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95 Comments
- carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21Hmm, I'm not sure I'm going to go with the host that can't even take the digg effect on a thursday night.
- emdub, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20 Uhm hate to break it to the author but midPhase and ANHosting are the same company. Literally. Not a single lick of difference between 'em so you're getting the exact same support from both, whether by phone, chat or email. Normally I'd allow for a slight discrepancy because of different times he tried contacting support but in this case he claims he got the automated "thanks for emailing" response for ANHosting after only a minute while midPhase took twenty times as long.
*****. Same system, same everything. His own email service must have been lagging and that makes for untrustworthy results all around. Ditto for email answering. Somehow the midPhase folk answered his email in just as much time as it took for him to receive the automated response while ANHosting took over two hours. Again, same people answering both. I call BS, buried as inaccurate. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19If you read the story, the 1 minute time is the response time to email. 1&1 has a support ticket system, so they would be notified immediately that they had received the email. It took them over 2 hours to actually answer the question.
Pay attention. - marklar69, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Burton hosting better call their host their site is down!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Bluehost and hostmonster use the same support, yet these results show major differences in response times. I call B S.
- chrisbasham, on 07/22/2008, -1/+11Hmm. Burton Hosting (http://www.burtonhosting.com/) -- the top hosting company on the list -- is down "due to high load on the website." They may have great support, but it doesn't look too good if their primary site can't even take the hits.
- fac3less, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9The top folks on the list ...
They use "quad xeons" for shared hosting?
Sheesh, I can't imagine the number of users they are packing on a single box like that.
And here I thought not putting all of your eggs in a single basket was a good idea.
I think this list is an advertisement for a specific provider on the list. I won't mention names but it's the one-man show up at the top of the list.
I'd highly recommend utilizing a site that allows user submitted reviews rather than a single source.
Check out http://www.hostjury.com instead. Much more informative as it's from many, many people. - sortran, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Great info. Although I am not sure that it would be true for folks in foreign countries, as they would be calling / emailing / chatting at different times :-/
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7The guy should have put the hosting fee too.
It's one thing to expect premium support for hosting and another entirely to pay for it. If those are sub-$10 accounts then ***** him and his fantasies. - kudos, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8"I used to...", "we", "we", "we".
Make up your mind. - keef06, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Article Mirror:
http://www.hostseeq.com.nyud.net:8090/blog/hosting/shared/shared-hosting-support-showdown/
Or (Screenshot of Page):
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/956/hostseeqsharedhostingsuzp1.png
my bad, two mirrored links already posted... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Sweet. I've always wanted to do something like this, but never seemed worth the time. People should make a "kitty" for someone to"police" companies and rat out the ones that are worthy of cusomer support found in Kazakhstan-- while it was state run.
- statik99, on 11/03/2009, -1/+7And best test, after placing fake tickets to find who is the best, use them as your host and make the front page to see how bad the Digg effect is. Now that's a stress test!
- tagawa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5And in the UK, avoid Freedom2Surf/Pipex. Support response measured in days/weeks if at all.
- Homunculiheaded, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's strange how frustrated people get with sites the suffer the digg effect, when it's really unrealistic to expect a smaller site to be able to scale dramatically on demand. And more importantly, rather than being angry at the site you should be more concerned with the general Internet architecture/infrastructure. Yes people could add extra servers to handle the random, extreme jump in bandwidth/cpu demands, but the fundamental root of the digg effect is the same inherent flaw in the Internet that makes ddos attacks so difficult to prevent. Not that we can fix that easily over night or anything, but it should be something more people are focused on rather then blaming small sites for being unrealistically scalable.
- vonskippy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Avoid MidPhase like the plague. Soooooooo oversold they make dial-up connections look fast, and tech's that will out right lie and tell you they aren't having a problem, it must be your browser or your ISP. Downtime is measured in days, not hours or minutes. Users are jumping ship as fast as possible - just look at Midphases user forum.
3 weeks, 5 days, and a few hours and my year long contract will be up and it's "so long - no need to write" to MidPhase. - Futurepower, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5COMMON TRICK: A common trick is to make a web site that pretends to evaluate several web hosting providers, but actually is selling the one that is found to be the best.
