Article
Which Web Hosts Are Worth It?
Page: 1 2
Responses To Additional Questions
After receiving the response to the initial query, I sent out some more questions in an effort to obtain more detailed information. The responses to these were mostly good.
1. How many people do you have available to provide support?
Most companies had people available 24/7. Rackspace had the most, with 300 employees, 2/3 of them being 'techs'. It is obvious that there would be fewer people available in the evening, although Donhost provided the very literal response of:
"We have 4 people available."
This made it difficult to work out if they were available 24/7. Joshua Internet provided the best response to this question:
"Sorry, that's commercially sensitive information I'm afraid."
Virtual ISP also decided not to answer this question fully:
"We offer support to all our customers mon – fri, with out off hours cover being via email."
2. What access speeds can I expect from the Website?
Most responses to this question were that it depended on my connection, but a few provided specific connection details, such as who their data carriers were and the speeds of their Internet backbones. As mentioned earlier, Rackspace even provided an address so I could trace route it.
3. What kind of redundancy do you have available if the site goes down?
As expected, the respondents had multiple connections to the Internet in case of failure. Positive Internet carry spare parts for all their servers. Datagate have mirror servers ready to take over in case of the main server failing, which is a very good feature. Joshua Internet gave an interesting response again:
"As these are budget hosting accounts, sites are not load balanced or mirrored across multiple servers (it would double our prices). But our servers are carefully looked after, so such an event would be rare."
Dziner Solutions gave a detailed reply about how their drives are hot swappable for extra redundancy. Virtual ISP do not appear to have any kind of redundancy:
"It's very rare that we loose servers for long period of times."(sic)
4. What happens if I exceed my diskspace/bandwidth allowance?
The general view on this was that most hosts didn't mind if you exceed your allocation by a small amount, but arrangements would need to be made if this occurred frequently. Only Aventure Host said they might close your site if you went over your bandwidth limit.
Host Supreme appeared to be very generous with their allowances:
"If you exceed your diskspace allocation, simply notify us and we’ll increase it at no extra charge. If you exceed your bandwidth, you will be notified but your site will not be shut down."
This is one of the main things to look out for with hosting -- will they shut your site down if you exceed your bandwidth?
5. Do you offer backup on your servers?
Generally, the data on the server was backed up, but only for the recovery of data in case of failure. Most hosts said I’d have to backup my own data. Aventure Host did not provide any form of backup on the servers at all for privacy reasons.
6. Can I transfer my domain name in?
This obvious answer to this was yes, for all hosts concerned.
7. What happens if I want to leave?
Again, there was no problem with this for any of the hosts.
Total Response Times
Of the 39 hosts contacted, I was disappointed to see that only 20 of them responded! The table below shows the response time for each host. Note that NR = No Response.
How Do They Stack Up?
It’s obvious from the chart above that Purple Paw responded the fastest. However, the best response has to go to RackSpace. Even though they couldn't provide what I needed, they had the best response and answered the questions most clearly and comprehensively. A close contender was DZINER Solutions. Datex UK are highly commended for creating a special package for my needs, even if it was reasonably expensive.
This survey has provided some very interesting results, which I hope you can use to your advantage next time you’re assessing hosts!