This is very much a new portal, so please do bear with us whilst it is in its infancy.
The TekSalon concept is essentially to pull together the information needed by the webmaster/webmistress to successfully manage a successful website. It covers the full gamut of issues: from hosting, to site development, from site promotion to security.
Hosting Awards 2005
On an annual basis the TekSalon staff get together to review the performance of all the hosts we have use or have significant contact with. The review team is headed by Jenni Harrison, a prolific writer on the hosting issue.
The hosts are measured against a list of criteria, with stablity, uptime and support responsiveness being prime considerations.
We use many different hosts, for different purposes (not all clients needs are the same). These tend to come down though to two basic hosting types: single website hosting, and VPS-type accounts. The reviews are organized accordingly.
SINGLE SITE HOSTING
Two hosts have been oustanding during this period:
1) HostMySite / SmarterLinux
To replace Pair as our #1 'single site' host takes an exceptional effort, but these guys have been awesome throughout. We signed up 15 months ago with a nuke site on their Linux platform. First off, they spent 30 mins on the phone with us to help us get it going: all issues due to our own lack of basic Linux knowledge. On $7.95 per month that's well beyond the call of duty! Since then we've had no downtime that we've noticed (and we do tend to notice VERY quickly). Performance is excellent, and on the handful of occasions we've called them (yes, there's phone support) they've been there for us. 10 out of 10.
2) Pair Networks
Rock solid. Again, we've never noticed any downtime. Performance is excellent.... not a glitch in sight. Pair are the bedrock of quality hosting in my opinion.
VPS/MULTI ACCOUNTS
1) Servint
The only real problem we had was the well known fibre cut last year which hurt (we have some of our most important sites there). They've been excellent apart from that. Support is excellent (they are always there when we call) and uptime is also excellent. Not the cheapest, but well worth the money.
2) RShosting
Smaller companies CAN deliver really top notch service, which is what we've had from RS. You can often measure a provider by the quality of the support, and RShosting have been responsive, friendly and helpful from day one. Uptime is superb, and speed equally impressive.
Honorable Mentions:
- Openhosting.Co.Uk... another lesser known and smaller host, but well established and a good provider.
- AxisHosting... Tina's new company. Hopefully she'll carry on where she left AffordableHost, because the uptime we had was excellent.
- Xcalibre... we've been with these a long long time. They are quietly efficient. The sort of host we hardly notice because they deliver the goods. A safe bet.
- DixieSys... we don't hear too much of them either these days, but we should, because they are sound. Good hosting again here, with no downtime we can recall.
New Kids On The Block:
The following are relatively new sign-ups for us, but are showing real promise: Kualo, PowerVPS
HOSTS WE WOULD AVOID
We don't like this section, because it's usually too far easy to criticise hosts, and there are plenty of people doing that. However, we feel that a couple of hosts have gone well beyond the line in terms of letting us down as customers:
1) We would certainly avoid Web Host Pro (Dinix). Why? There's a mega thread of crying ex-customers in the 'Host Down' section of WebhostingTalk.Com (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showt...threadid=387709). It's worth a read!
2) The same applies to EasySpace. We have suffered horrendous support from them, sometimes waiting for days for a response and then getting a "copy and paste" unhelpful answer. But that is only the start of it. A lengthy thread, again on WHT, gives you an idea (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showt...threadid=347347)
Disclaimer: these are OUR experiences, recorded honestly. We are not attempting to rank hosts via statistical criteria.
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