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Starting this thread after talk of the old thread https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/59352-neowins-top-hosts/ came up in discussion in the web section. That old thread is too big and dated to be of actual use in providing reference to what hosts Neowin members might recommend for whatever reason. 

So would like to start a new thread where members may list hosting companies they use, and their take and use of them. This thread well be reset every year to help keep it somewhat current.

When that other thread started most "hosting was basically just web hosting. Now there are lots of different services/features/uses for having control or space to use outside of your home connection.

Yes hosting still used for serving up http, but you also have hosted exchange, storage, vpn, shell access, vps be it KVM or dedicated hardware, seedboxes for p2p, etc.

Keep in mind no referral links please, and no discussion of discounts or PM for special link, etc. Please only post a host here that you are happy with, and would feel comfortable with recommending to your fellow neowin users with no benefit to you other than that glowing feeling of helping.  Links here in no way reflect endorsement by neowin proper.

I suggest you Start your posts with

Name/Link:
Major Features:
Customer Since/Time:
How you use/review:

 

I will request moderation of posts that seem to be spam, and while "seedboxes" may be a valid hosting option and quite legal in many parts of the world, lets keep discussion of your use clean and within the guidelines of neowin policy, etc.

 

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Name/Link: http://www.dreamhost.com/
Major Features: Pretty much unlimited everything, multishop provider of hosting services. IPv6, SSL (free option SNI)
Customer Since/Time: 2006-08-30
How you use/review: This is my do whatever I want/need to do site.  Host my personal sites, run owncloud on it. Serve up site for friends and family for pictures/video's of grand daughter, etc.  I have a shared hosting account with them that costs $119.40 yearly

 

Have been very happy with service/support and pretty much nothing you can not do with what they provide you for a very reasonable cost.  Even host some sites for friends here that don't really understand hosting and just needed some space, etc.  Can not recommend them enough - great provider.

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Name/Link: http://buyvm.net/
Major Features: vps provider, choose from lowend to highend needs.  IPv6, lots of virtual appliances/oses to install
Customer Since/Time: 08/17/2012
How you use/review: I mostly use this as low cost shell/vpn $15 a year!!  Currently running an openvpn-as appliance on it.  But from shell I can do networking testing for latency, dns, etc. from west cost.  I keep meaning to add another one of their vps on the east cost, etc.

 

Very happy with service and performance.  For $15 get 15GB of storage and 500GB a month, very handy as a roll your own vpn, etc.

 

Keep in mind that the lowend vps can be hard to be in stock, you might have to keep an eye out for when new stock opens -- follow them on twitter helps to know when stock is available.

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Name/Link: https://www.feralhosting.com
Major Features: Seedbox - great performance, great package options.  Server ready in minutes after signup
Customer Since/Time: February 24, 2013
How you use/review: Seedbox, I currently am on their lowest end package ?10 /month, this gets you 400GB of storage and 2TB upload a month.. Unlimited download and speeds just scream!!

 

I am currently on just month to month payment, which is nice for such a service - you can pay upfront and get discounts and or added services, etc.  Very simple to test out and if don't like your only out 10 quid, etc.

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Name/Link: Liquidweb
Major Features: Shared hosting, vps (managed/unmanaged), dedicated
Customer Since/Time: Around 2010 (Shared), July 2013 (vps)
How you use/review: Our company used the shared hosting. Small company, but out grew that, so they moved to a vps. For shared, he was paying about $30/m, and currently paying about $80/m I think. Went the managed route. I'm their tech guy, but never managed a server besides a small home one, so wanted to make sure we had support. Home server goes down, oh well. Business server goes down, the company loses money lol They set everything up for us, and made sure things were working properly before switching us from shared to vps. 

Customer service has been helpful. Rarely on hold for longer than 5 minutes, and they are quick to fix any problems. We had a problem with them for a short while, our server kept going down, but they fixed it somewhat quickly. Then switched to the vps, and haven't had any problems (Besides a typo in our custom php.ini file, but that was my fault lol)

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Name/Link: Minty Internet www.mintyinternet.com
Major Features: Web Hosting, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery, Online Backup, VPS
Customer Since/Time: Launch Date (15th Jan 2014)
How you use/review: I am currently using Minty Internets cloud service to back up all my data, It is really fast and has never been down for me even this early to there launch.

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  • 5 months later...
Name/Link: http://www.tagadab.com/ Tagadab
Major Features: ?1 Hosting Trial
Customer Since/Time: Last Year Sometime. 
How you use/review:Excellent Technical Support, Very fast at responding to tickets. Tor can be used as an exit note on a Dedicated box not on VPS or other server. Very easy to customize. Servers are rock solid and fast backbone in the UK. 

