In search of a perfect hosting company

I have been in search of a home in the cyberspace to reside my web files for about a good 10 years now. During the .com burst, I so wanted to be part of it. So I quickly signed up with the first hosting company I saw.

I was de-virginized by Valueweb into the world of hosting. I started out paying $10 per month for 200MB per month (I can't exactly remember the correct specification) for a shared hosting. Today, this kind of pricing scheme would be considered ludicrous. I quickly used up my resources and was forced look for a bigger server. Then I moved onto another shared server from Interland with slightly bigger specification. I could not remember what my plan was but again, I needed to look for a bigger solution. I have to say their support and performance was very good considering I was running only static websites.

The next cyber home was Futurequest. They were extremely reliable in the server performance and pretty good support staff. And spent few years with them. I even installed first database driven website using Mambo. Of course, Mambo has been upgraded to Joomla now. Eventually, clients started to ask me for hosting services. This was something new and thought at the time, "how could this be possible"? Due to its limitation of Futurequest, I had to look elsewhere again. I found Site5. They have incredible value for the money you are paying. Able to host multiple websites for clients, friends, family and what have you. Their tech support was amazing! They averaged 5-15 minutes response per request. They also had beautiful Control Panel to manage my websites. Due to their support for Ruby On Rails, encouraged me to start learning the framework. But their server performance was not as good as their support. Just too much down time. I am sure they had much improved now.

Next up was Dreamhost. Whom I still keep around due to their incredibly generous server space and bandwidth they provide for the money! Despite their often down time and sometimes slow performance, I did not want to give up the account due to their generous server specs. However, I took off all my important websites and moved them to the Media Temple's GRID Server inspired by an article written on TechCrunch. I think I was like their 1st GRID customer. I jumped on it right after reading this article. Big mistake. I should have waited until the MT's new product proved itself. I was a customer for few months and with MT, never experienced a smooth uptime or performance. There always seemed to be problem with MySQL cluster resulting in slow response or downtime of the server's performance. I know they had fixed all of their issues recently. Their support staff have been by far one of the best I have ever experienced. Able to talk to a real person on the phone was a huge plus for me. However, the load time averaged about 9 secs to 40 secs. Due to its some flaws of the new MT's Grid's server, I moved onto Mosso due to a article I read from 31Three's blog. Also by reading Mosso's website's promo materials got me very excited to give them a try... for a 1 whole month. I also never had the uptime and the speed performance promised by Mosso's website promo verbiage. Again, I experienced great support staff, always there to help via phone, chat, forum...etc. Due to the server performance not meeting my expectations, I had to leave. My clients and I couldn't work with 9 secs to 25 secs loading time. And for $100 per month, I certainly expected 1-5 secs.

Finally, this week, I decided to take matters into my own hands and do some research in finding a good hosting provider for me. I lurked into Webhostingtalk.com and read the forums for positive reviews and experiences from the actual customers. After several hours, I found Servint. After pondering for a day and even asking questions on the forums, reassured me that Servint VPS is the choice to host my projects. For now, I feel like I am home at last! By far the best support (via phone and online ticket system) I ever dealt with! Mostly, Servint's server performance's speed load time has been 1-4 secs on average on database driven sites! The static sites load instantaneously! Their online ticket response time is less than 5-10 minutes. Their phone staff are incredibly knowledgeable and speedy in troubleshooting. I can finally be at rest and not think about my hosting woes and just focus on what I do best which is design and development. I cannot recommend Servint any higher. I also use Dreamhost as my back-up and testing like Ruby On Rails... etc. So... how happy are you with your host?