Hosting Companies
In working on websites for a number of different clients, I have worked within quite a few of the hosting companies out there. In this blog, I want to highlight three of these companies and offer my opinions on each one:
GoDaddy
GoDaddy.com
GoDaddy is my favorite hosting company out there. Their customer service is excellent (I have called a lot), their prices are competitive, and they make things very easy for web developers. My only real complaint (other than their trashy advertising) is that some of my clients have experiences brief down times of their websites as GoDaddy’s servers go down. This is extremely rare though and I haven’t seen this happen in the last 4 months.
GoDaddy’s customer service is fast and they usually provide the answer that I need. The representatives are based out of the USA. For prices, type in “GoDaddy Promo Codes” into Google and you will find an array of price-saving coupons. And for making things easy, they have hosting products specific to WordPress where you really don’t need to know anything about setting up a WordPress site to be up and running in no time.
Hostway
http://www.hostway.com/
I have used Hostway hosting for a number of sites. Overall, this is a pretty good company. They have just upgraded their user interface design to make their site easier to navigate. One time, I needed to upgrade to the latest version of PHP, and they were helpful in making that happen. It seems as though every time I have called Hostway, I am connected to a representative in India. At times, there has been a small language or understanding barrier, but overall, their representatives are very knowledgeable and helpful.
Register.com
http://www.register.com/
I don’t have one nice thing to say about Register.com. They are more expensive than the competition and their customer service is horrendous. During a recent problem I had on one of my client’s sites, I called Register.com 8 times. Of those 8 calls, the representative got my phone number and said they would call me back within 2 hours. I only received 1 call back out of those 8 promises.
Recently, Register.com attempted to move one of my sites from one hosting area to another. They promised they could make this happen. Turns out, their tech team couldn’t do it and my site ended up being down for a whole week. During this process, they forgot to move the SSL certificate I had with the website and so a few weeks later, my site was down 4 days again while they fixed that. They also tried to get me to pay for their mistake.
Register.com’s support staff is based out of Nova Scotia I believe. They are an hour ahead of Eastern Time. I have probably spoken to half of their support staff by this point and have only been impressed by a few of them.
Overall, you are not getting your moneys worth with Register.com. If I can help it, I don’t ever plan to use them again. They have caused me enormous stress and anguish.
I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on different hosting companies in the comment box below.
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I prefer Bluehost and am quite surprised to see such positive feedback for GoDaddy, actually. Never used it, but generally don’t hear the best things about it. I’ve been using Bluehost for 3 years now, and the hosting is reliable, service is good, and the backend interface is elegant and powerful, making the setup of WordPress or Joomla or Drupal super easy. (Cpanel, I think they use.) Haven’t used the other 2 you’ve got there.
Thanks for the great post, I like to buy my domains from godaddy and hosting from hostgator , you can use the coupon SCHOOL99 for 1.17$ .com domain
and CACTUS for hostgator to get a free first month 