Reliable Web Hosting

When choosing a web host its almost impossible to separate the fact from the fiction in terms of the quality of the services offered. It is especially hard to determine the most reliable web hosting service

There are many good articles about what to look for in a new host, but very little in the way of hard cold comparisons of actual performance.

We have hosting from three hosts, all selected after following the usual advice to determine the best option for our circumstances (entry level hosting).

The three host option was chosen to ensure:

• If one host went down our whole business was not affected
• To improve SERPs by interlinking from different IP blocks
• To gain some experience of the performance of different hosts

To provide further robustness the last hosting selected was a Hostagtor Reseller plan. This plan was selected because it allows you to setup multiple accounts on one host. If one account needs to be disabled by the hosting supplier (Digg etc) then other accounts are not effected. Contrast this with single account plans which are cheaper but would result in all sites on that host being disabled.

Here is a summary of the web hosts we use:

 
Earlier this year we decided to measure the reliability of a sample of our sites using the free Montastic Service. It simply pings each site once every 10 minutes, then provides an email/rss alert for change of state.

The following is a summary of the reliability we experienced for February 2007.

As you can see Hostgator had no downtime and although this is on a reseller plan, its reasonable to expect that the lower priced plans would have the same performance.

We had to contact the help-desks for both Hostgator and Dreamhost for issues related to the scripts we were running (Our problem not theirs). Both offered very good responsiveness and quality of response.

When reading this post its important to remember that the above is just our experience. The results across the whole client base for each of these hosts may be quite variable. Our experience may not be typical.