Hosting: Common Misconceptions
It is tough trying to decide on a hosting service to go with when there are so many “review” sites out there. Like a product or service you always see people venting about bad experiences with a company, on the internet, rather than positive ones and so you don’t know who to trust. You can’t please everybody all the time, but some companies definitely try more than others. Being a freelance developer myself I have worked with many different companies in the past (Godaddy, Dotster, Bluehost, HostGator, IcdSoft) including the one I currently work for now.
(Full Disclosure – I work for Ecommerce, Inc which is the parent company for IX Webhosting and have a website with them http://www.mashingthenet.com and working on developing another http://www.thestandardrec.com).
Most companies offer the same features and requirements you are looking for. Unfortunately, the hosting industry gives out statistics like uptime % for marketing purposes. It is nice to have expectations, but not unrealistic ones. 98% of all statistics are made up. There are many factors to consider with uptime like resource hogs on shared hosting who should be moved to Virtual Private Servers or Dedicated Servers, hardware failures for equipment that is still under warranty that takes time to recreate from backups, Terms of Service Violaters, or customers who are victims of ddos attacks, etc. For me, other than uptime, the biggest deciding factor is customer service and tech support. You also have to consider while cheap is good it is relative. I am reminded of the old saying, “You get what you pay for.” In my eyes the bigger the company the cheaper the price and more brand recognition with regards to competitive strategy, but it doesn’t always equate to great customer service when things go wrong. It depends on where operations budgets are being focused on: R&D, Marketing, Operations, Customer Service. The two best ways you can decide is word of mouth and have a test account on with a short billing cycle so you can do “trial” runs. The great thing I like about IX currently over other companies is the direction they are headed with operations and customer support. They want to get away from the customer settling for average expectations. They have a 99.999% uptime guarantee, 24/7 US based phone support, 24/7 ticket and live chat support and all the other of the requirements you are asking for including affiliate sales for you to receive commission on (http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.affiliates).
Here are some blog posts on where the company is headed: Custom Control Panel:
http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/09/introducing-imperia/
http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html
Customer Service:
http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/06/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-part-1-of-3/ http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/07/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-parts-2-and-3/
Here is the status blog to make customers aware of persistent issues on their servers that take more than an hour to fix or other operational moves that they email customers ahead of time if they are affected: http://status.ixwebhosting.com/
If you have any other questions about IX Webhosting or any of the other hosting companies I have worked with I would be happy to answer them for you.
