I’ve had really great success with Bluehost for a couple years now. Their price is right, and they have an awesome affiliate program (not sure I’ve technically paid Bluehost anything yet, or very little on account of the money I get when somebody signs up via the link in my site footers). Their c-panel doesn’t have the loveliest design in the world, but so what. They have a pretty nice feature set, and I’ve been very happy so far.

Also, as you mentioned with Dreamhost (who I have never had experience with) Bluehost makes it easy to run Google apps on your domains.

I’ve set most of my clients up with Bluehost too. One of my clients has a 1&1 account, and I’ve heard good things about 1&1 also.

I went to HostMoster instead and haven’t had any problems since.
I’ve also saved a lot of money.

I’d like to see a creative do a comparison Dreamhost vs. BlueHost vs. HostMonster.

I originally picked MediaTemple because they had great design and all of the big boys used them, I guess you only get the echelon service when you pay the echelon prices? 14-18 hours to respond on online support? Really? Wop wahhh..

Thanks for the great post.

-Aubrey

Nobody is perfect but Dreamhost does an incredible job at hosting my sites, technical support is great and they have a support forum (not that I’ve ever had to use it). They even have a cPanel import tool so that you can easily rid yourself of your current hosting problems.

Enjoy Dreamhost.

Denis Leblanc
The Design Grid

Thank you for your post. You basically helped me make up my mind.

When I started using Mediatemple I thought they were slick and their grid server sounded like a cutting edge solution.

Unfortunately for me one of my key clients was the first site I put on the Gridserver, and then shortly there after I got a DVS for myself.

The Clients Grid server account does exactly what you mentioned above it will move very sluggish for days and suddenly resume normal operating speeds.

I have done a lot of optimization on the site, running cache settings for our CMS system, cleaning up the database. eliminating scripts that shouldn’t be running or perform slowly.

after these modifications the support tickets submitted get the same answer from MT “its your site, optimize your site. etc etc. ”

We discovered during one of our particularly sluggish episodes that MT’s MySQL Admin tool took forever to load from the account center control panel. Always the same story it’s your site and not our problem. There is very little acknowledgment by MT that anything is amiss with their servers yet I find more and more posts by people complaining about the exact same issues I am experiencing.

I guess what really disappoints me is that after such glitzy interfaces, and claims, and the extra bucks Media temple fails to impress on any level other than the prestigious look of their UI. In which case form before function doesn’t have a lot of substance. I really wish MT would have worked out because now I have a hand full of sites to move.

I am leaning toward dreamhost as, but I have experienced response delays in a similar order of magnitude to MT. However I am considering sticking with the devil I know and Dreamhost has been dependable enough to be given another chance…

Not sure if you will get answers from any prospective web hosting service; they certainly won’t fill out a security questionnaire , but a few good staple questions to at least try and get answers for before signing up with a hosting service would be:

• Do you run a tiered zoned DMZ separating Presentation, Application, Data, and Management zones?
• Do you use different vendor firewalls between zones?
• Do your perimeter firewalls have intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS)?
• Do your hosts have host intrusion detection/prevention (HIDS/HIPS)
• Do your firewall access control lists (ACL’s) control both inbound and outbound (ingress/egress) traffic?
• Can they provide their servers baseline security checklists for the standard server build?
• Can they provide the results for any compliance they have passed ISO, SAS70, SOX, etc?

These are some of the more critical points, you may not get answers to them all (I didn’t) but you will get a few at least to help make decision. Personally I went with one of the larger hosting services out there because I knew at least they had the potential to budget for the bigger and better security toys.

Firstly, I would like to apologize for the customer support that you received for your issue. This is not the kind of support that we pride ourselves on and we will be addressing this internally to see why and how we failed to provide you with the best support possible.

Looking into your history, I would have to say that Font Burner probably wasn’t well suited for the (gs) Grid-Service. Because we need to take CPU into account on the (gs), 404 errors and other CPU resource issues can really spike the cost to a customer. We do try to provide all the necessary information in the FAQs, but maybe we should point the GPUs out more on the site.

I think that one of our VPS solutions would have worked better for you but might have been over kill. Unfortunately, we don’t have a shared server hosting solution like DreamHost does. It sounds like your hosting solution at DreamHost is better suited to your needs and I can totally understand that.

With regard to Incident # 1026, I feel that, while initially we failed to communicate the problem fully, most of that was precautionary. We didn’t understand the full scope of the exploit and did not want to speak before we knew more. That said, this exploit has been hitting other web hosts around the web so this was not unique to (mt) Media Temple. We have since made several policy changes to our security to fortify our servers against future attacks such as these.

We do thank you for your input. We try to approach any criticism with gratitude since we have an opportunity to learn. We will take what you’ve said here into account and try to apply the lessons so that future customers don’t have the same problems you did.

–
Travis Oberlander
Lead, Social Media Customer Support
(mt) Media Temple, Inc
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8520 National Blvd.
Building A
Culver City, CA 90232
206-300-0494
310-841-5618

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: 310.878.0119
: 877-578-4000