Any recommendations for a good host server?

[TheGAME1264]

I actually liked your post because you had good intentions. Although I know nothing of Crucial Paradigm (never heard of them before), the fact that you mentioned them in context with a larger company such as Hostgator means you're on the straight up. You meant well, and I respect that.

However, I just cannot recommend Hostgator to anyone. They have huge issues protecting their customers from botnets, and I spent about 6 weeks trying to get those clowns to recognize that the majority of "traffic" to the group of sites one of my clients has hosted with them. They could probably cut down on their own bandwidth costs about 30% if they took a few days to analyze their customers' traffic and put in a half-decent firewall to protect them from it, but they're not about to do that.

hostingcompanyname reviews is a good way to get reviews on hosts, provided the user knows to take them with a bit of a grain of salt and that there's no excuse for personal experience. Quite a few are obviously either shill reviews ("XYZ Host is great, they're never down and their support is always responsive, the end") or simply don't go into detail about aspects of the business that only a good hosting customer would know about (e.g. control panels, non-standard support issues, how they handle critical situations).

[Squadron]

Thanks

However, I just cannot recommend Hostgator to anyone. They have huge issues protecting their customers from botnets, and I spent about 6 weeks trying to get those clowns to recognize that the majority of "traffic" to the group of sites one of my clients has hosted with them. They could probably cut down on their own bandwidth costs about 30% if they took a few days to analyze their customers' traffic and put in a half-decent firewall to protect them from it, but they're not about to do that.

Thanks for the feedback. You are dead right about the bots draining bandwidth. The last 12 months it seems to have gotten far worse. To overcome this issue on any cpanel hosting I use I check my visitor stats in Awstats every few weeks then block those Class B IP addresses that are causing the problems. I just add a line to the root .htaccess file like this:

deny from 178.150.

Most of the bot traffic in my case comes from Russia, Ukraine, Germany and China, markets I am not interested in. I found some IP addresses were consuming as much as 2 Gig per month.

[TheGAME1264]

Yeah, that's about what I was finding, except that it was getting so bad that I ended up having to write a bot trap to create the .htaccess rules automatically myself. The bots were shutting down the sites at least once a day, and I'd have to go in, deny the bots, let Hostgator know what I did, and have them reactivate things.

Russia/China were the two biggest offenders, but many of them were in the States and Romania. Germany's definitely got some bad botnets, too.

[Squadron]

Wow, that sounds really bad. I had another problem with some cheap and cheerful hosting where some hackers in the middle east, kept defacing the pages.

It was a pain in the butt but I certainly learned a lot about web server security

[FatalPriapism]

One I definitely recommend against: hosting24
Their customer service/help desk is usually pretty responsive, to the tune of 3 or 4 hours tops. That said I was frequently encountering downtime due to things like unscheduled maintenance, asinine TOS violations (you sent > 10 emails in 1 minute), and forums being bot spammed like I've never seen.

One I can recommend: BlueHost
You have to pay up front, around $80/year for one year. They do have a $50 Facebook ads credit, no strings on it. A couple other ad credits where you get $25-$100 once you spend x amount. I've only had one instance of downtime, which lasted about 20 minutes. SSH access configured on a shared server. Minimal bot traffic. Active customer feedback/improvement system where you can actually vote for different ideas (and they do implement from that list). The only downside is that the online help desk can have a 10-15 minute queue at times.

[Squadron]

One I can recommend: BlueHost

I used to a big Bluehost fan, but last year I had lots of issues with .htaccess redirect attacks and Terms of Service warnings because bots were causing too many processes to run on my account no matter what I did.

I still have some sites on Bluehost. If you only have one or two sites on the account then I think Bluehost is probably just fine.

[PinkLily]

Thank you everyone for all your feedback.. I appreciate it so much.. I will be having only one website and just starting so it seems a bit complicated but with all the help you all have given me ..I think I will be on the right track hopefully ...thanks again...

[seth@solarblu]

For E-commerce the easiest route would be wordpress. If you can figure out how to convert your design, or you can play with an existing theme. If you are accepting paypal payments for this website you can use wp-ecommerce. Hope this helps you out. Oh, you don't need VPS unless you are getting 10,000 traffic views a month, that is when a site hits its maturity.

[AlphaMare]

For E-commerce the easiest route would be wordpress. If you can figure out how to convert your design, or you can play with an existing theme. If you are accepting paypal payments for this website you can use wp-ecommerce. Hope this helps you out. Oh, you don't need VPS unless you are getting 10,000 traffic views a month, that is when a site hits its maturity.

I use Wordpress a lot, but I would not use it for e-commerce. It is fairly simple to beef up the security if you're going to use it as a CMS or blogging platform, but as an e-commerce platform I think it is still too vulnerable.

[Webzarus]

I use Wordpress a lot, but I would not use it for e-commerce. It is fairly simple to beef up the security if you're going to use it as a CMS or blogging platform, but as an e-commerce platform I think it is still too vulnerable.

He's gonna promote WP for everything because that's what he and his company promotes and offers support for, even if its well known that its not the most secure or robust e-commerce platform.

He's made 8 post today as a new person and the most of them were inviting people to contact him offsite for more details about his hosting offers.

No he didn't post links, but his message was pretty clear.