Since I'm not satisfied with Jumpline, I'm switching my hosting provider. Here is my short list:

1. Tera-Byte
2. HostRocket
3. FutureQuest

Can you give some advice to me?
Thank you very much.

Adam

Tera-Byte is the way to go coz
1. Cheap Badnwidth
2. Great Support

Only draw back accroding to me is that they put you on a Raq machine :(

One of our sites is hosted on Futurequest.net, and I have absolutely nothing but praises for their server speed and customer service. If you're looking for a virtual account, I highly recommend them.

Quite frankly, all three are excellent. HostRocket has had its ups and downs, but in the last few weeks has made amends and has done very well.

You should be fine with whoever you go with.

(side note to George : welcome aboard - I love DD! Great DHTML resource, and definitely worth visiting weekly...)

http://www.tera-byte.com - Fast friendly Support, Good stable servers unless your on the Hwang server lol they are having problems with asp not sure if its fixed yet. Very Cheap and best of all they are cobalt raq3i's me wuv them servers for some reason. Been hosted there nearly 4 months loved every minute :-).

Site hosted there http://www.kchat.org

http://www.hostrocket.com - Again another cheap company, Been there 3 months now. Fast servers due to the fact they are based at alabanza. The technical support has been excellent. Not one minute of downtime.

Site hosted there http://www.flashtechnics.com

Hope ive been of some help :)

Originally posted by GeorgeC
One of our sites is hosted on Futurequest.net, and I have absolutely nothing but praises for their server speed and customer service. If you're looking for a virtual account, I highly recommend them.

How much I enjoy your site Im visit often:)

HostRocket and FutureQuest look great to me but how can they be so cheap while offering all that bandwidth? They don't set you up on raqs do they? I guess not going buy thouse nice looking control panels :) no more raqs for me!

I didn't see anything about a 99% Uptime Guarantee? do host realy stick buy that if something where to happen?

Sorry for the deviation from the topic as I just say thanks to BC and Tazz for the encouragement on our site(s) :)

As I understand it, Futurequest can offer above average bandwidth for competitive prices due to its account holders respecting one another, and not abusing the quota. It's a tight nit community they have there, myself in it. The company also just moved to a new data center, so their servers' connection speed is faster than they have ever been.

I haven't been with any of the other hosts mentioned above, so I can't comment on them. At any rate, Futurequest is IMHO a very good choice.

GeorgeC, kudos again from me for DD :)

May I ask please how many pageviews DD gets on the average? Am curious.

Learner

Thanks for all the responce,
I like this forum very much!! :blush:

However, ......, hum .... what's raq mechine? :emlaugh:

Adam

I found this thread, and I just wanted to say that I'm a really big fan of HostRocket, I just came out of a rocky experience with GX Hosting <urg>, and was getting pretty skeptical about any host offering that much at a low price.

But I was surprised when I signed up with HostRocket, the guys there are really nice and explain just about everything you need to know, plus they are on AIM instant messanger so you can talk live to them, which really helps. I just talked to them, and they are getting a 1-800 phone line installed, and they just recently installed a ticket system. Another thing that is helps is the message board they installed where you can post problems and get a wide variety of answers from tons of people.

Their servers are fast, and their control panel is the best I've seen. If you wanna check these things out go to http://www.hostrocket.com.

If you don't believe me on this, check out both of my sites,
YakkoSLW.com (http://www.YakkoSLW.com) & voLaTiLedesign.com (http://www.voLaTiLedesign.com)!

Originally posted by oceansky
what's raq machine?

Oceansky, a RAQ is a server manufactured by Cobalt. They are cheaper in cost than most servers available today.

The unique look about a RAQ server is its flat blue colored body with a bright green LCD panel infront.

Learner

To Oceansky: Any reason not to consider DreamHost?

I have no interest in the above. Just curious.

I'm in the same boat as you, I'm searching for another host. My current provider charges 30/month, and I'm only getting 2 gig of bandwidth. I occasionally go over that. Their servers were down for 2 hours yesterday (a router failure). I've had a couple of other problems, so given the price, I guess the downtime was the proverbial straw.

HostRocket looks good on paper to me.

BC, you wrote:
"Quite frankly, all three are excellent. HostRocket has had its ups and downs, but in the last few weeks has made amends and has done very well."

What sort of "ups and downs?" Having a good "last few weeks" isn't what I'm looking for.

Hi,

I believe that he is referring to some downtime we have before we move do our new server facility. Not positive however. We have had no downtime since the move.

-Brendan Brader
brendan@hostrocket.com
http://www.rocketsupport.com

Originally posted by Learner
a RAQ is a server manufactured by Cobalt. They are cheaper in cost than most servers available today.

