geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: wellington1869 on Mon, 12 July 2010, 12:16:14
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any strong opinions? anyone have experience with both?
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I unfortunately have no experience with hostgator, but I love Dreamhost. I know, not much help.
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Well, what's your goal? Both are oversellers who are competing on price/features and will therefore sacrifice reliability and consistency somewhat.
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goals:
--personal website to put up artwork and/or a blog
--dont want it to slow down/go offline very often (<--this is probably what will decide it; if there are horror stories in this regard for either?)
--24/7 useful customer service line
--affordability
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Whenever you're on oversold shared hosting you're accepting the risk of downtime.
That said, I've heard a lot of great things about DreamHost (haven't used them myself).
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Yeah, Dreamhost seems to be pretty good for what it is... but it is still oversold shared hosting.
Webfaction is a favorite of web app developers, but it also caters to them a bit more... the control panel is less extensive and you might have to DIY certain things a little more. But they have a very solid reputation and will probably be more reliable.
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There are lots of Dreamhost horror stories... and also plenty of happy customers too though.
Dreamhost takes overselling to Olympic heights. Just take a look at their deals. Do the words "too good to be true" pop in your head?
Caveat emptor. If it really needs to be reliable, you might want to look elsewhere.
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hmmm, doing a bit of googling on the one vs the other, looks like in general hostgator leads in the opinion polls...
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If you have a computer that's running 24/7 (and a connection without a stupidly low usage cap like 20GB/month), my recommendation is to host from home. Might be a pain to set up but it's fully within your control that way.
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You also have to have good upload speeds which, in my neck of the woods, is very rare in consumer-grade service. You would have to step up to small business-level plans that are usually much more expensive.
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You also have to have good upload speeds which, in my neck of the woods, is very rare in consumer-grade service. You would have to step up to small business-level plans that are usually much more expensive.
also i wouldnt trust myself with the security (ie, i'm 100% sure that either i'd get hacked, and once hacked, wouldnt have a clue what to do about it)
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also i wouldnt trust myself with the security (ie, i'm 100% sure that either i'd get hacked, and once hacked, wouldnt have a clue what to do about it)
What do you need to run and does it matter if it's Linux based hosting? I might be able to set you up.
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You also have to have good upload speeds which, in my neck of the woods, is very rare in consumer-grade service. You would have to step up to small business-level plans that are usually much more expensive.
Right, that too. Typically what you find available to consumers would be fine for one connecting person to have an at least decent experience, but not much beyond that.
also i wouldnt trust myself with the security (ie, i'm 100% sure that either i'd get hacked, and once hacked, wouldnt have a clue what to do about it)
Throw it on a spare computer, take regular drive images, etc. Not the best advice in the world but a) contains it to the spare machine and b) allows recovery fairly easily.
Of course there are better precautions pertaining to actual security but implement those alongside of what I said.
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If it's for a personal site that you don't need 99.999% reliability, those kinds of hosts are good because they save you money. But I've been relying on virtual dedicated servers from Godaddy for a few years with much success. Before that I hosted physical servers in a data center and that is much much more expensive.
Personally, I'd look at Godaddy's hosting plans as they seem to routinely offer more than the competition for less money in nearly all products and services they offer. There are plans for every level of service you need.
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also i wouldnt trust myself with the security (ie, i'm 100% sure that either i'd get hacked, and once hacked, wouldnt have a clue what to do about it)
BTW, usually the hosting company has a really simple solution to people who get hacked. They shut you down. They won't bother to figure out what to do. It's not their problem and it'd be too expensive of a problem to fix if they actually did want to fix it.
Anyway, what makes you so sure you'll get successfully hacked? Most attacks are run of the mill cracker attacks using simple exploits or brute force attacks. Keeping software up to date and having good passwords will protect you from the vast majority of exploits unless there's someone out there who's got it in for you.
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Personally, I'd look at Godaddy's hosting plans as they seem to routinely offer more than the competition for less money in nearly all products and services they offer. There are plans for every level of service you need.
GoDaddy's pretty good. They also not as cheap as people think they are since the price they advertise is for their stripped down account. By the time you add features that you typically get in a hosting setup, it's no longer a bargain host. So long as people understand that, they should be cool with it because they provide better service than a real bargain host with servers constantly in danger of tipping over the point of collapse.
My only big complaint with GoDaddy is all the extra **** they try to sell you when you're trying to check out in one piece.
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That becomes even more important if you plan on using MYSQL on the back end and not just serving files. You don't want an oversubscribed host if you can help it, but cost is always a factor.
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GoDaddy's pretty good.
Godaddy sells to spammers the names of the domains they register.
I registered a domain that was spam free for 7 years on register.com before moving to GoDaddy.com. A week after changing registrants, that domain, from which I had never sent an email to a 3rd party, suddenly had the same amount of spam as my 2nd domain, also with godaddy. 4-500 spams a week suddenly appeared, sent to postmaster@, webmaster@ , john@, mary@, gabriel@, winston@, etc. (you might be surpried to know how inclusive the random name list is).
