I have several sites I want to setup and need a hosting company that will let me do that. My longtime provider, Midphase, has had ok service. The tech support has been okay as long as I didn’t have anything unusual. Their live support has gotten harder to use (long waits). They have a plan offered by http://anhosting.com that has most of what I need, but it yearly payments. I really want something with less commitment.
So followed my friend at firestorm-technologies and tried out http://HostGator (current host). Here is what I learned chatting with their support and research.
All hosts have limits. Midphase cuts service when you hit 10% of CPU. Hostgator does when you hit 25% longer than 90 seconds. Hostgator seems more reasonable here.
Databases. Both have plans with unlimited databases (surely they aren’t each a process). Anyway Midphase limits you to 50 simultaneous connections, Hostgator you get only 25. Really you could only host one active site on Hostgator.
Speed. This of course is very hard to measure. Once my site was replicated on hostgator I ran some tests using tools that check speed from several locations in the world on different networks. Bottom line, Hostgator was almost 3 times as fast rendering my blog. A better test would have been to run this over several days with a variety of pages.
Support. Hostgator seems to be slower turning around small requests but in general is easy to get a hold of and online chats have worked well.
Terms. Hostgator TOS scare me actually. All kinds of odd fees and stuff they might charge you if you are a problem. Midphase would probably do the same things they just didn’t disclose it. Hostgator is a month-to-month contract – I like that.