Name/Link: https://www.feralhosting.com
Major Features: Seedbox - great performance, great package options.  Server ready in minutes after signup
Customer Since/Time: February 24, 2013
How you use/review: Seedbox, I currently am on their lowest end package ?10 /month, this gets you 400GB of storage and 2TB upload a month.. Unlimited download and speeds just scream!!

 

I am currently on just month to month payment, which is nice for such a service - you can pay upfront and get discounts and or added services, etc.  Very simple to test out and if don't like your only out 10 quid, etc.

 

Plus One for this. 

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Major Features: Targeted at Student hosting personal projects and Minecraft Users
Customer Since/Time: Last Year
How you use/review: Simple to set up to host student projects for Website Design. UK Support is excellent. 

I thought I posted in the wrong thread here, I am guessing for 2014 most of these company's listed have only matured....Keep up the good work. All my links are relevant for July 2014. 

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  • 9 months later...

Name/Link : http://tsohost.co.uk

 

Major Features: Clustered shared environment makes it fairly easy to host a website and let them worry about the infrastructure behind it.

Customer Since/ Time : 1Yr 

How you use: Reseller account, host friends that used to be on my own shared (Cpanel) server but I stopped providing shared hosting myself due to time constraints and no longer wanting to maintain my own shared environment.

 

 

Name/Link - http://colocker.co.uk

Major features: Co-location for non rackmount systems, pricing is per locker + power/bandwidth rather than per device which is nice if you have several low powered devices.

Customer since: 3+ months

How you use:  Itx machine for personal VM's/offsite storage, Might also stick a couple of PI2's in there at some-point when I get around to it.

 

Name/Link: Iwstack cloud  (part of prometeus  www.prometeus.net )

Major features: Cloud envrioment with HA/Failover options, reasonable pricing Apache cloudstack based.

How you use:  Hosts a couple of VM's I wanted on something a bit more robust than my personal machine above.

 

Name/Link http://online.net:

Major features: Price, Bandwidth.

How you use: Cheap Dedi's mostly, Picked up some machines when they were on an offer for a silly price, worked out cheaper than equivalently spec'd VPS's bandwidth is very cheap.  No idea how good the support are for technical issues as never needed them yet.

 

Edit:  Seem to have messed up the font at somepoint.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Major Features: Domain names / Hosting / hosted Exchange / Online storage / VPS / managed servers 
Customer Since/Time: 2008
How you use/review: I was first using their web hosting services and then when i got skills i started to deploy vm on their cloud (xen+cloudstack) to host my websites on my own servers.
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Name/Link: OVH / SoYouStart / Kimsufi (All the same company, Kimsufi = Enthusiasts / Students, SoYouStart = Small / Medium Businesses, OVH = Enterprise)

Major Features: Fantastic value dedicated servers with a great spec and loads of bandwidth. OVH also do just about anything else you can think of hosting / server wise, including: VmWare VPS's, Shared hosting, Exchange Email, VoIP, vSphere as a service, CDN and more
 
Customer Since/Time: 2009
 
How you use/review:
 
Over the years i've had various dedicated servers with OVH, starting out with a cheap Kimsufi. It wasn't very powerful, however had loads of hard drive space and bandwidth. This server used to push around 10-12TB per month with no complaints from OVH.

 

Currently I have combined a lot of older servers i had in to the following server, which costs

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  • 1 month later...

what is the best hosting company that offers VOIP, VPN , exchange email ect at a very cheap price. Been looking for comparison sites for this purpose. Can't find any. 

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Check out some of the suggestions in this thread. If there was one host that provided everything for a cheap price then there wouldn't be any need for this conversation.

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  • 1 month later...

Name/Link: Amazon Web Services
Major Features: Reliability, scalability, and speed
Customer Since/Time: Foreverrrrrr
How you use/review: They're awesome. With autoscaling and load balancing as well as reliability, I'm going to be with AWS for a LONGGG time. Haha

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  • 2 weeks later...

Name: Fastmail (Fastmail.com)
Major Features: Very reliable email, affordable
Customer since/time: Over a year
How you use/review: Use them for email hosting, have had no issues with emails not being received. their spam filter is amazing and have had no false positives yet nor any spam in my inbox. They do offer 'file hosting' in addition to email hosting which allows you to serve static websites (no php, asp, sql, ect)

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

what is the best hosting company that offers VOIP, VPN , exchange email ect at a very cheap price. Been looking for comparison sites for this purpose. Can't find any. 

