looking for 4G hosting options

[james438]

I wasn't sure where to post this one. I'm currently a little frustrated with my GoDaddy Hosting service. I have 4G Hosting which has a lot of perks namely that I can use one hosting service for an unlimited number of websites. The frustrating thing right now is their customer service. If my site loads quite slowly for a few hours each day and I file a ticket with them their policy is to not investigate if when they look the site loads just fine. Intermittent downtime then becomes an issue that they largely won't deal with and you can imagine how frustrating that can be for some people.

So I giving serious consideration to changing my hosting service. I am guessing there are not too many people with 4G needs like myself, but does anyone know of any good 4G hosting services out there?

This is a bit of a big decision for me because I usually buy a few years hosting service at a time to save on costs. Before I paid for individual hosting service on a monthly basis for three websites. I think one of them was on a yearly basis. It was rather complicated. Using one hosting service for 4 domains is less expensive and much easier to maintain.

[djr33]

What's 4G? What features do you need? I've used GoDaddy for years-- cheap, generally reliable, and indeed truly awful customer service-- you may often wonder why you bothered to call tech support. They lost my data one time when I upgraded my plan, and it took me several weeks of bothering them on the phone to get someone to finally go in the back room where they keep the backups to restore the files. So I have my reasons for using GoDaddy (mostly that I assume I won't need to contact customer service, and it's generally cheap). And I do have multiple sites on one host; it just took a bit of reworking (.htaccess) to make it work out. Most hosts will allow multiple sites on one host; only some odd ones (like GoDaddy) try to trick you into paying more per site.

So aside from the detail of 4G (given that I'm not sure what you're requiring), it shouldn't be hard to find a host that can let you do what you need, and it should be relatively cheap. I don't have anything in particular in mind, but I know it's out there.

[james438]

Well, I might have been tricked into paying more again, sigh. 4G hosting is 4th generation hosting. GoDaddy made a big deal about it a few years back when it came out. They seem to have removed the articles they had on it. I find I have to update the links I have to their site more often than I would like. I am currently looking at their other hosting plans and seeing if I want to downgrade, stay with my current plan, or go with another hosting company.

How long have you been using GoDaddy? What hosting plan do you use? I notice that in an effort to be user friendly the details of their different hosting plans has been pruned significantly. Yay for user friendliness...

[djr33]

I've been using GD forever, first for domains then for hosting, then I stopped using the hosting, and now I have a secondary hosting account (that is, I have another account with another host too).
I have one of their basic plans, can't remember what it's called, but it's not anything special-- linux hosting, I think the second level.

[james438]

Thanks for your feedback. I suppose I'll stick with GoDaddy hosting for a while longer.

My personal website is my hobby site and it is merely frustrating when it goes down, but when one of the other sites I have that are used by my church or a restaurant go down that is a bigger deal. When my income tax returns come in I plan on reevaluating my hosting plan with them. My current plan has a little less than a year to go.

[djr33]

To be honest I continue to use GoDaddy out of laziness. It works well enough for my purposes (and I haven't had too much downtime in general, luckily-- that might make me change hosts if it became a problem), and it would be a lot of effort to move the sites. Plus the domains are hosted there, so it's easy. But again, that's just laziness.

I'm certain there are better (and equally cheap) hosts out there. So if you're up for looking around a bit, don't take my comments here to suggest you should stick with GD. But if you do, you can probably make it work. Maybe the downtime is related to the particular plan? I'm just on their basic shared hosting, so maybe that's more reliable? I don't know...

[Beverleyh]

Hmmm, yes GoDaddy. I've known worse (one [free] webhost I tried many, many years ago literally just vanished overnight, taking my website with it - that was fun) but I've also known better. I worked with them for a year then moved elsewhere because I found their customer service a bit lapse.

My current web host is pretty good - they respond within an hour or so and if there is a glitch, generally fix it in a few hours. I have 2 separate accounts with them, purchased 7 years apart - one for older php4 sites, and one for newer php5/eCommerce sites - and there is a marked difference in features/limits. I got a lot more for my money on the older one (which they continue to honour at the original price - kudos to them) whereas on my newer account, while the CP us much fancier and database capacity is much bigger, the quantity of dbs is halved and the number of domains/sub-domains I can host is capped. The restrictions mean that I tend to offload simple sites into the older zone to free-up space in the new one for bigger projects, but it works well for me and I'm glad I have that option.

You'll probably find a lot of that nowadays - reduced features compared with your older/current hosting plan, but still comparable with today's offers - but if it means improving the quality of service and uptime, its definitely something to consider.

[ajfmrf]

I have two domains with Domania .I personally know thw guy that owns it.He bought out a few smallhosting companies I used in the past.Here is a place to check them out.http://forum.domania.net/index.php

[james438]

What is the hosting service that you use Beverlyh?

[Beverleyh]

awardspace.com, on their Web Pro Plus packages - there's a discount on sign-up but their renewal prices are on the bottom right of the home page.

I was going to suggest their basic plan to you but just spotted that it now only covers 2 hosted domains - it used to be 5 :(

Here's their comparison page : http://www.awardspace.com/web-hosting/free-shared-hosting-main/compare-shared-hosting-plans

[james438]

That does look good. I will seriously consider them. How often do you get downtime with their hosting service? Do you know what version of php they use (5.3.14, etc.)? What version of imageMagick do they offer?

To show what version of ImageMagick you have use:


<?php
header('Content-Type: text/plain');
system("convert -version");
?>

djr33, it is a bit difficult to change hosting providers. I've been using GoDaddy since 2005, which is also when I started getting into web design.

[djr33]

Yeah, I know what you mean.

[Beverleyh]

On my newer account (almost a year old) I can choose from php 5.3.6 and 5.2.17 (on my old one I can choose from php 4.4.4, 5.2.5, 5.3.6 and php 6)

ImageMagick 6.3.7

I havent ever seen any downtime while Ive been with them and I'm online most days. They report 99.9% uptime which I think is one of the higher figures I've seen. There have been a few times where DB connections have dropped or have been a bit slow but a quick email had it rebooted and fixed within an hour.

Hope that helps

[james438]

Oddly enough the language versions are all a step down. The prices are better and the lack of downtime, customer service, and maintenance also look better than GoDaddy.

I would like to change over. I'll look it over some more, but I'll probably move on over to them in a month, give or take.

[Beverleyh]

Forgot to say, you can also edit the php.ini file (well, a reduced version) but you can tweak up things like upload_max_filesize and post_max_size

Also, in case you want to use cURL or RSS or setup payment channels for shopping carts, you'll need to ask for outbound connections to be enabled on your account - they are disabled by default on their shared hosting - but again, submit a ticket, and within an hour the connections are enabled.

[Beverleyh]

Let me know if you want me to run any tests on your behalf :)

I just checked with them and they can confirm that they are planning on introducing php 5.4 soon - no set timeframe but it is on the cards.