Looking for a new hosting company for my clients
21 posts by 5 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: June 25, 2020 (RSS)
Hi all,
Since Bluehost has decided to focus their support on "All Wordpress, All The Tme", I need to start looking for a new hosting company for my clients.
For many years Bluehost has defied the norm, by being good, fast, cheap ($297 for 5 years of shared hosting) and by using only knowledgeable stateside support reps for 24x7 phone support.
They also offer unlimited domain hosting, a free domain registration, free SSL, free SpamExperts, free sitelock, unlimited domain based email accounts and forwarding, unlimited databases, and unlimited storage. An offer that's hard to refuse...
Recently, they have been pushing back on support, unless I have a Wordpress site.
I’d rather not increase my client's costs to any significant degree, and most hosting services I’ve looked at either kill with addons (like SSL, SpamExperts domain based email and forwarding, sitelock, and meaningful storage or databases), or don't offer 24x7 phone support with knowledgeable stateside reps.
Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks,
Jerry Kornbluth
Take advantage of a free 3 month trial subscription, only for CMSB users, at: http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com/trial.php
By kitsguru - November 8, 2019
Depending on how many clients you have, you might want to consider their VPS solution. I have my own VPS with Cpanel and cloudlinux at DigitalOcean for my 88 clients. Everything costs me about $150/month but I am billing almost $500/month. If I need help Cpanel provides free support 24/7.
Thanks Jeff,
Interesting approach, but I'm looking more for self managed, shared hosting solution so that each client is responsible for their own account.
Appreciate the feedback though.
Jerry Kornbluth
Take advantage of a free 3 month trial subscription, only for CMSB users, at: http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com/trial.php
By kitsguru - November 8, 2019 - edited: November 8, 2019
With cpanel you have that which is what you had at bluehost.
Unless you mean for server support.
By kitsguru - November 8, 2019
You might also look at greengeeks for shared hosting. I used them for years, but they changed their pricing model on me and the digitalocean route worked for me. But I am also very linux savvy, so it was a big plus fo rme.
Thanks Jeff,
I need each client to have their own (shared) hosting account in their own name.
None of them have very sophisticated issues or need.
Jerry
Take advantage of a free 3 month trial subscription, only for CMSB users, at: http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com/trial.php
By kitsguru - November 8, 2019
Then definetely check out greengeeks, their support is great.
Thanks again, Jeff,
I'll check them out
Jerry Kornbluth
Take advantage of a free 3 month trial subscription, only for CMSB users, at: http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com/trial.php
Thanks Jeff for making me aware of GreenGeeks.
I've checked them out, and here's what I found after setting up a Pro account:
Their phone tech support is all North American based and the reps work from home and seem pretty knowledgeable.
Their phone support isn't 24x7 (Mon-Sun: 9 AM to 12 AM EST), but their chat and email support is, although I don't know where it originates from.
I have a feeling that they would be excellent choice if I only needed to host a few sites on my account.
However, I have around a dozen site on my existing shared hosting account and some of them are relatively large and image heavy.
I ultimately decided not to migrate my sites to GreenGeeks, and here's why:
GreenGeeks says they offer unlimited storage, and they also offer a free migration service that I was told could painlessly transfer my existing cPanel including all files, settings, databases, email, etc. to my new account.
This sounded almost too good to be true, but it seems that the devil is indeed in the details.
Before they would initiate migrating my cPanel, they went through my existing site file and here's a portion of their responses:
__________________________________________________________________________________________
You account on your source hosting should be not over 10Gb (mine is probably double that)
Also, we have checked the mentioned folders and found that they contain a lot of images/photos/videos. (true)
We normally don’t let customers host excessive amount of files as it causes resource usage issues for your account, especially with media files.
However, in order to solve this issue we can suggest moving these to a more streamable friendly provider such as amazon/dropbox storage.
Also, please check your data from the old hosting account and remove/download old/outdated or not needed files from it.
Additionally, please note that if your account size grows rapidly we will be forced to notify you on this and ask to remove/upload some old files in order to solve this issue.
Because shared hosting servers aren't designed for the usage in a manner that would rather fit a media hosting/sharing service then regular shared web hosting, keeping that large volumes of data within a single cPanel account creates problems for the entire server and negatively impacts the quality of services we provide to hundreds of other loyal GreenGeeks customers whose accounts reside on the same shared hosting node, particularly - during the process of daily backup creation.
Take advantage of a free 3 month trial subscription, only for CMSB users, at: http://www.thecmsbcookbook.com/trial.php
Wow, have ever changed their policies. sorry it didn’t work for you. They were in the process of IMPROVING their service and a couple of policies bit me in the ...so I created my own VPS at Digital ocean. With what you have discovered, I would not use them either.