Website hosting

[Igotsoul4u]

Im currently putting together a website but i need to find a really good host. I am not even sure what a good host is to be honest. I need the site to be fast, reliable, and whatever else. I will be putting up to 300 mp3's into some sort of player and i don't want it to take forever to load. Thanks my main concern. I need people to go to the site and instantly hear the music. It would be horrible if someone navigated to the site and had to wait more then 10 seconds for something to happen.

[autodidactic]

I've been using www.hostmonster.com and am very satisfied.

[theblue1]

For my clients, I tend to put them on GoDaddy. But GD appears to use some sort of prioritization scheme. Maybe. At least, that's how it seems. When I go to a GoDaddy hosted site that hasn't had many visitors lately, the initial response time is a little laggy (as though it's being uncompressed or dragged up from some back server). Once there've been a few visitors, however, response times seem fine to me.


[Now, one might think this is a browser caching issue I've misunderstood -- but I'm all over browser caching issues. Aggressive caching drives me nuts, so I always turn it off or as far down as practical. I keep IE set to absolute zero caching and Firefox as low as it can go -- it says it's off but it clearly is still doing some caching, since I often have to force a refresh if the web page file hasn't updated but other content has. When you set IE to always load fresh, it really does. And if you dig in far enough, you can actually get Safari/Win to load fresh each time -- but you really don't want to, as it slows to an absolutely unusable crawl on any kind of complex site. I have never seen such slow loading/rendering. But it is mostly standards compliant -- mostly -- and it does have that cool 'brushed aluminum' bezel chrome. ]


ANYHOW... for mission critical stuff (my own site ) I use the more expensive Crystaltech.com (They are in Arizona -- but they do not seem to be a bunch of tweakers, despite the name. ) It seems to be a very well run company, service is very solid and they are very forthcoming with information about that service. They are the only host I've known that will tell you if your site was down for, like, five minutes. Everyone else seems to hope you just won't notice. That said, they're certainly not the cheapest guys on the block. You can get nearly as many features and bandwidth for a little over $4/mo from GoDaddy as I pay $17/mo for at Crystaltech. (I do, however, have an account there that allows me to host a number of domain names on the same site and use those domain names for email accounts.) But whenever I sign someone new up over at GD, I find myself thinking... I could just move everything over and... but I'm not ready yet. One thing -- if you don't need server side programming/databases and the like, Crystal tech has their own aprx $4/mo account that doesn't have nearly as many features or b/w as a GD account but offers whatever these nearly intangible advantages of CT are... See? I'm starting to second guess myself again.

[DSD_Mastering]

I've been with Blue Host for a while and love it!

Regards,
Bruce

[quincyg]

someone at gs turned me on to canaca.com

good and cheap.

[MotifCity.Com]

I have been a software developer/project lead for about 13 years. I have used Alentus.com exclusively for all my sites and client sites. They are second to none--especially if you're doing PHP or ASP.NET sites. Their support team is amazing (you can email them at support@alentus.com at ANY hour and they will reply within about 15 min tops--no joke, try it). They also host my site, motifcity.com.

If you go with Alentus, PLEASE use this URL:

ASP.NET Web Hosting, SharePoint Hosting and SQL Hosting - complete Windows Hosting Services

Regards,

Mark

[Igotsoul4u]

thanks peoples!!!! Sometimes I wonder what I would do without this site!!!! Long live gearslutz.

[Jake 2.0]

Happy go daddy customer for over two years now. Jantelis.com

[theremin]

hostmonster.com and blue host are owned by the same company.

i would like to add another +1 to the both of them. :) They have been great, are cheap, reliable, and have plenty of tools and options to expand your site. I build all of my own sites and most places lack either a current version of php or have other restrictions that limit what I can develop. Hostmonster has had everything and when I have needed something else, they have accomodated me. I still one day plan to host my own server, but that is a ways down the road and for now hostmonster has been awesome :)

S!

[taktheride]

dreamhost. i share it with two friend so its not so expensive. they allow you to host unlimited domains. its always fast and we have like 2 TB of transfer a month, which we've never come close to needing.