Has anyone used wizardhosting.com. They features look good but I want to know if they are reputable. How is there support also with technical difficulties. I have attempted to use hostrocket but support sucks.

As you may have noticed Wizards Hosting hosts this forum. They are a very good company and I've never heard a bad word said about them. We use Wizards Hosting and they are top notch, we've been with 2 other companies before them and no one comes near Wizards in terms of customer support and relations.

I read wizardhosting's term and they are peculiar in some respects. Basically they limit an account by bandwidth which is natural and by accounts not using more than 20 percent of system resources but then they forbid banner rotation programs and forbid using domain forwarding as I understand their terms. Thats unique. I gather that from:


"- Multiple hosts resolving at an IP or domain name that we provide:

This means if you open a account with one website and you pointer sites. We apply this rule if your pointer sites are high traffic....we would call you, email you and ask you what can we do about it.

- Sites with banners, graphics or cgi's running from their domain used on other domains:

When you employ services such as Link Exchange or a cgi host who lets 1000's of others link to their site, it is important that you require any sites you exchange ads with, display your ad on their server. Not only will not abiding to this guideline cause your site to load slow, depending on the resources that you are absorbing you will inadvertently affect our other clients."

-

We have been with a variety of hosting companies over the past few years, then we found WizardsHosting.

We now use WizardsHosting.com and are very happy with them. :)

Carlos seems to be very knowledgeable and is quick to help out when you need it. Recently they initiated Wonderdesk's HelpDesk (http://helpdesk.wizardshosting.com) and there is usually someone on HumanClick for those more "personal" answers. I believe that Carlos is also a CPanel designer with DarkOrb.net

As KDAWebServices said, they are "top notch"

Originally posted by firstmark
I read wizardhosting's term and they are peculiar in some respects. Basically they limit an account by bandwidth which is natural and by accounts not using more than 20 percent of system resources but then they forbid banner rotation programs and forbid using domain forwarding as I understand their terms. Thats unique. I gather that from:


"- Multiple hosts resolving at an IP or domain name that we provide:

This means if you open a account with one website and you pointer sites. We apply this rule if your pointer sites are high traffic....we would call you, email you and ask you what can we do about it.

- Sites with banners, graphics or cgi's running from their domain used on other domains:

When you employ services such as Link Exchange or a cgi host who lets 1000's of others link to their site, it is important that you require any sites you exchange ads with, display your ad on their server. Not only will not abiding to this guideline cause your site to load slow, depending on the resources that you are absorbing you will inadvertently affect our other clients."

-

Firstmark

Thank you for pointing those 2 issue, see we have kept out TOS since we where in Alabanza (where bandwidth IS very expensive), you just made me realize that the TOS need a major clean up :(

cheers

i host with them... excellent support :) i just love bugggggging the old man who runs it :)

Wizardshosting would be a fine choice. Carlos is often on ICQ and they also use Wonderdesk for support issues. Overall, great company!

In another thread, firstmark asked:

"Which of http://www.wizardshosting.com/ plans does webhostingtalk.com use? And how many page views and how much data transfer does this message board site average a month?"

We don't really use a plan. You must have missed our begging threads :) We are on the graciously provided complimentary plan. Not sure on the page views, but last check the board was consuming just over 15 Gb/mo *I believe*.

Actually, Like chicken said, .. it's not a "plan"

We have a d-server dedicated ONLY to Webhostingtalk and our main Wizardshosting.com site (933mhz, 512Mb Ram 2x 20 gig HD's) ..

Some days the board gets 20K page views

cheers

Can't go wrong with with wizardshosting.com, they're the greatest, the best, the... the... (do I get a free tv yet?)
Seriously though, the support is the best I've seen with any company I've ever used.

Is Wizardshosting in any way, shape, or form connected to or on the same servers as liquidweb?

I just signed up with them 1 1/2 months ago and my site has been down 4-6 times. Not for just a few hours, but I mean the entire day.

I just signed up with wizardshosting, and want to make sure this isn't going to happen in the future. I saw this site is hosted with VDI, do you experience alot of downtime??

thanks

they are on the same network.. but the network seems to be cleaning up there act.. so we shouldnt see anymore drastic downtime...

I was considering both WizardHosting and VenturesOnline, and at the end, I chose VenturesOnline. I think WizardHosting is great, and Carlos is helpful, but he didn't reply the last email I sent out, so that was the deciding factor (because VO did reply). Overall, I find Carlos very knowledgeable about the subject matter and responds to queries pretty quick (all within a few hours). So, if you want to go with WizardHosting, you won't lose out.

From reading on this board I sometimes get the idea that wizardshosting is being runned by 1 person.

If you look long term isn't it safer to go with a hosting company which holds a bigger support staff?

I did a quick search for wizardshosting.com and venturesonline.com on google and couldn't find almost any references/postings about them, besides the postings in this forum.