I'm VERY skeptical about Burton Hosting, since even the home page of their web site does not display well in Firefox. Some of the prices are on top of the features, for example. How can they give good support when they can't even make a working home page?
English appears to be a foreign language for Burton Hosting. Notice this on the home page: "THIS MONTHS SPECIAL OFFER!!" That should be, "This month's special offer." The apostrophe is missing. Also, the only purpose of all caps was with typewriters that didn't have bold. Burton Hosting seems to have not noticed that improvement in technology.
The Burton Hosting web site has many areas of sloppiness, and I suppose that means that everything in the company is equally sloppy. - jartek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Guy FED UP! with bad tech support"???
I did the math, the average response time was 4.63 MINUTES! I don't know what kind of customer service he is used to but in America, if you get an issue resolved 4.63 minutes it is a blessing. - timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Actually, it's pretty poor info. How many questions did he ask? What did he ask? Did he check if it was just a fluke for the response times over an hour? His methods are statistically insignificant, so this really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Try http://www.realmetrics.com/ for some *actual* statistics. - drderail, on 10/12/2007, -0/+41&1 Should be the lowest on that list. They're absolutely craptastic. Sure they have nifty ads and the cheapest hosting around but you get what you pay for. Nothing. And trying to call in to the hot line is useless, 13 Minutes wait times just to reach an Indian who pretends to understand you but really doesn't, only forcing you to call back and wait another 13 minutes to try to get someone who does. Since we switch from them to Rackspace it has been clear sailing. I call in and immediately get a tier 1 tech, no hold time period. After answering a security question and describing the problem I'm passed to my server team (of which someone is available 24/7), I spend no more then a minute on the phone total before getting to a tech that knows what I need or who to escalate to.
- holzp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Time to submit another one to his current host. :)
Server fried! - evileyetmc, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9Yea, it may be an unfair advantage to those companies that are in the author's timezone. Maybe another study with him sending email at 8am local time, for example?
also, site's slow, but coral caught it:
http://www.hostseeq.com.nyud.net:8080/blog/hosting/shared/shared-hosting-support-showdown/ - askjeffro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I thought along the same lines. The best part though? The number one picks own site has been tanked by digg users.
- syco123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Pipex homecall iternet service support were downright rude to me and hung up when they couldnt answer my questions. Wowo icouldnt wait for that contract to expire. Never ever again!!
- jcaino, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4wow, and the site is south already.
eh, just loading sllooooowly...
there's a good number of hosting companies missing from the list
pair Networks for one - one of the grand-dads of web hosting. - pinetree, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'll bet the "1 minute" email response times are from auto responders -- is that really meaningful? Also, the coloring of the table could be a lot more useful. Since each number is based on only 1 or 2 measurements, there should be large error bars on all of the numbers, so numbers that are within 5 or 10 minutes of each other are pretty much the same. That should be reflected in the coloring.
I did a much smaller study many years ago, and half of the companies took DAYS to respond to an email inquiry. - lagrange, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Getting someone to respond and getting them to actually fix a serious problem are two different things.
A lot of companies with horrible customer service always pick up on the first ring, so to speak. - dafrog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If u can afford it - Check rackspace and their fanatical Support
- TomP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21&1 was the worse for me i waited DAYS! for a reply
- geekitechture, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2message on burtonhosting.com:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11) in /home/bhdotcom/public_html/mysqlConnect.php on line 23
Due to high load on the website, this service is temporaly unavailable
Whoops. So much for that plan. Nice to know they'll pick up the phone, anyway. - shadowself, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Site is farked, but... you get what you pay for. If you pay $5 a month for hosting, don't expect champagne and caviar.
- RSCruiser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Don't knock the quads now...
My shared hosting has been on a quad xeon box for a good 2 years now. The number of sites it hosts is irrelevant if the provider keeps an eye on the usage and removes abusers (like my current host does so well). All their eggs in one basket doesn't really mean much for shared hosting either. You shouldn't be hosting anything critical on it so if the box ever does fail, you have nothing to worry about while its replaced. If you do have something to worry about, you better have backups.
The box your bytes are piped off of is irrelevant when it's managed correctly. - Mr.Chainsaw, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6I used to work for bluehost.com. Things have gone downhill for support within the past four months, but its just been because we have been understaffed. But they hired alot more people, so the company should be doing alot better now. We have a goal of 90 second wait times. Which we still hold most of the time.
