What do you look for in hosting?

piersk

Ok, those who know me know that I have been known to dabble in the realm of webhosting and I just wondered what people looked for? How much space/bandwidth etc? What kind of db (mysql/pgsql)? how many email addresses/ftp accounts? And how much would you pay?

vaaaska

You might read up about Textdrive.com (http://www.textdrive.com)

Dean and Jason made some major moves by giving people/developers what they wanted in hosting. They raised $40k in a week to buy equipment and stuff.

Nerds who done good. 😉

Elizabeth

There were a few things I looked for when I was switching hosts last time-

Uptime & reliability. This was first and foremost.
Control over our server. Because I was toying with the idea of getting a dedicated server, but I didn't have the time to hassle with it- I was lucky to find a webhost that let me control (to a point) what was on our servers, schedule cron jobs, set up databases, block IP addresses, that sort of thing. It's as close to having a dedicated server as you can get without worrying if the server will go down at 2 am.
Price. While we were willing to pay a little more for a high quality web host, this was one of the primary reasons for us switching in the first place.
Support. It's good to know that if there is a problem, there is someone somewhere working on it 🙂

[edit]Our current hosts offer unlimited emails, databases and 1000Mb space with 50 gig transfer[/edit]

goldbug

Originally posted by Elizabeth
T*Support. It's good to know that if there is a problem, there is someone somewhere working on it 🙂

Definitely. That's the exact reason I left my former host. They had sweet plans, but their support was (almost literally) nonexistant (didn't even respond to the BBB complaint I filed).

So yeah, I look for support (esp. via phone), and lately, PostgreSQL support.

piersk

Originally posted by goldbug
Definitely. That's the exact reason I left my former host. They had sweet plans, but their support was (almost literally) nonexistant (didn't even respond to the BBB complaint I filed).

So yeah, I look for support (esp. via phone)

Presumably then, for you guys, the hosting would need to be in the states?

goldbug

Originally posted by piersk
Presumably then, for you guys, the hosting would need to be in the states?

Not necessarily. I actually looked into a British company last time I was switching, and would've gone with them had their VDS setup been postgres-compatible.

Note: they were a British company, but had a normal "US" 1-800 number, so it didn't cost me anything to call them.

Elizabeth

Originally posted by piersk
Presumably then, for you guys, the hosting would need to be in the states?

Not necessarily- as long as someone is reachable via support ticket, I'm okay with that.

vaaaska

Me too, don't need to call support - unless they go down for a day or two then they can expect to hear from me via smoke signals as well (but this has never happened luckily).

dalecosp

Originally posted by vaaaska
Me too, don't need to call support - unless they go down for a day or two then they can expect to hear from me via smoke signals as well (but this has never happened luckily).

or FAX; I've been sorely tempted to send my ISP a fax about their reliability at times :rolleyes: