In addition, many hosts maybe ‘good’ on simple html or flash, but have weaknesses when it comes to databases (e.g. a blog).

Btw, a blog is edited ONLINE, not offline. That could you drive nuts with a stalling server.

I would suggest anyone to invest some time on a quick research how shared hosting works. And what’s the difference between shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers. There are quite a few short and sweet explanations out there (www). Do yourself a favour and invest 10 minutes of reading.

Next, when considering shared hosting ALWAYS check the provider’s TOS. There is stated when they start to suspend your site. Usually against the server resources. When you have high traffic spikes that eat up 15-25% of the CPU resources –> you’re fired.

Be careful with shared hosts that offer unlimited space and unlimited bandwith. Think twice.

(Managed) VPS solutions (the next step above shared hosting)will drive up your monthly costs in the range of approx. $ 40-60.

That’s the price of beeing ‘famous’ :-)

Dedicated solutions are in the $ 100’s range (monthly).

Why do I mention it ? For sure most of us have seen those professional photographer’s flash websites. They are pretty fast and huge images are shown as quick as a flash.

That can’t be achieved with shared hosting. When you like to do it on your own (hosting provider) –> check the prices above / year.
Now do your math and consider ‘ready made’ solutions. Like APE, among others, do offer it (INCLUSIVE fast hosting).

A lot of costs, all done just to save busy clients and busy (image) editors to save some seconds of their valuable time :-)

——-

One important things to check when comparing hosts: many (in my opinion most of ‘em) do like to camouflage their monthly fee a bit in their advertisings.
May read: ‘as low as $ 4.99 /month’. Sounds good ? Well, but often true only when you prepay some years ahead. When you like to pay monthly costs are very quick up $ 8.00 (or something like this)

Just an example: Hostgator (a well known provider) offers their base shared host service for $ 4.95. That way they are always listed in the ‘good and cheap’ rosters.
Now, go there and try to order. $ 4.95 only when you prepay 3 years ahead. A monthly payment schedule is close to $ 8.00.-

I personally don’t see this as ’serious advertising’.

Viceversa, Liquid Web (one of the best hosters out there) starts at $ 14.95.- At first glance it sounds expensive. And they are always listed in the ‘very good but more expensive’ roster.

Just because most ‘pundits’ out there don’t do their homework …

BUT, that’s the monthly costs at monthly payment. Just as it is is advertised (and most people would understand it that way). When you sign up for an annual plan (or quarterly, or bi-annual or whatever …) Liquid Web prices will drop and be close to all the other cheap hosters.

So, check twice when comparing web hosting prices.

Btw, http://www.liquidweb.com/ is a ‘must’ on Rob’s list, imho.

I recently run intos the same troubles as ‘Conscientious’.That’s why all that stuff is fresh in my memory. I didn’t like to waste my time on ‘host-hopping’ and did a very extensive research and comparision.

I’m with Liquid Web now, so far the best web hoster I ever had in 15 years on the web. (And I’ve their cheapest package !)

Although you always get what you pay for, they aren’t that costly as they may look at first glance. They are just serious. And I like companies that are serious in their advertisings.

And about 15 years on the web teached my one important thing: nobody is perfect and even the best hoster can have troubles, hickups, downtimes, etc… That’s not the problem.

The difference ? HOW its handled. In other word – SUPPORT.
I like my tickets see answered within MINUTES (not hours or days … or never at all *smile). And I like to speak to a support member who is a real pro and knows (by far) better than I know :-)

And I love it when the support asks ME (the client) if the problem is solved in MY opinion and if THEY are allowed to close out the ticket. A quite new experience to me.

Best,
Reini

I honestly find it a bit too easy to blame this on people wanting the cheapest hosting (even though that’s part of the problem); because a lot of people I know would be happily pay a bit more for something that actually works (I know I did – when I switched to Mediatemple I ended up paying more than double of what I had paid earlier).

Part of the problem is not only that people want the lowest prices, but also that there are all those tech “geniuses” who’ll advertize their fancy sites with a huge fluff of baloney (c.f. Mediatemple).

But there is literally no quality control online for hosting. Nothing. You can look around and read reviews, but at the end of the day, all you can do is pray (unless, of course, you’re an expert who knows what company to go to).

So what are people going to do? I know a ton of photographers who’d happily pay for hosting that works well – except that nobody has the slightest clue how and where to find it. So I’m a bit weary of blaming things on supposedly people not wanting to pay for hosting.

Of course, anything implemented badly is not going to work well. Apparently Mediatemple implements it badly. Most ISPs implement stuff badly – not robust enough, not enough backup, not enough fail-over, not enough capacity to deal with exceptional usage. That’s how they trim costs so they can offer services for lower prices because most customers look at price first, and only complain later that the cheap product they bought isn’t “good enough” when it fails. It’s very, very hard to explain to customers why they should pay more than rock-bottom-pricing for a more reliable service. Customers want Fast and they want Cheap and the other ISPs advertise that their product is just as fast and good as your (better) product, and less expensive (cheap) and customers believe the hype and go with the lowest price. In order to compete, you have to lower your costs (so you can sell for a lower price) and there goes the reliability and robustness. This problem exists at most ASPs and ISPs, at most levels of service from shared hosting to dedicated servers to broadband, etc.

You don’t know if your website host really has things under control, until things spin out of control. The reason I know that the clustered system at XO works as advertised is that I helped build it, and helped test it. For shared hosting I don’t think you will find a better engineered or better provisioned hosting platform. Sure, you can find cheaper hosting, but not cheaper *and* just as good (or better).

If you need more reliable/robust hosting than XO provides, you probably need to Akamaize your site.

I especially noted that updating my blog (which requires database communication) often was impossible in the evenings (Eastern Time), since it would just time out.

Clustered Hosting might work well in theory, but unless implemented properly, it works just as badly as non-clustered hosting.

All of the services you list are relatively cheap. As a result, they must make shortcuts in either “good” or “fast”. Both of these can lead to outages.

Most people don’t know how to evaluate a web host. They don’t know how to determine if a web host is good or not, if it is fast or not. They might check a few hosted sites from their computer, or read a few reviews, but in the end most pick a web host based on price, with perhaps a few positive recommendations (from people they know, or reviews) and that’s it.

If you want a site that doesn’t crash when your site gets slashdotted (or another site “on your server” gets slashdotted) you need a site that is hosted on a cluster. Clusters have many servers that access a database to get the info to respond to a webpage request. They usually also have a large cache of the most recently requested information, and deliver that information directly from the cache (no need to go look in the database). This makes them fast, and reliable even when one site on the cluster gets heavy traffic (slashdotted). See Clustered Hosting: A Better Hosting Technology a white paper from XC. Disclosure: I worked for XC (Concentric) and rolled out this product in 1997. I no longer work for, nor do I get any benefit from referring people to XO – in fact my own site is hosted on another service (cheaper, thus I’m giving up on “good” or “fast”, or both).

I really enjoy having Rob handle all the web stuff for my new site. It might be a bit more costly per month versus what I would pay if I did it myself…but then again, I’d have to take care of a lot of other stuff myself too. ;) Love that I don’t do that any more!

Not to prop a major competitor of Rob’s (if you read any photo rags you’ll recognize the tag) but one of their advertisements hits the nail on the head! The ad reads “I chose a career in photography to hone my web editing skills.”

That line says it all for me! If I’m going to be a successful photographer I should not be spending my time worrying whether I’m on a gigamajig server or a Fire3 Raidex Portal IP Host or whatever… I need to spend my time working on my marketing, my book, my clients, and even more than that MY PHOTOGRAPHY.

Thanks to Rob and his venture, I can do just that.

MySite is owned by United Online, who also own NetZero and Juno. So I don’t think they are going away, nor too small. The lowest cost packages mean very little in the way of site visit statistics, but I have found a way to live with that and get the information I need.

My mail and hosting were impacted by an 11 hour outage and I use IMAP for mail sharing across devices and machines. I’ve been getting duplicates for the past few days so that’s over 600 mail duplicates that I’ve had to sort and filter in the middle of arranging a large advertising shoot. Fortunately, I had a problem in the past which meant I had an alias as my primary address which was directing to my MT POP and a Gmail address.

Judge your provider by their worst hour. Boy, were MediaTemple found wanting.

Terry

Use the following tool to check out your site:

http://whois.domaintools.com/aphotoeditor.com

This tool is also good for seeing your SEO score and tells you how many alt tags are missing in your images.

Congrats on the award.

Terry Divyak

With MT, I fell for their promise of being able to deal with traffic spikes, but I never even saw what their backup system (if by “backup” you mean “saving some data every other blue moon, which then takes three days to restore your site”) was. If I had known, I would have never signed up with them.

Also, customer service certainly is important, but if you listen to a bunch of very friendly people for three days telling you things that obviously are not true… I’m just saying.

A good site to check out is http://www.findmyhosting.com/ – it has an annoying title, but you can get an idea what you can get for what you need. Always read the feedback and make sure to see which negative feedbacks are just because some people are… well, not very smart (my favourite bad Amazon review for an iPod still is a complaint that it broke when dropped on a concrete floor from several feet – and no, that was no joke). But there are some very obvious red flags; and you’ve just seen one for Mediatemple.

Mediatemple reminds me of the second company I worked for, a software company stacked with MIT computer science grads. They thought they had the best software idea, and in theory it did work very well. In practice, it didn’t. But because they were so convinced of their ideas, they never bothered to look into the problems. That’s Mediatemple, in a nutshell. They’ll be happy to show you pages of information, which is mostly useless for non-tech people; and I’m sure their new system has some huge flaw built right in (which someone with tech knowledge can probably point out easily).

But regardless, the bottom line is always TO BACK UP YOUR SITE REGULARLY (especially if you run a blog). Computers can and will break, and you don’t want to be stuck in limbo like me. Trust me. Had I known about their backup system I would have had backups every week. Well, you live and learn.

A key thing to remember about Dreamhost and any hosting in general is to not treat it as a backup. DreamHost in particular has had quite a few outages when they have lost customer’s data. It helps that they are open about it on their blog, but even their paid backup service should not be your only back up solution.

Most hosting companies offer some way of backing up either the entire website, or the files and the database separately, with you being able to download a zip/tar/gzip archive of everything in the end. You should either download those back ups manually from time to time or set up some sort of automated script to do it for you.