Furthermore, when I provde an email address to a company, I give them an address such as adobe_FrameMaker7upgrade@mydomain. That way it's obvious when I get a viagra ad sent to adobe_FrameMaker7upgrade@mydomain I know exactly who the culprit is. For example, when I receive SPAM at godaddyregistration@mydomain It's not really open to discussion who sold me out. Since 1997, I've known few companies to sell my email address, but they are all beyond a shadow of a doubt:
- GoDaddy
- Adobe
- Quantum hard drives
- SRSystems.com
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GoDaddy is one of the kings of internet horror stories. Right up there with PayPal. Giving them your money is like playing russian roulette. Sure, the majority of people have no problem, but...
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fwiw, i have godaddy right now, and am trying to switch cuz my sites (which are all personal sites basically) arent even available for me at 3 a.m. when me and three search engine robots are the only ones trying to visit
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...and three search engine robots are the only ones trying to visit
lol.
GoDaddy is one of the kings of internet horror stories. Right up there with PayPal. Giving them your money is like playing russian roulette. Sure, the majority of people have no problem, but...
Good analogy. MOST people have no problem, but there's always a minority. I think big companies don't care about a few ants, that's why it would probably be better to finder a smaller hosting company -- one that values each customer.
Never had any problems with paypal, but I think it's easier to solve paypal issues than spam...
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Ricercar that sucks that it happened, but all it takes is someone doing whois queries to harvest domain contact information and you happened to be on a registrar they were picking on at the time. Someone will figure out how to bypass the captcha or whatever means a site has to prevent scripted lookups and they'll get a lot of domains. It doesn't necessarily mean they sold your information. I haven't had the issue any worse with them than the other registrars I've dealt with and I've used most of the big ones. But anything is possible - including one lame employee swiping info. I seriously doubt Bob Parsons would allow harvesting of contact info from Godaddy at a any price. He's a die hard retired marine and patriot that is very much into his moral character and ethics. But you never know for sure.
fwiw, i have godaddy right now, and am trying to switch cuz my sites (which are all personal sites basically) arent even available for me at 3 a.m. when me and three search engine robots are the only ones trying to visit
You'll get that from most shared hosting plans at various times. If you want perfection, get a dedicated server. That's the only way to get five 9's availability and even then you might not get it, but you do get a SLA.
lol.
Good analogy. MOST people have no problem, but there's always a minority. I think big companies don't care about a few ants, that's why it would probably be better to finder a smaller hosting company -- one that values each customer.
Never had any problems with paypal, but I think it's easier to solve paypal issues than spam...
Have you ever had an issue and called Godaddy? You get someone who speaks english and will resolve your problem. Period. Try that with any of the other big registrars, even the evil horrible netsol. Try that with PayPal, ever had them resolve something for you? I haven't. I have had to go after people on my own each time to get things resolved. Godaddy is nothing like paypal other than being a market leader in their segment.
Sorry to come off as such a Godaddy fanboy. To me they are like Google in that they set the standard, lower prices, increase their offering and all others follow in their footsteps. They've continually offered more than the competition and even if you have spam issues, just route your email through Google apps for domains and you'll be set. No registrar can control who does lookups on their domains, they can only try to minimize abuse. I've owned hundreds of domains personally and worked with thousands of domains for customers and the only registrar I will deal with if I have a choice is Godaddy.
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howabout a third option. isomedia web hosting (http://www.isomedia.com/home-personal-hosting.shtml)
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howabout a third option. isomedia web hosting (http://www.isomedia.com/home-personal-hosting.shtml)
well, looks like i'm going with hostgator. i'm sure they all suck tho, just depends on the time of day. luckily i'm not doing anything too mission critical.
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I seriously doubt Bob Parsons would allow harvesting of contact info from Godaddy at a any price. He's a die hard retired marine and patriot that is very much into his moral character and ethics. But you never know for sure.
I've read Bob Parson's blog before and he seems like a real honest broker. They don't pull any punches with marketing and sales tactics and I know some people who don't care for that, but they're not selling snake oil and when everything's added up, you get a good price that's not a basement bargain, but a fair price for fair service.
As for the military connection, I really wish that was enough to qualify someone to lead ethically. One of the most abusive and crooked hosting companies I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with (AIT) is/was run by a guy who flaunts his military connections at every turn.
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You'll get that from most shared hosting plans at various times. If you want perfection, get a dedicated server.
Totally agree or get a few friends together and get a low end dedicated. Even a VPS can have some resource allocation problems. They'll tell you all the VPS partitions are hermetically sealed to prevent resource hogging, but in my experience, something always manages to go wrong eventually and some bozo is again dragging everyone down with him.
Try that with any of the other big registrars, even the evil horrible netsol.
NetSol is awful! NetSol is slang for "overpriced gar-bage." Their hosting sucks. I have one client who has NetSol hosting and at least a few times a year, the file permissions on everything somehow change themselves to read only and you have to go through a special permission reset procedure to get everything to work again.