Hi All,
I have been reading your posts in regards to web hosting and the type of service you are getting. First of all I have my own shopping cart www.canozcomputers.ca where I sell computer hardware etc, I also sell hosting packages.
Let me tell you about myself, many years ago I ran a business that was totally dependent on the internet, I knew nothing about how the internet worked I just relied on the web designer to create and host my website. It turned out he hosted my website in an Asian country for a while then one day my site, info etc just disappeared. After contacting my web designer he stated that the company went broke and took their servers out of the data centre never to been seen or heard of again. It took 2 week for my site to be up and running.
so i decided to learn study all aspects of the internet and how it runs, I built servers where I installed them in a reputably data centre I now offer hosting services for the last 7 years.
I built my own physical servers where I run and maintain them and run my CS Cart.
My servers run on twin XEON intel processors with dual raided hard drives, the servers run LINUX operating system with Cpanel access. The servers are located in a secure data centre with a 100mps up and down speed with access to 4 back bone connections, backup with UPS and diesel generators with a guaranteed up time of 99.0% to 99.9%
Prices start from $5.00CAD/mth, no contract, no setup fee, free technical support. I am also very flexible with packages and requirements. My business is registered with the BC gov.
I know what it is like to find a good hosting company especially when you need to contact them about technical issues.
If you have questions you can contact me via my website or through this post
Regards,
crossfire
It is not difficult at all to find a good hosting company in the year 2011, would take me all of about 1 hour at most to have 6 very good choices…
So what does one get for $5CAD/month? I’m assuming it’s a shared virtual server. What are your limitations on when you decide there are enough sites on a particular server to warrant expanding to another server? How do you monitor performance and sever load?
Who is your backbone network provider and what is the size of the pipe coming into your facility?
What OS are your servers running? What version of Apache (or other web server), PHP, other standard opts?
A box and a price is not enough info for anyone to make a business decision on. cs-cart is VERY db AND file intensive. If your servers are not geared toward optimization in those areas, the odds of you being able to host more than 5 virtual severs running small sites will probably end up with performance issues. Maybe not overall, but the spikes are going to make for some very unhappy customers.
Anyway, point is that if you’re going to use the forums to sell your wares, you need to provide enough info. Personally, someone who decided to “learn all they could about the internet” would not be someone I would entrust my business to. But then I have pretty high requirements and I’m willing to pay dearly to ensure my servers are up 99.9% and that there is 24 hour on-site support with a max of 1hr downtime from any hardware failure guaranteed. That’s kind of the industry standard at this point.
Note that 99.9% uptime is still 8.76hrs/yr of downtime. 99.0% is 87.6hrs/yr… People pay for '9’s. 99.99% is just under 1hr/yr of downtime.
Well you can’t do better the personal recommendation at times. So I’m happy to recommend my own host http://www.vidahost.com for UK hosting, although I think the do also have USA servers available. They don’t shout as loud as most so perhaps not many here would have heard of them hence I am happy to spread the word as good service should be rewarded.
I don’t work for them, I’ve not seen a bad report as regards speed and I can say support is first class.
I agree - all the above is extremely important. Also try and ensure that they have a good NOC department.
I am from South Africa and a Manager for a Web Hosting Company and you need to ensure you are not going with Resellers of ISPs but rather a “real” ISP. Also ensure they have the funding to invest in top technologies which ensure uptime is looked after well. If your site is down for too long it could affect your google ranking at times aswell.