind of control panel are you offered? Looking at their features, it seems to me that they're offering their own replacement for cpanel x. If so, is it fine to use?

They do use their own, in-house control panel, but it's fairly extensive and allows you to do everything cPanel would.

 

[Der Alta]

I've tried out a few of the "large and inexpensive" hosts around, and have been fed up with most of them. You get what you pay for. I used to have a nice little company that handled it all for me, and never had a major problem. The little problems never really created a hiccup.

I switched to Powweb to save myself 6 bucks a month, and have been riddled with Spam. Horrendously bad. 6-8 emails a day. All stemming from installing a small forum on my own site. I decided to uninstall my own forum to save on eliminate the spam.

I found that with a large shared hosting plan, that if another site gets blacklisted for sending spam, so do you. They black list the server. If you're on it, you're screwed. I for instance, cannot send an emali to any AOL account. The support staff replies with "we're working on it."

Avoid the cheap shared hosting plans.

 

[Jondot]

I used to administrate about 10 Powweb accounts, as we resold them to customers before attaining our own web server, so I think I can be of some use.

Firstly, how do you rate the support staff? Are there plenty of them? Do they get stuff fixed pretty swiftly?

They're 'okay'. They have tens of thousands of accounts, and due to the shared hosting setup, there is downtime every now and then. All in all I didn't have too many problems with the accounts, but when I did have to contact customer support it took an hour or so.


Secondly, how prone is the service to hackers, spammers and anything else like that? My current host seems to be riddled with illegal activity which leads to regular downtime while they drive them out like mice from a a maze of cheese...

Like I said, it's a shared hosting solution. Your server is shared with hundreds of other users, and if the wrong user does the wrong thing, it could affect all of the users on that server. The one 'common' problem I remember was certain clusters getting hit by DDoS attacks. Six months ago or so they did a lot of updates and changes though, so maybe they fixed that (I personally can not say either way). Downtime was generally minimal.


Lastly, what kind of control panel are you offered? Looking at their features, it seems to me that they're offering their own replacement for cpanel x. If so, is it fine to use?

They do use their own, in-house control panel, but it's fairly extensive and allows you to do everything cPanel would.

Really? That's interesting. I've had a lot of "Hmm, looks like an overseller", but I hadn't found an actual user. I really want to try and avoid that kinda thing now. I just assumed that as they're offering such large storage sizes that it'd be much fewer people per server.

I've tried out a few of the "large and inexpensive" hosts around, and have been fed up with most of them. You get what you pay for. I used to have a nice little company that handled it all for me, and never had a major problem. The little problems never really created a hiccup.

I switched to Powweb to save myself 6 bucks a month, and have been riddled with Spam. Horrendously bad. 6-8 emails a day. All stemming from installing a small forum on my own site. I decided to uninstall my own forum to save on eliminate the spam.

I found that with a large shared hosting plan, that if another site gets blacklisted for sending spam, so do you. They black list the server. If you're on it, you're screwed. I for instance, cannot send an emali to any AOL account. The support staff replies with "we're working on it."

Avoid the cheap shared hosting plans.

Yeah, I'm beggining to think I will. Ideally, I'd like to only be sharing my server with about 5 other sites. Of course, that's not going to happen (sadly), so I guess my best bet is to go find a smaller company who still have a reasonable ammount of staff. Yep, I'll be looking all night


But seriously, thanks for the help. I really needed some user opionions 👍