Utter Randomness

I just felt like sharing my love of my host. My current host is RapidVPS, and I have been with them for 5 months. Now, I’m sure at least one reader of this post will be thinking “But I’m on this awesome free host”, good for you.

Here’s my experience with free hosts:

• Limited and slow support
• Resellers. They offer others’ resources to you
• Quickly close down
• Don’t offer many things needed to run a modern website (MySQL/FTP)
• Slow
• Attacked and abused frequently
• Overselling. They offer more than they can give (Used to entice people, and it works)

I’ve probably been hosted at a dozen different free hosts so far, and that’s generally how it goes. So what makes RVPS so great for me?

1. Monthly payments. None of that crap where they show you the price for a 3 years advance payment. In fact, they don’t even offer whole year sales (But actually, at the time of writing, they’re trying to fill up some shared hosting space so they are, but they’re still keeping the monthly payment an option!). I don’t want to pay for a year + at a time. What if something happens at that host? I don’t want to have wasted hundreds of dollars paying for all that surplus hosting when the host turns out to be a flop and I want to move.
2. Fast servers. Oh yeah, paid hosting is a ton faster than free hosting, even on a shared plan.
3. Features. Pretty much everything I could ever ask for. MySQL (unlimited), web based email, auto responders, unlimited domains, PHP, server status page, and a whole lot more.
4. Support. While hosted at RVPS, I’ve only had to contact the staff 3 times and I’ll explain a bit more because you probably think that shouldn’t have to be done on a paid host. Firstly, all 3 support tickets were answered within **1** hour. Of course that’s not going to happen all of the time. Now the first ticket I sent was because they had an error on their account registration page. Their script let me enter an invalid domain name, which broke my account. This one took the longest at an hour for a response, and when I did receive a reply, my account was fixed and active and their registration page had been fixed. The second time I contacted support was for an old MySQL version (4). One of the staff graciously moved me off to a new server — seemlessly — that had MySQL 5. The third time I contacted them, it was because the server was undergoing massive stress. The load was up at 80, and a normal load for that server was usually 1 or less. 80 times the norm really took it’s toll, but the server still tried to deliver pages (and would, sometimes after minutes). I contacted the staff and got a response within 5 minutes, the load halved in 10 minutes, and the load back to normal in 20 minutes. Their support is truly lengendary IMO.
5. Not oversold! That means they offer each account what they can handle. While this may be a turn off because of a relatively low amount of bandwidth, it adds up to better performance.
6. Their account system is epic. I mean, really epic. With 1 set of login info, I can manage accounts across different servers with their own unique hosting plans. If I want to say, have a website running on a dedicated server and also have a backup server hosted at RVPS, I can simply login and restart both within a few clicks, or restart 1 and change the login details of the other. It’s super easy, but I have yet to actually purchase two simultaneous packages.
7. Acc System #2. Their account system also allows for you to seemlessly upgrade and downgrade to nearly any hosting package. You can go from shared hosting to a level 2 VPS without any site downtime.
8. What! They own their equipment, they don’t rent it out. They buy datacenter rackspace and have people working physically with the servers. Rick, owner of RVPS, even posts pictures of himself, other staff, and the servers. Rick is proud of what he does and rightly so. I don’t know of any other host (so far) that is willing to post pictures of themselves and their setup.

I’m currently on the lowest level shared hosting plan and have loved it since the day I first got it. While I’ve seen plenty of other hosts that are super cheap (some at $3 offering TBs of transfer); I chose and have stuck with RVPS. I know someone hosted at that cheapo shared hosting site and the minute he got a spike in traffic his account was suspended, then when his site was attacked they wanted to kill his account permanently. It was only by a loophole in their TOS that he was able to keep his account hosted there. That’s not the kind of company I want to be hosted with.

So, when finding a paid host, look for reviews, forums (easiest for others to voice their opinions and concerns), and check them out more. Took me a few weeks to decide on RVPS, but once I saw the intelligence, confidence, and overall joy Rick took in his job, I knew this was the host for me. I also loved that he owned the servers and thus had physical access, as well as him posting pictures that I could view before registering on the forums or buying a hosting package.

Finding a fast, reliable webhost can be quite a challenge – especially if you don’t want to spend any money. If you just want to host a blog or a forum, then search google – there’s plenty of free services out there that allow you to do that easily. However, if you want to build your own site or control every aspect you’ll want to find a webhost.

Here’s some basic tips

• Check the age of the supposed “company”. Nowadays, the hosting market has become very saturated and reselling has become popular.
• Don’t fall for “overselling”. This is when a host will offer you absurd amounts of bandwidth and space at no cost. These high numbers are just there to attract you – and it works.
• Check for forums. Many hosts are starting to create forums for their users to chat on. Check the number of users and activity and use it as a potential guide.
• Look for reviews on the internet. This one is very important – other users will post their experiences, good and bad, about the host. A word of warning though: Quite a few hosts have been caught paying people to write good reviews for them. If the host is truly bad, the number of bad reviews will still clearly outshine the good.
• Try to find their uptime stats. You wouldn’t want to find out that your host that claimed 98% uptime has less than 80%.
• Look at their features. For a free host, mysql/sendmail/fsockopen and a few others can easily lead to abuse and are often not available on free hosts. If you absolutely need these, make sure you check if the host offers it before signing up.
• Read their TOS. This can be a very important one – if you want to host a proxy site, that generally won’t happen on free or paid hosting due to the CPU intensity of these sites. Also it is important because some hosts don’t want to host games or photo galleries, which may be what you want to create. Save your time, effort, and possibly money by at least skimming through the TOS. On top of that, remember when I mentioned overselling earlier? Well, this becomes key in their TOS. Often, it will say that the hundreds of GBs of bandwidth they offer you must not exceed ___% bandwidth for files that aren’t text based like html/php. If you want to host some images/software etc, this can be critical.

Good luck in your searches!