I'm not sure about that one. I think you'd find a fair amount of people that would agree when I say they are a bit OVER priced. New RaQ4's surely aren't that cheap. I suppose they are cheaper than some other name brand 1U servers though, and maybe that is what you meant?

Brendan, thanks for the reply. When did you move to the new server facilty?

I recently moved some domains from tera-byte to hostrocket due to billing issues. Since I'm in the US and they are in Canada, had to deal with fluctuations of currency exchange and having to tell my credit card company to let the charges through, despite numerous times I told them before.

Just hope I last at hostrocket, one site has been active less than a week and chewed up 700megs of bandwidth already. Eeek.

One thing I liked about tera-byte, was real command line telnet sessions, complete with Pine. Although I soon discovered that while browsing my files, I could snoop around other peoples stash as well. Nice security :)

Nobunaga,

Yes, Brendan confirmed what I was saying, in that their servers had some sporadic minor downtime a few weeks ago, which has since been rectified. They now have many, many fans, particularly over at SitePoint and are doing very well.

Dreamhost is used by one of our forum members (Greg aka Akashik) so you might like to ask him about Dreamhost. I believe he's extremely satisfied.

Finally, about that question on cheap bandwidth : most companies (and I'm not directly implying HostRocket or others - this is a generalisation) know that most of their sites tend to use very little bandwidth, as they're generally static HTML/GIF/JPG files, and that's it. Usually most hosts only have a few clients with forums that consume large quantities of bandwidth and they balance (or gamble?) these against the minimal bandwidth users in order to provide cheaper bandwidth costs. The average for the industry is between $2-3 and 11 per gig.

I also wouldn't make the error of judging temporary downtime suffered by a generally reputed hosting company as a negative thing especially if it involves beneficial issues such as shifting to a new locality. A little temporary loss in such cases is offset by the future gain... which is a good thing for all concerned.

It's analogous to one's water supply getting temporarily shut off whenever new plumbing (a wider pipeline) is installed.

Learner

Thank you, everybody,

I'm going to try HostRocket, because I'm attracted by their long traditional log, low price, your comments, and their responce to my pre-sales questions is so fast and friendly.

And, you cannot know the truth if you don't try.
I can just turn to Tera-Byte if their service is not good. :cool:

Adam

Ditto here, thanks for everyone's comments. Learner, your point's taken on downtime.

I spent most of yesterday scouring the Web, looking for info. I've narrowed my choices (I think) down to HostRocket and WestHost. They both seem like excellent outfits and regardless of which one I choose I hope they both do well and are around for a long time.

WestHost has been around longer and seems to have an outstanding record of uptime, so they are ahead by a nose in by book at the moment, but I haven't decided one way or the other, yet.

Oceansky, you wrote:
"I'm going to try HostRocket, because I'm attracted by their long traditional log"

By "long traditional log" do you mean the usual log files that most providers supply, or does hostrocket supply something extra?

No, HostRocket said they provides the usual log "many?" hosts provide. But Jumpline, Tera-Byte, or FutureQuest all compress the log into different files (eg. gz), which I just cannot (I might be lazy) find a software to analyze the compressed files.

Hope that my info can help you -- Adam

Originally posted by nobunaga
WestHost has been around longer and seems to have an outstanding record of uptime, so they are ahead by a nose in by book at the moment, but I haven't decided one way or the other, yet.

I'll just add that HostRocket is now using Alabanza, which has been around quite some time. I am not sure where HostRocket was, nor anything at all about WestHost.

Oceansky,

I just looked into our log system again and it seems we too compress the files by day. I answered your question incorrectly the first time as. I know on our old servers we did not and assumed it was the same on the new ones, I had not personally checked them. You'll need to find a different host if that is a requirement of yours. I dont think you've signed up yet but if you do before you see this I will refund your money upon you request. Again, sorry for the mistake.

-Brendan
support@hostrocket.com

Does anyone know of a good log analyzer program that does support this type of log files?

-Brendan
brendan@hostrocket.com

WebTrends log analyzer will uncompress log files on the fly and analyze them.

Oceansky, I don't know what your requirements are, (WebTrends isn't free), but worst case, you can always FTP the compressed log files to your PC, uncompress them with gzip (free) and then run your log analyzing software against the uncompressed file. Although you did say you were lazy. ;)

Hum ...... I DID SIGN UP ... :angry:

However, Brendan, I appreciate your honest and promise to refund. :) Still, based on the comments of several boards, your package is still better than that of my current host, believe that I'll have a good time with you.

So, hehe, ... I cannot be lazy now, :emlaugh:
thanks nobunaga, WebTrends log analyzer is too expansive to me, I've to find another one.

Adam

Analog (http://www.analog.cx)is a good tool, but I have no idea if it uncompresses on the fly. These days, what with WinZip supporting .gz and all, uncompressing them yourself isn't that big a deal.