Geek pop quiz: Your favourite web hosting company!

[theweaselking]

Okay, everyone, it'a Audience Participation time! I've got some propects in mind, but I want to know who *you* use.

Who do you get your web hosting from, and why should I switch to them?

What I have:
A single domain. Email for about 50 users. A website.

What I require:
POP mailboxes for those users.
Webmail access to the pop boxes for those users.
Unlimited web-configurable-by-me email aliases.
Unlimited web-configurable mailing lists.
Apache/MySQL/PHP support on the web side.
For legal reasons, the email hosting *must* be in either Canada or the USA.
Absolute, 100%, perfect reliability. Forever. In all circumstances. If an asteroid hits the primary datacenter, their backup better switch over before I notice.

What would be nice:
Autoreply addresses.
User-configurable Out Of Office.
CFM support on the web side.
SSL for POP and SMTP
SMTP on a port other than 25.
Real, actual penalties in the contract for not meeting said 100% uptime guarantee. Which will never come into effect, because we will have 100% uptime.
Reasonable prices

What I do not require:
Massive web space or traffic limits. This is a small site - space on a shared cluster is totally okay. It just needs to be *up*, and receiving web traffic and sending and receiving email, all the time.

So. Hook me up with your favourite *perfect reliability* web and email hosting company.

EDIT: Yes, I know "perfect" is impossible. What I really want is "no downtime for stupid reasons". I'd like email to not be DELIBERATELY trashed for nonsensical reasons. I'd like changes to the web server to be done outside of prime business hours, and I'd like them to test them, and I'd like them to revert them if the tests fail.

Comments

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

Been thinking about taking this deal, but overkill is probably too nice a word:

http://www.ipowerweb.com/products/webhosting/business-web-site.html

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Do you use them yourself, or know someone who does?

I've been looking at iweb's package:
http://iweb.com/web-hosting/compare/

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

I know someone who uses them. Any particulars you'd like me to ask them?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

A link to their TOS and SLAs would be nice. They're certainly nice, but without those, it doesn't mean much.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Having somebody else run the servers and just give me the results is the goal. I don't want to admin them, or worry about hardware, or any of that.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for SLA's and guarantees of uptime on managed services, you're not talking about small shops anymore. Qwest, Rackspace, UUNet/MCI/Worldcom/Verizon and their ilk offer what you're looking for, but even they won't guarantee perfection, and they won't be cheap.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I know. At the same time, commercial hosting is *okay* for this company. They don't need dedicated hosting.

They just need *reliable* hosting, from people who won't decide suddenly that "'undeliverable' bounce messages should be blocked so the users never see them!"

No, really. That was Monday.

Before that, it was "email from authenticated customers, aimed at other people on the same domain, to valid addresses, should be trashed *totally silently* as a 'double-bounce' if the From address has a typo, despite it not being even a single bounce - the target address is correct - AND despite it being sent by a valid, logged-in user"

Before THAT, it was "greylisting" that held email from non-whitelisted domains for *four days*. Implemented with absolutely no warning or notification to the user.

Before THAT, it was making a change to the web hosting, in the mdidle of the work day, without user notification, that involved a typo in their change so every single page on the site except for domain/index.php was broken - and they didn't CHECK anything except the primary index.

The current provider are incompetent jackasses. What I want is, basically, the same services this large commercial web hosting company currently provides, just without them being morons.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

That sounds like why I fired my company's previous provider and picked Rackspace for web hosting.

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

I've been with dreamhost for eight or nine years, and I can't recall ever not being able to get my email.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

However, Dreamhost explicitly does *not* have a guarantee of uptime, or a remedy in case of downtime. This makes me unhappy.

I've heard really good things about them, don't get me wrong. I simply don't want to trust them with a corporate site and corporate email.

[chizzer.livejournal.com]

I use Dreamhost as well, and I've only experienced downtime once - about 15 minutes when they had to upgrade their Apache server. Past that they've been wonderful to me, with an insane amount of bandwidth and disk space. The two times I've had to email their support department, I've had a useful reply within 15 minuts.

[chizzer.livejournal.com]

Well, only experienced downtime at an irritating moment once. I'm sure they've done other upgrades/maintenance in the wee hours when nobody would want to look at my website anyways.

[lonebear.livejournal.com]

and i have been told that dreamhost wants to dump email.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Their website says nothing about this, and their plans explicitly include manymany POP boxes.

Given that mail is so amazingly simple to do, and so entirely expected with a domain, I find it unlikely that they'd do it. Web hosts really do try to be a one-stop shopping centre for your domain.

