Last October, while on a trip visiting my Dad 2,000 miles away from my desk, a telephone call alerted me to an outage at my internet hosting provider. All email service was interrupted. Websites I managed were unavailable online. My internet service provider had been hacked. Clients were agitated. The hackers had attacked and access was denied.
A year earlier, Vic, my Guru technical director and hosting provider for more than decade, decided he'd had enough with the late nights, rebuilding servers, upgrading to yet another version of Spam Assassin and investing in more security software that clients didn't want to pay for to vend off the hackers. He dumped his 300 plus client web properties onto a larger provider with a Microsoft specialty and went off to apply his genius in the world of Apps.
You have to have the bank account of Google today to fend off the hackers. So the advice seems to be to go with someone's who bigger who has the budget to keep up with the hackers.
Just as we were recovering in January, we were hacked again. Clients were continuing to request a move to another hosting provider in a mad scramble for safety.
I already had a few clients at Network Solutions who were contented mainly due to their reputation for reliability and support, so I switched another client over and found the overall interface and instructional text quite intuitive to follow.
Another client who is running an online product catalogue requested to switch to Blue Host on the advice of an associate who moved their hosting a year earlier with no interruption in service since.
Bluehost was really was breeze. I didn't feel like I had to search for things like "what's my DNS?". Set up was easy and support was responsive. When the catalogue didn't work on initial set up, they offered a solution.
I then called up my web producer Cyril to see if he had any other recommendations instead.
He told me he looked at the largest and cheapest ISPs he could find without spending weeks researching, thinking that volume sales can keep the cost down, and size would indicate reliability.
He says his clients don't require the ultimate reliability and security that Q9 Networks offers,
for example, and as the first line of tech support there's no need to have superior service from the ISP.
He compared Go Daddy (the largest, according to Wikipedia), HostMonster (unlimited domains), and 1&1 (International). Go Daddy is the most cost-effective if you're on a tight budget, but their up-selling drives me nuts and the tech support is just acceptable. At least they provide many tools for server management and and it's easy enough to Google for their online help and promo codes.
Media Temple had also been mentioned on several occasions, mainly for their tech support and infrastructure. When I tried to set up an account, I went through the whole process of filling out my credit card info only to be bounced back to the home page with no feedback. I emailed support who promptly responded. I had already gone elsewhere. How could I trust a provider whose transactional site was broken.
Hope this helps in your search for the ultimate ISP.
A year earlier, Vic, my Guru technical director and hosting provider for more than decade, decided he'd had enough with the late nights, rebuilding servers, upgrading to yet another version of Spam Assassin and investing in more security software that clients didn't want to pay for to vend off the hackers. He dumped his 300 plus client web properties onto a larger provider with a Microsoft specialty and went off to apply his genius in the world of Apps.
You have to have the bank account of Google today to fend off the hackers. So the advice seems to be to go with someone's who bigger who has the budget to keep up with the hackers.
Just as we were recovering in January, we were hacked again. Clients were continuing to request a move to another hosting provider in a mad scramble for safety.
I already had a few clients at Network Solutions who were contented mainly due to their reputation for reliability and support, so I switched another client over and found the overall interface and instructional text quite intuitive to follow.
Another client who is running an online product catalogue requested to switch to Blue Host on the advice of an associate who moved their hosting a year earlier with no interruption in service since.
Bluehost was really was breeze. I didn't feel like I had to search for things like "what's my DNS?". Set up was easy and support was responsive. When the catalogue didn't work on initial set up, they offered a solution.
I then called up my web producer Cyril to see if he had any other recommendations instead.
He told me he looked at the largest and cheapest ISPs he could find without spending weeks researching, thinking that volume sales can keep the cost down, and size would indicate reliability.
He says his clients don't require the ultimate reliability and security that Q9 Networks offers,
for example, and as the first line of tech support there's no need to have superior service from the ISP.
He compared Go Daddy (the largest, according to Wikipedia), HostMonster (unlimited domains), and 1&1 (International). Go Daddy is the most cost-effective if you're on a tight budget, but their up-selling drives me nuts and the tech support is just acceptable. At least they provide many tools for server management and and it's easy enough to Google for their online help and promo codes.
Media Temple had also been mentioned on several occasions, mainly for their tech support and infrastructure. When I tried to set up an account, I went through the whole process of filling out my credit card info only to be bounced back to the home page with no feedback. I emailed support who promptly responded. I had already gone elsewhere. How could I trust a provider whose transactional site was broken.
Hope this helps in your search for the ultimate ISP.
