My first and continuing bad hosting experience,
www.webhosting.com which is SBC.

40 bucks a month

This is how many people are virtualy hosted on one server.

$ ls -l /data/sites | wc -l
913

913 X 40 = $36,520 a month in revenue of one server.

Here are the stats of top

load averages: 1.08, 1.13, 1.02 22:08:07
259 processes: 255 sleeping, 2 zombie, 2 on cpu
CPU states: 43.3% idle, 16.3% user, 18.1% kernel, 22.3% iowait, 0.0% swap
Memory: 2048M real, 38M free, 997M swap in use, 2619M swap free

I like to check my webpages through the w3c validator. The problem is the validator crashes my website. This server is so over worked it won't even stand up to a validator.

I decided to I wanted to run a board and it was obvious webhosting.com wouldn't handle the load. I came here and everyone said site5.com was great. I look at sight5.com and the plan looks good, so I sign up. They send me an email with my account info ect. Then I go to there much hyped admin panel to set my crap up, but nothing works! The front page comes up, but all the links are dead.

Now at this point I'm pretty disgusted. The only reason I signed up was for the database. I don't really think it's honsest to tell users you have a service and then get their money and dump them on a broken server hoping they won't notice. I really don't care about the money, I care about the two weeks of wasted time waiting for them to fix it.

These so called admins are funny also. I have a BS in Computer Science. I develop internet apps at a well known bank. Java servlets, ejb's, and jsp running on IBM websphere on AIX with Oracle 8i. My apps don't have downtime, if they break I'm there within the hour and until they get fixed. So I really have little sympathy for a company who can't configure their server or get their dinky little admin scripts to work.

I'm now going to try tera-byte, I hope they turn out to be semi competent/honest.

BadAsh,

If you really want quality and support then I suggest you try FutureQuest.net (http://www.futurequest.net). These people charge a little more than other host, but you can not beat their service or support. Before when I was signed up with them, I think the longest it took for them to answer a support ticket was 15minutes. They also have a board where they let their users know about every little thing that's going on. They have lots and lots of tech people.

A couple other good ones to try:

www.optimumhosting.com
www.adaptive.net

Both have great support.

BadAsh:

I can attest that the control panel on Site5 was really rockin' until their server started having problems.

Support was great -- I got responses to three separate trouble tickets in less than 5 minutes each.

According to the guys, they'll have the new server up in a couple of days. I'm chalking this experience up to being an abnormal blip in an otherwise well-managed service.