Best Hosting Blog

When it comes to hosting services, you usually need to choose between hosting your website on a Unix based server (58% of the world’s servers run on Apache), or on a server that runs Microsoft platform (IIS). Usually, Unix shared servers are cheaper, and their majority run on free platforms like Apache.

If you just began building websites, you may be better off with IIS. These servers work with the ASP language and support MS Access databases. However, for those who feel comfortable with PHP programming as well as MySQL databases, go for a Unix account. If you need to use ASP on the server, there is an open source project called Mono, which supports ASP / .NET on Unix servers - see if your hosting company offers/allows you to install it.

I’m currently working on a new system that will allow users to vote for dedicated hosting services. In the meantime, I received some inquiries about which web hosting companies are offering reasonable priced and reliable servers. I tried several different companies, and am currently using LayeredTech. They specialize in dedicated servers and have a large selection of programs. It take them a few days to set up a new server, but they will install all the extras that you can ask for (in it’s open source) without charging you more for most applications.   

As GoDaddy’s customers experienced last weekend when millions of websites were unavailable for hours (hopefully this is an isolated event, they are usually very reliable), you may wake up one day and find out that your website is down.  There are several different error pages that may appear - I’m talking about the 404 message “The page cannot be found”.

If this is your first time to see this message, do not panic.  Your website is usually intact, but cannot be reached via browser. Try to see if you can access it with an FTP program. Then call/chat (if it’s not urgent you can email) with the host tech support. Some hosts have a network status page which lists current network problems.

If you work with a reliable hosting company, they would resolve the matter within hours. If you see that your website is not back online within a day, it’s a sign your host sucks. Do not waste time - start transferring your site to a reliable host. Regardless of how long it would take for the site to be up again, you want to make sure that your website will not experience further downtime. From my experience, if your host didn’t fix the problem within a day, they are not professional enough ad soon a second problem will emerge.   

Some companies, not all of them of course, advertise different Money Back guarantees. From my experience, it’s not always so simple to get your money back, even for products/services that you did not use. If you are not sure that the hosting package that you have found is right for you, or if this is the first time that you pay for hosting services, please check our best hosting comparison table.

We continuously update the information in the table. If you had a great (or a negative) experience with one of the hosts, please leave a comment and we’ll add it to the database.

One last tip - even if the first conversation with the customer service rep does not help to get your money back, wait a few minutes and call again. Especially in large companies, every rep has a different approach, and some of them are more flexible than others.