Many of you know that Hosting Weather Report (http://www.hwr.us) is going to be launched soon, to that end I have spent a lot of time looking for hosting companies, and getting signed up with various providers. I have already posted a review for Fluid Hosting, so I won't repeat, but I wanted to talk about the other three companies I am using for this project.

All three hosts that I am working with provided me with a basic Unix account (either BSD or Linux) for $9.95 a month. I pay for all three accounts, so there is no favoritism in my reviews.

1. Voxtreme (http://www.voxtreme.com/):
Site hosted: http://south.hwr.us/
I worked closely with Matt getting the account set up, he was quick to respond prior to setting up the account. Once the account was set up, any issues I had (I needed some things customized, so I expected to use support extensively, initially) I used their online ticketing system. Response was always fast and courteous.

I only had two issues with Voxtreme. The first was that I did not initially have SSH access, and had to justify it -- from an operational standpoint I think that is a good policy, but from a customer standpoint it bugged me . Once I made the request for SSH access, it was granted to me within a couple of hours.

The second issue had to do with network performance. Initially, the network was much slower than the other sites. I spoke to Matt about it, and the problem cleared up pretty quickly, though I am not sure what what the cause of the problem was.

Downtime has been non-existent since the network issues I saw went away, and the service continues to be great.


2. Vilitas (http://www.vilitas.com/):
Site hosted: http://mw.hwr.us/
I worked with Scott to get this account set up. The service and response time has been amazing. All of my requests have been answered promptly -- including helping me debug a problem in the script that was creating a conflict with the control panel Vilitas uses. Scotthas even followed up a couple of times to make sure everything is going well.

The uptime and network performance have also been excellent. I only have nice things to say about Scott and Vilitas.


3. Canada Web Hosting (http://www.canadawebhosting.com/):
Site hosted: http://west.hwr.us/

If you cannot get to the site hosted at Canada Web Hosting that is because I have not been able to get the site online. HWR requires a couple of Perl modules installed. I have been waiting since Thursday to have this done. As of this writing it has not, and I am extremely unhappy. When I placed my order I asked about getting them installed (as I did with Voxtreme and Vilitas), that request was ignored when I was issued my sign up information. So, I asked one of the engineers to add the module using their chat room and it was not done, so I opened a ticket last Thursday and have requested updates twice. Both times I have been told that it was being escalated, but still no modules.

I can't provide any other information about Canada Web Hosting at this time, because my site won't run without those modules.