Looking for a better web host

[Ron Lindeboom]

PS: We don’t host at NetSol, we only use them for parking our domains, etc.

Abraham does use NetSol’s hosting service for his personal stuff and he loves ’em.

One of the cheapest and best hosting services that I know of is HostPro.com and I used them for years for some of my side projects and outside accounts. About $100 a year and they have great uptime, lots of bandwidth, great features and their support is very good.

Ron Lindeboom

[Mike Cohen]

We lease servers from Aplus.net and have had pretty good luck. Our HTML served Flash videos work pretty well. We host dozens of client review websites without incident.

Mike Cohen

[Jesse Stiles]

i have been using bluehost as well with networksolutions

i use hostgator as well but i dont believe they have windows server

[Steve Wargo]

And, some of their CSRs and techs work for me.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

[Walter Biscardi]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I’ll be investigating some of them and hopefully move my site over by the summer.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Walter Biscardi]

[John Baumchen] “Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited hosting space, great cpanel goodies, unlimited email accounts, great service, and did I mention low rates. “

They sound exactly like BlueHost. On Bluehost, however, we get spotty playback of our video clips and they said they are not a true video server host and that I should move all my videos elsewhere.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[John Baumchen]

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Hostmonster.com.

Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited hosting space, great cpanel goodies, unlimited email accounts, great service, and did I mention low rates.

Cheers

[Rich Rubasch]

We just had to flee from Hostway. for years they were great and then they outsourced tech support and bought a bunch of small hosting companies and everything went to hell.

We landed on Hostmonster because of a great review on CNET. However I recently found out they are actually owned by BlueHost. Could be another Hostway waiting to happen. I also read that GoDaddy had the slowest access speeds than others. Hostmonster has slower FTP downloads than we were getting with Hostway, but Hostway took our entire site and all email accounts down for a week, then got the site up and we lost email for one month until I switched to Hostmonster.

So far so good. Tech support is right there and the control panel is pretty good. Performance is adequate.

In doing my research, and I know you will find this Walter, is that in this age of YouTube and every single person putting up gobs of video, hosting companies are like health clubs. They want your monthly payment but don’t offer much more. This is especially true in the shared server segment, and they all are probably right about having a dedicated server for top performance especially if you want to stream videos.

I’ve said this before…be sure that videos on your site load quickly and don’t make people wait. You might think your videos are all that, but others don’t want to wait for a big blob of an encode. Keep the bit rates low, keeps the size small. People will get the idea of what you do just fine, and in the same 15 minutes they can watch 10 short videos rather than wait for one to download only to realize it’s not what they were looking for, then they are gone.

On the Demo Reels forum I am usually commenting on how painful the download was with little payoff in the end. I’ll wait for a big Hollywood movie trailer, but not your sample of a local spot or a documentary that you are trying to sell. Even at 320 x 188 I can tell if you have it or not.

Check out our samples at https://www.tiltmedia.com and you’ll see what I mean.

So, report back, Walter. I know you will. I’m curious if you discover what i did. the hosting industry is in trouble in general as servers fill up, tech support is bogged down with newbies and everyone thinks outsourcing to India is a viable solution.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Paul Thurston]

Hi Walter,

You know what, if you can afford it, I recommend having your own stuff in your shack. Verizon Communications offers a top speed of 50Mb/s for downloads and 20Mb/s for uploads with its FiOS fiber optical system. In most places, it sells this service for $140 per month. Yeah, you end up having to put together your own severs (one windows Server 2008 64-bit for video streaming and one Linux + cPanel server for your e-mails and webpage.) But it’s YOUR stuff and bandwidth is shared with no one. The only downtime is that caused by a power outage in your shack or a hard drive failure every two years if you chose to not use an SLC solid state disk.

-Paul

———————————————–
Paul Thurston
Producer
Chile

[Rich Rubasch]

Ouch. That sounds messy. I’ll take the $15 per month with Hostmonster and let them worry about firewalls, down time and redundancy.

Still, I do wish there was a professional service for business owners only with guaranteed speeds and service, or at least a tier. Hostmonster does not offer dedicated servers and I suppose that is what I am describing.

This market segment is really struggling right now with the number of users that flock to the next best hosting company….a year or so ago it was Hostmonster. A little before that it was 1&1. After about two years when their user base hits critical mass they outsource service and don’t have enough techs to support the servers. But they keep collecting the monthly fees even as service declines.

Seems this is the cycle in hosting companies.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media