crappy hosting companies in Random Commentary

Here they are: Bluehost, Justhost, 1and1, Godaddy, Network Solutions. This is based on my experience working with them. And here are the reasons why:

Bluehost Slow, random downtime, and completely unhelpful customer service. My first job as a web designer at a teeny-tiny internet marketing company saw me inherit a jumble of websites saved under the same root folder, a semi-matching jumble of add-on domains, all in one of those little $5.99/month hosting packages. Needless to say, speed became an issue, and inevitably one of the is-this-still-in-use? accounts became so outdated that it was hacked. So EVERY site was hacked. And Bluehost did nothing to help. Know who did? Hostgator, when we moved everything over to them. They found the problem and fixed it.

Justhost A friend I went to school with recommended this one to me (probably because it was cheap?), so I tried it. Newbie as I was, I also purchased my domain name(s) with them. Turns out, they had no domain management tools, and getting them to transfer the domain names when I wisened up was like stuffing a fat man into a jell-o cup. It took forever just to get them to give me a straight answer.

Godaddy Slow. They’re not as bad as they used to be, but still, it’s like night and day when I FTP to Godaddy versus FTP on Hostgator. Godaddy would also have random downtimes, and even running Wordpress updates is way slower. Their customer service can be helpful; I’ve dealt with some good people there before, but also some pretty unhelpful people. So you take your chances. I do love Godaddy for domain name management, though. They give you tools and access to settings that other companies (i.e. Network Solutions) actually charge extra for, like domain name forwarding.

Which brings me to Network Solutions. A rip-off, basically. I was convinced at the time I was dealing with them they had like 2 guys working there and that’s it. Like I already mentioned, they charge you for services like domain name forwarding. E-mail hosting packages cost an arm and a leg – when you can get unlimited inboxes and storage included with your hosting at companies like Hostgator. There was a time when NS was having DNS issues with all domain names hosted with them, which affected one of our more irritating clients at my old job. So in trying to trouble-shoot, I found out the issue was with their DNS – not from them. I couldn’t even get them on the phone. Nope; I found out from a message that Hostgator posted on their own support site.

1and1 This is what brought me to this whole rant; I’m in the middle of getting a website up for some friends of my bosses at work (all great people, by the way. No complaints there!), and last night I finally go around to logging in to the hosting account they chose to set up with 1and1. (They DID ask my recommendation but at the time they had already gone with 1and1. I figured it probably wasn’t worth the hassle for them to switch. I can deal with a less-than-impressive hosting company if it saves them trouble.) Anyhoo, I saw they chose Windows hosting instead of Linux, so everything I hoped to accomplish last night has been pushed back by 48 hours because I had to get approval to switch their hosting package from them, and now apparently 1and1 has to ruminate on the actual change for 24 hours.

Maybe I’m just anti-anything-that-isn’t-cPanel. I love cPanel. Hostgator uses cPanel. These other companies that use their custom “control panels”… uhg. I understand they’re dumbing it down for the average user, and optimizing it so they can push their fail website-builder products on the masses who know no better. Blech.