Edian Design Blog

Our site used to be hosted by Hostony. It was cheap. It allowed more than one domain under the same account. It started well. However, within a month our server was down for a couple of days - they upgraded us to their gold-plan which offered more disk space & bandwidth. Things were OK for a while.

Then we noticed that our sites were down on a daily basis, and when they were running they were very slow. We’ve contacted Hostony many times, but their technical support is quite ridiculous. They have outsourced this service to Ukraine or somewhere in the ex-Soviet block - which would not be a bad thing if their staff spoke English properly.
Here are just a few responses we got from them:..

“Tell me some mailbox name and password for it for tests.”
“Ticket was automatically closed because of it is out of date. Given solution will be considered to be true.”
“You or anybody requested the password”
“There is a client DoSing from the server”

OK, you can work out what they are trying to say, but please - this is not meant to be a language exercise! Hostony is supposed to provide a professional service - if they aim to serve the English speaking market they should employ people who are technically & linguistically competent. 

The final straw was their decision to move our account to a new server - but they forgot to inform us. Our MySQL databases were set back a fortnight - fortunately we had a recent back-up, but we could have lost lots of data. We had various problems for the following weeks as a result of this move. Although our sites were up and running, they were very slow and we couldn’t monitor some of them via Awstats & Webalizer.  We sent several emails to Hostony explaining how important it was for us to see the statistics - they were disinclined to reply or do anything about it. Eventually we had to get a programmer to sort the problem out.

Then we just moved to another hosting company.

So do be aware of Hostony! They are a cheap web hosting company, but they also provide a cheap service.  Their inefficient & ineffective customer support is ludicrous and totally unacceptable. Also, they cannot be contacted by telephone.

There are hundreds of web hosting companies out there offering the best hosting service your money can buy. The choice is endless. The techno jargon is daunting.
So which one to choose?..

It really depends on your needs.

Do you want to target a word audience or a specific country - i.e. you’re selling things for the UK market, your site should be hosted by a company based in the UK. If your site has an international theme, then the server hosting your site should be located in the States.

The second issue you should consider is the size of your site. Do you have many dynamic pages or does your site mainly consist of straight html pages? Do you want to run a forum or a blog?  If you have a large site with thousands of pages you should consider signing up for a dedicated server.

The third issue is traffic. How many visitors do you have per months? How many are you aiming for? Again, if you have thousands of visitors per day, you should consider a dedicated server.

Some companies offer the hosting of more than one domain under one account. If you have many sites - this might be a good solution for you, but be careful, your monthly allowance of bandwidth & disk space has to be shared between your sites.

When you’ve considered these issues go to this site and read the reviews of web-hosts.

We, at Edian Design, have dealt with many web hosting companies. We didn’t like Hostway because they were inefficient and expensive. On the other end of the scale Hostony offers a good value hosting plan - but their customer service is absolutely dreadful (read our story). Stay away from them - or move away! Hostgator also offers good value hosting plans, so far we have been pleased with their hosting & customer service.
Lunarpages offer an excellent, reliable service - but it doesn’t come cheap.

If you’re looking for a budget hosting company in the UK, we highly recommend 34SP, we have been pleased with them. Another good UK company is 3dpixelnet.

Be careful with web sites offering charts of  the ” best web hosting companies” or “top hosts“,  “best web hosting reviews“  etc  - most of these sites are affiliating sites, i.e. they do not present an independent view (nor reviews) of web hosts. However, this site seems to offer an independent review of hosting companies  - so far the reviews correspond with our experiences of various web hosting companies.

Anyway, good luck in finding a good host for your site an let us know if you find one!