Choosing Your Hosting Company

[conniew]

I have been struggling with my website for about a year. I have gone from one hosting provider to another. My issues are these: 1) Support- my current and past hosting providers won't return any emails or help question, if you can even get the links to work. 2) Reliability-my site is never working and my email accounts don't work half the time. 3)Ownership-I am still working on trying to get my technical and administrative contact information to be changed to me...instead of the first hosting provider I had. 4)and finally-willing to help-as I'm sure you can tell....there is no help at this point.

 

So, my question to you is this: What makes you any different than the places I have had for hosting. Specifically the points I mentioned above. I am very skeptical of any hosting providers at this point and I don't want to get into another mess.

[cmuskett]

You won't be sorry coming over to TCH. My last host was one of those "Bad Experiences". I've been here since April and long ago decided that TCH is the last hosting company I will ever need!! Customer service is wonderful.. Lots of very helpful people in the forums. I recommend TCH to any one who asks about a hosting company!! Just read on in the forums and you will see many glowing reports!

 

Rock Sign

[GroovyFish]

Charlotte is absolutely right, you won't be sorry!

 

I have been with 3 hosts in 1 1/2 years. The first was like your bad experience...awful, my site was down constantly, they didn't provide live chat, forum or an emergency number, only email support and that would usually take 2+ days to be answered and the answer would be "should be ok now". I never got an answer on what the problem was and why it was happening EVERY WEEK. I paid for a year in advance, but left after 6 months and lost the $$, but I couldn't afford to have my site down that often. It was THAT bad.

 

The next host went out of business and "sold" me to another company. And they were OK, but didn't support much or offer any extras and it was very expensive for very little.

 

I finally found TCH and moved my sites, am in the process of moving a client's sites over, also encouraging a friend to move and will be moving my family retail website over after the holidays.

 

Support is great! (today I entered a LOW priority support ticket and it was answered in 3 hours) and you cannot beat the forum for help and support!

 

The plans are wonderful just by themselves, but the great thing is all the other extras like one click installs of programs I have been wanting to play with and try out. I am having so much fun, my work is suffering LOL.

 

OK, there are tons more I could fawn over, but I will stop there. And no, I don't work here LOL.

 

Good Luck!

Groovy

[TCH-Rob]

Conniew,

 

I am not just a mod here but a customer as well. My experiences before I started helping on the forums have been great. Of the few outages I have had to go through all were taken care of quickly and I was informed every step of the way in these forums. I haven't had to submit many help tickets aside from having an SSL installed, but they were taken care of with a fast response time even though I had said it was low priority. I have worked for a few hosts and some I didn't use even though the account was free.

 

No hosting company is up 100% of the time but you will find that the 99 uptime is on the money. Not only are the employees willing to help with anything we can but our brothers and sisters here are here for each other as well.

 

I can sing praises all night long and prefer to let our family do the talking. Read the forums. People don't use Rock Sign because it is a cool smiley it is because they truly believe Rock Sign.

Edited October 30, 2003 by Critical Mass

[TCH-JimE]

Hi,

 

Glad your really thinking about your hosting company, rather then just picking any old one and then getting frustrated with the overall result.

 

1) Support- my current and past hosting providers won't return any emails or help question, if you can even get the links to work.

We monitor our pages daily and are always making sure that all links work and if we find one that doesn't, red flags go up immediately and the page is changed so the link works.

 

Also all help desk tickets are ALWAYS responded too (Bill gets out the Wet fish if we don't!) We never close a ticket saying "sorry, can't help", we will either fix the problem for you or point you in the direction of the best help.

 

2) Reliability-my site is never working and my email accounts don't work half the time.

Our servers have a 99.9% reliability uptime through out the year. Occasionally one has to be rebooted so it will be down for about 2 minutes, and if we have to completely take it off line, we post up here first to let you know. If something does go wrong, Bill has a pager which goes off and within a few minutes he and about 5 other Gurus are on the scene seeing what is wrong and doing the correct fix.

 

3)Ownership-I am still working on trying to get my technical and administrative contact information to be changed to me...instead of the first hosting provider I had.

The site is owned by you, your domain name will be owned by you, if you want to leave (I will cry!) then thats your own choice, but I don't think you will want to leave. You are completely responsible for your site.

 

4)and finally-willing to help-as I'm sure you can tell....there is no help at this point.

Not only do we have some of the best Gurus out there to help you, we have this excellent family here at totalchoicehosting so that there is always someone who will be able to answer your question for you.

 

I look forward to seeing you as part of the family!

 

Jim

[Deverill]

Conniew,

First welcome to the forums! It is good to research your options before getting into a mess. The others have said well the feelings I have about TCH as a customer. I've never seen better.

 

The one thing I'd like to suggest is for you to look through the forums, look at the names over to the left and see which posters are management, staff or moderators versus customers, evaluate the help given and make your own decisions in answer to your questions.

 

You'll see lots of posts by Head Guru who is the owner of the company. In many cases he'd be sitting in the Bahamas drinking Pina Coladas and cashing his checks but that's not the kind of guy he is. He is an in-it-up-to-the-elbows, gotta-make-it-work person and that dictates the kind of company TCH is... we all follow his lead to one degree or another and the ones he pays a salary to must follow it pretty closely

 

I think if you read some of the forum threads you'll make your own mind up about why you should come to TCH. We'll be here when you do come over and will be happy to help in any way possible. :hug:

 

All the best

[shakes]

you've probably got enough response already but i'll add in my .02 ...

 

i've been a customer for about a month now and every expectation I've had has been beaten. The few times i've opened a ticket they've been closed within an hour ... a number of other times I've just shot these guys an IM and had my answer 30 seconds later.

 

support is top notch ... servers are super fast ... and what other hosting company offerss a forum?

 

and to top it all off ... this place is dirt cheap. I actually almost didn't sign up because the plan was so cheap I couldn't believe I would get good service for that little. Well I did sign up, and I've gotten better service here than any other provider I've had.

 

Give em $5 for a month and try it out. If you really don't like it ... and really miss your $5 you can get it back.