[Edited by JamesBond on 04-01-2001 at 06:24 AM]

Hello
I sometimes think people overstimate the support issue when looking for a host.

I know that I have had a hosting account with another host for 3 years and have only contacted support once. This was when e-mail went down for several days, and the response was they were working on it.

80% of our technical enquiries are on issues not really covered by our technical support (like "how do I use css" and similar web building questions). We always help with these issues but its not really our responsibility and we make that quite clear to customers.

Of the other 20%, most are from people in the first few days of setting up an account who need help with e-mail set up etc, because they have not read the welcome e-mail which includes this info.

The exception to this is when there is an outage and you get innundated with calls (and of course there is not much we can do if its a network problem rather than a server problem).

If you are with a host who has a lot of server side problems which cause you to need a lot of technical support you might be better looking for a more reliable host who will not have these issues.
If your host is unreliable they probably have a heavy support burden which makes their support less good.

Does this make sense?

Gordon

I agree with you on that, however the point I was trying to make is that it might be a bit risky to rent a dedicated server with a small hosting company which is basically runned by 1 person.

What are things like when that person is going on vacation, or something happens to him.
Who is going to handle issues in that case?

The dog?

Yep the one ;)

JamesBond .. you are a little missinformed .. WizardsHosting is OWNED by one person (ME), but not run by only one person, at the size we are right now, that would be suicide, I have 5 more people working for me, 2 of them don't do much, so I don't count on them too much ;)

but that still leaves 3 more, very active and with the know-how to replace me at any time when I go out.

I am the frontman, I do the deals and make sure the business is stable.

VDI's frontman is Bill, he's the only person you hear about .. but you dont think VDI is run by only 1 person do you? ;)

And for references

http://www.hostsearch.com/showcomment.asp?Companycode=2039

but that still leaves 3 more, very active and with the know-how to replace me at any time when I go out.

I am the frontman, I do the deals and make sure the business is stable.


Thank you for enlightening me :)


VDI's frontman is Bill, he's the only person you hear about .. but you dont think VDI is run by only 1 person do you? ;)


Not at all :)

Let's just say that I've had a bad experience almost 2 years ago with a hosting company which basically had only 1 person with know-how (the rest of staff didn't have much technical knowledge compared to him), they offered great service/support and all, but when that person left it went all downhill from there.
And I know there are a lot of hosting companies out there that are being run the same way as the one mentioned above.

So that's why I have become careful with smaller hosting companies, though I am aware of the advantages they often offer (better prices, quality support, flexibility etc.) over the big players on the market.

I understand what you mean, fortunatly I found some very competent people, but believe it or not .. it's very hard to find them these days, there are allot of wannabe's out there :(

Originally posted by JamesBond
Let's just say that I've had a bad experience almost 2 years ago with a hosting company which basically had only 1 person with know-how (the rest of staff didn't have much technical knowledge compared to him), they offered great service/support and all, but when that person left it went all downhill from there.
And I know there are a lot of hosting companies out there that are being run the same way as the one mentioned above.

Bond, James Bond, what you have with hosting is a very technical product. Often there isn't *one* possible reason why something doesn't work, and even if it did work, there's not *one* possible reason why it doesn't anymore (still with me?).

Add to that- support staff, whom you can't hire if they know too much (they will cost you too much), and whom you can't hire if they know too little (almost useless).

And then you have your clients, which you won't hear a peep out of (as long as the server is up). Although they've gotten dependable service for months, if there's a ten minute downtime, they'll be on the boards quicker then you can say, "IT WAS JUST A REBOOT!!!" :)

Not an easy business to run, that's for sure, and I try to be understanding with my hosts.

Originally posted by Chicken

[QUOTE]
Bond, James Bond, what you have with hosting is a very technical product. Often there isn't *one* possible reason why something doesn't work, and even if it did work, there's not *one* possible reason why it doesn't anymore (still with me?).

Totally aware of that, but that's not what I meant with that company going downhill.
I didn't have root access with them, so I was depending on them to set up mysql and things like that, and it really does help when a competent person does that for you without messing things up.

And when there is only 1 competent person in the company...you just have to hope he'll stick around! :)


Add to that- support staff, whom you can't hire if they know too much (they will cost you too much), and whom you can't hire if they know too little (almost useless).

And then you have your clients, which you won't hear a peep out of (as long as the server is up). Although they've gotten dependable service for months, if there's a ten minute downtime, they'll be on the boards quicker then you can say, "IT WAS JUST A REBOOT!!!" :)


Well, it's not like I don't know what that feels like, since I'm the co-owner of a small webdesign firm and we host our own clients.
That's why I am extremely careful about where I host our clients' websites, since we are the ones having to deal with our clients when their sites are down.

When it comes to hosting your own sites you can take more risks when choosing a hosting provider ofcourse.

Hee hee, I suppose I really shouldn't have put your name on that post as it was really more of a general comment, not directed to you. I was pretty sure you knew the deal... :)