I am wondering if people would benefit from a discussion of where best to host web content? I would love to see what other people think about different hosting solutions and which ones are good or bad. Which are expensive and which are worth the money people spend. Everyone promises the world but there are a lot of solutions that are fly-by-night or just bad.
TheRustyCook,I too would love to see what people think about this subject. This should raise a lot of discussion. The reason that I say this is because I know that once a web designer finds a host that works for them, they tend to stick with that hosting company. There are severall different reasons why a web designer may stick with a hosting company, it could be the name, it could be the price (I think most designers go with this reason) or a slew of other reasons.
To answer your question about my history with hosting companies, I used to use 123ehost (www.123ehost.com) which is a company that was based out of Canada. The reason I stuck with them is because they were fairly cheap. The reason that I ended up leaving them was because it was difficult to get help. Don't get me wrong, they had excellent email help, which was nice since they are in Canada and to call them was expensive (this was pre VOIP days) but when the problem was email, I was stuck calling them, and this was expensive. I also had a really hard time with creating a mailing list as they did not have a good program for that. I spent close to 5 months trying to get one that worked with their system, with almost no success. (the only thing I could do was get it to send an email with the subject in place, but no text in the body of the message).
I had another local Battle Creek company approach me, and they were more expensive (I was paying $50 per year for basic hosting space and they charged more than that. I do not want to disclose what I pay now because they have cut me a pretty good deal, but it's still more than $50 per year) but I was willing to give them a chance. One of the first things I did was try to set up a mailing list, but because they used windows boxes instead of linux boxes, it was different from what I was used to, so I called them (locally, much cheaper than Canada) and within 5 minutes on the phone, I had a working mailing list that I understood how to operate. You can't put a price on that! The name of the Company is MityMan (www.MityMan.com) and I have to say that I am very happy with them.
I used to think "why are web designers/developers so stuck on making people go to their own servers?" I now understand that every server has it's own quirks and every company has their own ways of doing things, and once you get a hosting company that you like, that you understand, that has good help when you need it, and the price is right, designers tend to stick with them.
I would love to hear about other people's experience in this.