Ok, I have to give a quick shout out to my hosting company, HostForWeb. I’ve had my web-sites and e-mail hosted by them for about…5 years now? I can’t remember when I started, but a while ago.
Today, I noticed that my e-mail was not going out through my domain via smtp. I quickly determined that the server was up (I could ssh in, and locally telnet to port 25), but I couldn’t reach it from my home. Laptop didn’t work either.
First, I called Comcast. They were less than helpful, claiming not to notice anything wrong with my account. I didn’t push the issue, because I figured I should check my hosting company as well. Also, we’re moving in two weeks and Comcast isn’t coming with us.
Well, I went to HostForWeb’s live chat support, and within 30 seconds Greg answered, and asked what I needed. I explained the situation, telling him I thought it possible that my IP was being blocked. He did some checking and tweaking and asked me to try again. Still didn’t work. I didn’t really think the problem was on their end, but I had to check anyway. In the end, he gave me a new port to access the smtp server, and I was on my way. In less than 5 minutes.
Comcast, try to beat that.
I should also mention, that I have had a few other occasions to contact HostForWeb tech support (I screwed up my DNS; my home IP really was banned at one point for something; etc.). Each time, even via e-mail, the problem was resolved incredibly quickly. I think the longest I ever waited was 30 minutes until resolution.
So if you’re in the market, these people are great. The support is phenomenal.
Technorati Tags: HostForWeb, web hosting, tech support, comcast
Am going to _try_ hostforweb.com
They have almost confirmed that there are no (RSS/Atom) feeds for news/system-status/blog
Since this post is the first link in google for “best hosting company ever”.. you might be able to convince them to provide feeds at the least for “planned and unplanned maintenance” , “news / new features” and a blog – in that order !
i have been with HFW for around 5 years now. yes there were ups and downs but what really brought me this far with them is their support. it’s simply anytime, everytime you need quick answers … you got them.
honestly i have also hivelocity servers but its support does not come close to HFW’s.
in my experience … as a web hosting company it is best that you have a backup server running in another DC.
The best! Maybe a few years ago. I have been with them for @5 years now. They were once a very competent hosting company. However they have gone downhill at incredible speed for the last few years and are now very unreliable.
I am talking about both shared and vps hosting. If you are serious about your hosting, I recommend that you look a little further. Many modern hosts are stepping up to where HFW was years ago (too bad they could not keep it up).
I just checked my site monitoring stats for the year of 2008 and there were over 10 outages. If you are to say that they are the best you better give a bit more of the facts. I urge anyone to visit their forums before you purchase. At least they are still transparent and the flaming posts are not edited out of the forums (yet).
Rofl – I signed up 2nd december and today they managed to terminate my Vps by reading a ticket that was 3 months old and was meant to be marked as closed – then they cant find any backups for my vps and so ive lost all my work – dw i backed bits up lol