 

I doubt you'll find 1 company that offers all those in a package available to consumers. 

Exchange - Office 365

VPN - link ^

VOIP - What exactly are you looking for, fully hosted PBX or you got some on prem stuff to connect to the trunks?

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Name/Link: FatCow: http://fatcow.com
Major Features: Provides a large selection of server features and web interface. Centralized management of accounts and domains (with domain security) is great. Unlimited storage and bandwidth, quick, stable
Customer Since/Time: Um, 10+ years?
How you use/review: I've had very good results. No server issues, good uptime, great customer support. Managing several domains through it is pretty simple. It is more costly than other providers, but I feel the security, stability, and support worth it.

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  • 1 month later...

I moved from Hostgator to Dreamhost last month, as Hostgator increased the price on shared hosting without any reasonable explanation. I tried Dreamhost because of the recommendation in this thread and also some additional research. Surprisingly I started having issues with my Wordpress site downtime (although Dreamhost promises zero downtime), I had never before with Hostgator. Support team tell me things like "hey, try to tweak phprc file". OK, I did know before about such a thing like  phprc file. :) Maybe Endurance was not that bad I think now...

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2 minutes ago, Astrum said:

I moved from Hostgator to Dreamhost last month, as Hostgator increased the price on shared hosting without any reasonable explanation. I tried Dreamhost because of the recommendation in this thread and also some additional research. Surprisingly I started having issues with my Wordpress site downtime (although Dreamhost promises zero downtime), I had never before with Hostgator. Support team tell me things like "hey, try to tweak phprc file". OK, I did know before about such a thing like  phprc file. :) Maybe Indurance was not that bad I think now...

I've been running multiple forums boards, WordPress testing sites, and a lot of traffic. I have ZERO problems with them. When I was first setting up forums boards, I had a member issue. I only have 32mb of memory, and I needed 64mb or more for IP.Boards 4.x.x.x. They instantly told me what to change, and it would work. Sure enough, I did it, and boom, I have 256mb of available memory now.

 

I have the actual hosting plan, BudMan hooked me up, and damn wasn't it awesome. Let me know if you want to move from that hosting, I can have as many WordPress's as I need and I've been looking at changing where my images are hosted and pull from my home server.

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13 hours ago, BinaryData said:

I've been running multiple forums boards, WordPress testing sites, and a lot of traffic. I have ZERO problems with them. When I was first setting up forums boards, I had a member issue. I only have 32mb of memory, and I needed 64mb or more for IP.Boards 4.x.x.x. They instantly told me what to change, and it would work. Sure enough, I did it, and boom, I have 256mb of available memory now.

 

I have the actual hosting plan, BudMan hooked me up, and damn wasn't it awesome. Let me know if you want to move from that hosting, I can have as many WordPress's as I need and I've been looking at changing where my images are hosted and pull from my home server.

My site is down again with Dreamhost -- 500 Internal Server Error. And I tweaked phprc file and removed all not-needed plugins in Wordpress as Dreamhost proposed... And it is a small simple website, nothing special. I've had never such a thing before with HostGator. :( So, yeah may be I will invest my time in reading server error logs this weekend or maybe I want to move away.

 

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2 hours ago, Astrum said:

My site is down again with Dreamhost -- 500 Internal Server Error. And I tweaked phprc file and removed all not-needed plugins in Wordpress as Dreamhost proposed... And it is a small simple website, nothing special. I've had never such a thing before with HostGator. :( So, yeah may be I will invest my time in reading server error logs this weekend or maybe I want to move away.

 

Check your pm.

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On 12/4/2015, 11:18:35, Astrum said:

My site is down again with Dreamhost -- 500 Internal Server Error. And I tweaked phprc file and removed all not-needed plugins in Wordpress as Dreamhost proposed... And it is a small simple website, nothing special. I've had never such a thing before with HostGator. :( So, yeah may be I will invest my time in reading server error logs this weekend or maybe I want to move away.

 

That's generic issue and you need to find the full error message on the server. Please ask your hosting provider to check the error logs for more information

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5 hours ago, AdamRobocop said:

That's generic issue and you need to find the full error message on the server. Please ask your hosting provider to check the error logs for more information

Dreamhost was particularly not helpful in my case. They sent me a bunch of wiki links to explore and did not answer straight questions (about the errors). I still have no idea what caused five days in a row one hour downtime. Now it seems fine, but I don't know for how long.

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