March 7th, 2007 by James Omdahl
THE FOLLOWING IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
First off, if you are reading this, it is a small miracle. The company that hosts our blogs, Mosso, has been experiencing problems for over a week now - yes A WEEK. We have seen everything from slow page loading to the site being completely down. If moving our blogs to a different host wasn’t such a pain, I think we would be changing hosts ASAP.
I think that after our experience with Mosso, it is safe to say that hosting an affiliate web site with Mosso is a very, very bad idea. I couldn’t imagine how furious I would be if I was pointing PPC ads to a site that was hosted by Mosso right now. If we were hosting a highly trafficked PPC site on Mosso, I bet our losses would be in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars over the last week - and you can bet that Mosso wouldn’t be paying for your losses.
[The ironic thing is that while our sites are down, Mosso's site is up and running like a champ. I wonder who hosts their site?]
But to keep this post from being a total flamefest, let’s make this into something productive shall we? Leave a comment and tell me what hosting companies you have worked with that you would recommend to other affiliates.
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March 7th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
I had an extremely bad experience with a hosting company called “splicehost”.
when i initially starterd as an insureme affiliate back in 2004, i went with this company because of their cheap hosting plans….I didnt know then that i had made the biggest mistake.
After one year, i had to renew the hosting..But inspite of paying the renewal fees my site was down for more than 10 days. I couldnt contact them as they did not have any customer service number. Through their payment processor i was able to track that they were based in isreal.
I then switched my hosting to Godaddy, knowing it is a US based company with good customer service.
The whole thing costed me thousands of dollars due loss of potential revenue and profits.
My advice to my fellow affiliates is to spend a little extra and go with a reputed hosting company.
March 7th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I hosted my sites at Webintellects for a while, its a major brand in the industry and they have good support. However, I was measuring their performance with WebsitePulse and found that they had router problems.
Using HostingSpeeds I found “the fastest hosts in the world” - as measured globally - and found that instead of getting local hosts for my planned entry into Australia and United Kingdom I would actually have faster response from the whole world from a number of Canadian, Belgian and Dutch hosts.
After having analyzed the 23 “fastest hosts in the world” I was a bit tired. Some of them only spoke Dutch, some had inflexible offers (e.g. only one domain name per account), and some of them were too expensive for me. Finally in December 2006 I settled for EZProvider, a Canadian host based in Vancouver. They have the advantage of being connected directly to one of the Internets major pipes, so the global response time is fantastic. Using WebsitePulse I can also see that their response time is very stable.
Ive been running my sites in production on EZProvider since January without any problems whatsoever. And the support is formidable so far.
I think its important to understand that hosting itself is a commodity, almost like electrical power.
Theres really no major difference between the technology provided by various providers, unless youre looking for very special things. There may be major differences in the commercial offerings however. As I said I dont accept to be limited to one domain name, and this is a very common limitation. But its not difficult to get unlimited domains for $9.95/month.
Be aware that there are major differences in the global response time between hosting providers. To anyone wanting to take this journey, I recommend HostingSpeeds as a starting point. You wont see many of the big names in hosting at the top of this list, so why go with them?
Use WebsitePulse to verify the response time for any host from any monitoring station in the world. Youll be surprised at how important it is for a hosting provider to have a super-fast Internet connection.
Disclaimer: HostingSpeeds only lists sites that place their seal on the front page, so some of the monitored hosts - including the top 5 - are anonymous.
March 7th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I currently co-locate on a dedicated server, however I am seriously considering moving to a shared host such as those mentioned above in the comments (cheaper and less maintenance). But every time I find a host that looks like I want to give them a whirl, I google them and find horrible customer experiences. So if others have some fantastic hosts please post them for us.
March 17th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Mosso is having beyond terrible issues for the past two months. TWO MONTHS!
- All my sites load slowly and sometimes they time out.
- There is an ASP caching issue. You can not FTP pages. You have to use ASPuload…BUT GUESS WHAT…today aspupload is not working. I am falling way behind on projects.
- I have over 80 clients on Mosso. Its not easy to move away. This company is making me look bad to my clients and potential clients.
My Story:
- Readyhosting.com was a perfect company. Late 2005 they were bought out by anotehr company. I spent over 100 hours transferring my customers to the new company in 2006. After 2 months of slow speeds and occassional downtime I called tech support…heard a click…and then got transferred to a call center overseas. Great!
I transferred all my clients to hostdepartment.com around July 2006. The first day was terrible! It was so slow. I asked them to move me to a different server. It was SUPER FAST…for two weeks and then a week of the same problems.
After that I went to rackspack to see if they could refer me to a company that I can trust to have good uptime. They sent me to Mosso. I spent a good month or two transferring my clients over to Mosso. November was great! Then late December came and ever since then I have been having problems.
Overall Mosso is the worse company I have ever hosted with. The tech support is great and they are always there but I need my sites to load fast and not have problems EVERY DAY! I mean “EVERYDAY”.
If someone knows a GREAT company please let me know. I can afford about $200 per month for a reseller account. PLEASE HELP!
March 29th, 2008 at 4:17 am
I couldnt agree more with your comments about spending a little more on a reputable web host.
I too have been hoodwinked by splice host.
It is impossible to get hold of them. They know what they are doing, they choose not to answer emails.
Little surprise that they are based in another country - I wonder if anyone has ever tracked them down?
Do they know they are the scum of the earth and scurge of society?
They failed to inform me and when my name was up for renewel - I suspect they trade expired domains, this should not be possible due to the period of grace. However if they ignore all my emails for 45 days then there is nothing I can do.
they should be shut down. Only downside to shutting them down, is that they will just set up in business again under a different name and start their scam all over again.
The law is very much behind when it comes to online crime!
Avoid splicehosts like the plague!