I’ve made my first website on professional hosting four years ago, and since then I went through four web hosting companies. And after awesome service I’ve received today on Skynet Hosting I wanted to voice a few thoughts on choosing web hosting based on my personal experience.

Budget web hosing is a very competitive business, and its very hard for companies to survive. The first company I hosted with wen out of business a year after I signed up. Second one appeared great in the beginning – they’ve had awesome tech support. But several months later they started to have up-time problems, the site was down for days, support disappeared, no phone or email replies. I even lost three month payments after I moved from them, as they did not stopped charging my card. After that I’ve decided to get two hosting plans from different companies, so I can analyze their performance and move my site fast if I had a major issue – in this case I would move it to the hosting I already know. First hosting I’ve got was Totalchoicehosting.com, and second one was Skynet Hosting. I moved my site to Total Choice and was very happy with them for a while, as my site was finally up 100% of the time! But two month later my site was shut down by their admin. Why? Because error log of one of my scrips reach 20mb, and they thought it was a threat to server’s stability. I thought that my script is really causing serious issues and felt bad.. until I found out that the error log was full of warnings my script was generating. I forgot to turn warnings off before uploading. This was no threat to the system’s stability, but they didn’t care, they just shut the site down.  I fixed the script issues and they started the site back up, but taking back and fourth with them I’ve learned how technically illiterate their Support is, and how little they care. They also give very little for your money – this, according to them, is a price for solid server uptimes.

But then there’s Skynet Hosting. I’ve been with them for a year now and I haven’t seen my site down yet. They also have very competitive hosting plans, no setup fees, no contracts. In order to survive, many companies provide unbelievable deals – 300Gb space, unlimited traffic, etc. for five dollars. This often means they’re overselling and will have issues with uptime because people get their hosting to host huge files, such as videos, and since this is shared hosting, shared with your site – this will affect your site performance. But with SkyNet you get very balanced tech/price deal, which should keep file-sharers and spammers away, keeping only serious websites, which will ensure solid uptime while giving you all necessary tools for creating and running successful website. Until today I haven’t had a need to talk to their support, but after a short chat not only I’ve get all my questions answered, but I also got free upgrade on my account to current offerings for the same money! I totally did not expect that! These guys are great : )

I’ll recommend SkyNet for anyone looking to move their website to reliable hosing and for those looking for home of their first website.