Web Hosting

I currently have hosting with two domain companies. This site is with Host Papa and my other two sites are with Host Monster. I will very soon be moving the other two over to Host Papa, even though I have not completed my evaluation of them. Host Monster is down far too often causing too much work on my end and too much down time for my users.

Here is my overall review of the service I have received from Host Monster:

Price

$6.95 per month for their basic service. This is a fairly good price, but you need to buy 2 years of hosting to get that price. They will also register your domain name for you. The price is good. There are some lower, but not many that have as many services to offer. B+

Customer Service

I have often used the customer service. The offer it in more than one form. They have phone support, chat support, and email support. I've never used the email support.

Phone support I only used twice. It was fine, but not spectacular. The tech on the first call was somewhat knowledgeable. Better than you usually get in phone support, including when I was one of the people answering the phones. The second guy was not so knowledgeable. I had to explain to him what I needed of him, it took him 20 minutes to do a 1 minute fix, then misunderstood what I needed and wasted another 10 minutes trying to do something else before I realized what was going on and stopped him.

The chat support I have used quite a bit. At times it was very good. Most of the time it took them a couple minutes to respond between each comment, as they were helping several others on chat as well. A couple times it took more than 10 minutes between question and answer. A minute or two I can understand, but 10 minutes is a bit much, after I've waited on "hold" for several minutes already.

Phone support is a hard job and usually the techs are not that good. They often think they are and have high egos about their worth. I was no exception. It is a place to start in IT. The pay is low and the work is not great. You have to deal with a lot of jerks. Still, you can have a good staff, if you train them properly and give them supports. Overall, the support here was lower than I'd like, but honestly about what I've come to expect from tech support. C

Uptime

The server is often running slowly. About twice a week it goes down completely. Sometimes for just a minute or two, other times for an hour or more. Once for nearly 15 hours. Even if the server is up, MySQL goes down regularly as well. Since my sites are database driven, this amounts to the site going down. D

Guarantee

I learned about uptime guarantees during that 15 hour outage. I contacted the support center about their guarantee, since it had gone way over their guarantee. "unfortunately the guarantee is a server guarantee and since we have hundreds of servers, one going down does not effect the guarantee." She then went on to tell me that I should go to a better service.

They did offer a 30 day money back guarantee, but now I do not see that on their site. You can though, end your contract at any time with no cancellation fee. You will get your unused credits back. C-

Products Offered

They have all the standard features, including SSH, PHP, MySQL and more. The also now offer unlimited space and bandwidth, 100 databases, unlimited email forwarding and many other features. They do not, however, offer a catchall email account which is a big fault which knocks them down a grade. B

Affiliates

If you sign up for the affiliate program from their website, they will give you $65 per referral. If, however, you go to Commission Junction and sign up there, you will receive $90 per referral. If you follow my links and sign up, I get the $90 referral. They pay well, but not the highest. A-

Overall grade

I don't include the affiliate grade in my final grade, as I think that would bias the final grade toward those that pay me well. I don't want you to pick someone just because I get a good commission, especially if you don't realize that is why they scored well. C/C+

I recently found out that not all uptime guarantees are equal. There are two major species of uptime guarantees: network and server. Server is better. First I'll explain what the two types mean and why server guarantees are better than network guarantees. Then I will discuss those percentages, what 99.9% uptime really means. Last I'll talk about free, low cost, and premium hosting and how much each really costs. For this article, we are just talking about shared hosting.

Network vs Server Guarantee
When they say "99.9% uptime guarantee" you think that means that if your server is down .1% of the month, they have failed their promise, right? Not necessarily. As I said, there are two breeds of guarantees. With a network guarantee, they guarantee that their network will be up 99.9%. So, if 99.9% of the network is up, they are within their promise. If they have 1000 servers and 1 is down for a month, but the other 999 are running without problem, they are fine. Of course, your site happens to be on that one server that is always down and there is nothing you can do, except find a new host.

Server guarantees work a bit differently. They actually guarantee that your server will be up during the promised time. Usually that means, the entire server. So if the mySQL server daemon is down, but the rest of the server is running smoothly, they are out of compliance. Like I said, this is better. If you want your site up all the time, get a server guarantee.

About Percentages
Lets do a little math here. If you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee, what does that mean? First, lets take an average 30 day month. There are 43,200 minutes in a 30 day month. .1% of that means that your site can be down for 43.2 minutes each month. That of course can be during your peak hours, and if it is maintenance, and they tell you ahead of time, then it does not count. The table below shows the most common uptime guarantees and how much time each one can be down during a month.

Costs of hosting
There are plenty of hosting companies out there. Some are free, some are very cheap, others are more costly. You have to decide what is more important to you, cost or reliability. Some of the cheap sites are fairly reliable for the cost, but for just a couple dollars more a month, you can get a really reliable service. If you don't mind occasional downtime, save the money. If you do, spend the extra.

How much does downtime cost? That is something only you can answer. If you are running a site just for fun, then a low, or no guarantee hosting company will be your best choice as they are usually the cheapest as well. If, on the otherhand, you want to make sure your site is up most of the time, look for a server (or site) guarantee with a high (100%, preferably) uptime guarantee. It is a sign of a dedicated company who will be there for you if you need them.