- adragontattoo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I have a site on Bluehost and love em, I havent had ANY issues with the service and I have had to call em up a few times for support with stuff. It took me longer to dial then it did to get someone on the phone.
- capajc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What's the SLA for fixing a problem that is a lie?
- fac3less, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I most certainly have respect for the quads :) I've worked with a few of them before.
The problem is the provider may not be segmenting the users enough for emergency situations.
Imagine a support team of two suddenly dealing with a quad down that has 2,000 users packed onto it.
The team would be inundated with requests that they wouldn't have time to actually resolve any issues.
I'm sort of looking at this from an employer's perspective though rather than a client. Managing users is a skill very few seem to have. - enkafan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I work for a webhost so these stats are pretty interesting to me. My company is not listed on the site but I we aren't exactly among the "budget" shared hosting companies either. Anyways, just because you got a response quickly generally doesn't mean anything. Our system will send a response immediately telling you that we've received it and we sent it to a support engineer to look at. How long will it take until that ticket is resolved is the main issue. Right now we resolve tickets on average in 30 minutes. This includes troubleshooting server problems, e-mail problems, handling requests, etc. Sure some things can't be resolved right away but writing into a support e-mail and saying "hey, how do I connect to my database" isn't indicative of the level of support.
The other thing that you need to remember is that you are paying for what you get. If you are paying $10 a month for hosting that means that your host is probably assuming you'll take up roughly 1s of support time from their engineers per month once you subtract bandwidth, power, hardware and other operational costs. Everytime you write into a web host you are probably costing them around $1 to handle your response assuming that the intern they have monitoring the support tickets is able to answer the support ticket immediately with a canned response. If something is broke - good luck. You've just cost the company money. - fac3less, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well they didn't stay up long... :/
- sherwinn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've had experience with 3 webhosts.
The best in support time was Ace-Host.net. We're talking 2 minutes for a reply.
Worst is Dreamhost. HORRIBLE. 2 days for a reply, so I switched. - JaminBen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I am not sure if I trust this entry.
Look at:
http://www.hostseeq.com
It is essentially a fake site full of broken links, sort of your basic filler SEO builder site.
http://www.hostseeq.com/blog/category/blogging/
Has very few blog posts. I'd guess that whoever did this study works for one of the top hosts on the list.
-Ben - pheen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've got a Rackspace server and have to say they have the best support I've ever seen. Just the other week, my FTP program wiped out a file I was working on. I emailed their support with the file I needed restored from the managed backup and in under 4 minutes I had the backup file.
- Kingconsulting, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have several of my clients on a pretty large hosting company. I usually don't need support. This week I had to call them twice for 2 different issues. After being transferred 5 times and being on hold for over 30 minutes I gave up and went to the website for a support ticket. 12 hours later it was fixed. I never even received a response I had to check myself. Then a couple days ago their whole company was down. Took about 4 hours to be up and running. I just gave up on the phone because they never answered.
Really frustrating! - cobbs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Avoid Lunarpages. They deleted my 300 product database WITHOUT a back up when they were doing routine maintenance.... enough said.
Now moving to Bluehost. Fingers Crossed. - 47knight, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4No Dreamhost??! It probably would have been at the very top, if not the first one on that list.
I - TechCF, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Nice info, but I missed Dreamhost on that list.
Dreamhost: email response and solution: 1hr
Registerfly: chat response (did not solve): 3m - JoshuaWood, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2working for me....
- RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Shared hosting sucks. Go with virtual private. I recently found an awesome one that for $10 a month you can get your own VPS box. They do great support.
I'm not going to tell you who they are, because I'm a selfish bastard and I don't have a referral link to them... but suffice it to say, they are very generous with their VPS boxes. - Miniman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have no idea what you people are talking about, i have 3 accounts with dreamhost and i rarely have to wait more than 10 min for an email response to a complicated question.
- Navicerts, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just because they died to the digg effect would not mean I would not choose it. Good support is much more important to me then being able to take a lot of hits to a lot of people. Maybe when i come up with some great web 2.0 winner to make a million dollars things will be different. Don't buy a indie car to drive to work.
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