[jackoutofthebox.livejournal.com]

WWW.ISP01.NET would me my recommendation

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Those guys appear to be an ISP, not a hosting company - as in, they lack a place for me to put my domain, and while they provide email, they don't seem to provide *many* email boxes using *my own domain*.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Fatcow.com was pretty good back when I hosted through them. They never had any real downtime.

That said, I don't think their contract allows for penalties for downtime.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No uptime guarantee at all, in fact, beyond that they promise to not treat any given customer any worse than any other customer.

[elffin.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to locate a hosting company that guaranteed more than two nines of uptime without some ridiculous disclaimer and/or outright fabrication of figures and/or serious money changing hands and I've never been able to locate a hosting company /ever/ that had real SLA penalties that did not involve serious amounts of money changing hands.

The closest thing I can think of to your requirements is Google, and I would point you at them but they are in the doghouse right now for having had a great big privacy hole that ought to have been spotted in beta.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

My favourite at the moment guarantees "100% uptime outside of scheduled maintenance", and scheduled maintenance is a 3-hour window at 2am, once a month.

And their policy on downtime is to credit you with days - 1 day for the first 15 minutes, 1 day per hour after that, maximum 1 month credit in any calendar month - but that's not bad. Not much, but not bad.

[neobitch.livejournal.com]

I'm really not sure how you expect to reconcile "perfect uptime" with "reasonable price", frankly.

Another recommendation for Dreamhost from me, if you decide to change your requirements.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

How about "no downtime for stupid reasons"?

(And there's a reason "reasonable price" is a want, not a need)

[neobitch.livejournal.com]

Point.

I think Dreamhost is probably disqualified, then -- I've stuck with them despite their oopses b/c they give me a ton of bells and whistles for the price, their support is great (and coherent, and often with humanity/humour), and they 'fess up when they screw up. The (appearance of) transparency is a nice touch.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I believe it. I know *nobody* who has anything bad to say about Dreamhost.

However, I also don't know anyone, even Dreamhost, who says they feel comfortable hosting a totally mission-critical function with Dreamhost.

[tomtherat.livejournal.com]

I'm actually doing some hosting support right now, and just from my limited look at the biz, guaranteed uptime is a) something you pay through the nose for and b) kind of bullshit. Its more or less impossible to guarantee 99.999% uptime or whatever, and you'll pay for it and then not get it. Especially with propagation issues it's not like you can just switch your domain around at a whim. At the end of a day you're pointed at an IP somewhere which can get asplode.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

At which point, you replace the machine at that IP, you don't change the DNS. And if it's a virtual cluster, it's pretty easy to do.

But yeah. My real need is "no downtime for stupid reasons, and especially not common downtime for mission critical apps because of things the company deliberately did to 'improve' things".

[autobotsrollout.livejournal.com]

I'm quite happy with Hostpapa; they've proven more than willing to adjust their basic contract level (which is crazy cheap) upwards slightly for additional service guarantees.

Plus, carbon-neutral energy.

Hurricane Electric

[skippy-fluff.livejournal.com]

I use and like Hurricane Electric. They have a generally clueful staff, are on the forefront of IPv6 deployment, and have handled several issues I've raised well. To take one example, one of the domains I manage (for a small non-profit) needed access to a program that worked on a different unix flavor than the box it was on. They swapped me onto a box of the appropriate flavor with a realistic "make before break" set-up and managed the real swap very well (they did not switch which IP was where, but did understand how to make the DNS caching infrastructure handle things well, and they did keep both systems up to account for strays). They did not charge me for any of that, because I'd been a good customer for several years.

Their posted terms of service do not have SLAs, so you'd likely have to negotiate those, and the prices would vary as a result. But, as a single data point, they would have met a 4 9s SLA for me for the past 3 years.

Re: Hurricane Electric

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I can second this recommendation, not from personal experience, but second hand. Everyone I know who has ever had service from, or even had to deal with (they were having reachability or other problems with an HE customer, but were not an HE customer themselves), HE has been extremely pleased with the level of clue and reliability.

[neutopian.livejournal.com]

I've been happy with pair.com for many years, never down once. Their support is particularly responsive, too.

[mzdemonique.livejournal.com]

alright, i understood about half of what you said.
keeping that in mind, our company uses network solutions (networksolutions.com). they are CHEAP and have a billion very user friendly, monkeys could figure this out type of packages with email and hosting and what not. they do have the occasional burp in email access but it lasts an hour tops.
there. i contributed. :)

[hel]

I use and like 1and1, but pay virtually no attention to downtime cos it's for a personal site. That said, I've never not been able to access my site, email, or ftp from them.