[Pacific Spirit]

I was thinking about your experiences with hosting companies. I myself have also used reseller hosting for a while but have switched to my own Dedicated servers in recent years. Pure that I can set my own rules and manage the server myself. I have also had bad experiences with certain companies in the past, but also good experiences with some. I am also curious about your experience. Let me know what kind of experiences you had with your Shared, Reseller (Master and/or Alpha), VPS (OVZ/KVM), Colo, Dedicated etc..

[sAmI]

I have a Reseller (alpha) from BuyShared.net, And i have been using it for now 3 years. The best thing about it you get a dedicated IP with it as well, No issues on Bandwidth. Their support team is pretty good, I usually get a reply within an hour or so. I didn't find anything bad of the company yet. Pretty happy with them.
OVH - VPS
Bought an OVH Asia VPS. Performance wise, Damn good. DDOS Protection on point, Never received a single ddos attack. But there are few bad things about them. Majority of the cards does not worked for me on OVH, I also contacted them if they have blocked Pakistan or so on but it was not. Support tickets takes time more than expected time written on the website. And the Reinstall of the OS just takes so much time. It just stucks on 85% and you have wait about an half an hour or sometimes more than that and this issue is with me around 3 years, Had another VPS 3 years back same issue. Otherwise everything is fine, I can say the support tickets delay because of the ongoing pandemic.
Hostgator - Shared Hosting
I once bought a HostGator shared hosting and i can say it was the worst experience ever, If you install wordpress the cpu process goes up to 100 and your website is dead. You need to pay 10$ to install your OWN SSL CERTIFICATE! Their cPanel have so many weird options and things which are unnecessary it makes it find things moree difficult.

[xdude]

Hmm, the last time I used a reseller account is very very long time ago. Those days there were free hosting but they used to inject Footer or header banners to your website. Sometimes both. That was really bad. Then the first time I had a real shared hosting account, I bought it with forum currency of Namepros.com. Those days were the Golden days of forum currency. Specially from few forums with Namepros at top of the list. They had a system where you could buy and sell forum currency and also we could use it to buy domains form the forum. They had automated the whole system. So That become a really cool place where you can trade, buy and sell stuff without Paypal. Things like web hosting and back links. Those were the good old days forum signature links worth money. So I was I had a really good time. Selling signature links and site links and buying stuff i wanted. That when I started buying my first shared hosting accounts. One thing in common was most of those small shared hosting providers didn't last one.

Then I used Godaddy Shared hosting for years. price was good and we had plenty of resources to use. Problem with Godaddy was their custom control panel. That thing was slow also there were not many options. Plus they were changing interface and everything all the time. Support was terrible. They answered quickly but support staff people were not good at what they did. We could find better solutions by searching in Google. and my website empire became too big for their their shared accounts. Funny since they were advertising about unlimited resources but the small print said otherwise.

After that I moved to the world of VPS. Early days I had terrible experience with those cheap vps providers of the time. They would pop up and offer amazing deals and then vanish after couple of months. Well, if you look at the bright side, I become very good at moving sites/blogs/forums quickly from one place to another. Also learned to take regular backups of everything. These are the times I finally start seeing real need of control panels and benefit of managed hosting if you are not into server stuff full time. That's when I have started using managed vps for my client websites. Costly, but this reduce number of sleepless nights I had because of related problems. The next move was to finding a better managed vps providers. Because if you need managed vps then it means you want fast responses and support people who know what they are doing.

Anyway there was a time I had about 8 managed and un-managed VPS along with many paid shared accounting accounts. Plus bunch of free hosting accounts. Today I have downsized it to just 3 VPS. One Managed server at Knownhost and one Windows VPS at Host4Fun and this great server sponsored by Shadow Hosting at Post4vps. For those who looking for offshore hosting, Shadow Hosting has some really great locations.

Something I have learned from my years of using hosting and hard way is You have to be careful if you go for cheap hosting. Also You need to do your own backups whatever the providers say. 2 things I usually want from hosting providers were good support and stable servers without regular offline times. Today site speed has become a important factor so I want my sites to work fast too.

[Melvin]

My first experience with hosting a hosting that provides gaming servers and virtual private servers for my local city since I was hosting my counter strike 1.6 servers I a lot of my local players wanted to get a server because here in my country shopping online from outside the country isn't allowed and i got my vps's from my brother that lives in France its an OVH vps anyway that time i rent like 4 to 5 servers and thats not bad for a beginner like me at that me i used open game panel to control my servers and it has a lot of features to control servers and to host many features games servers even a date counter etc, i do also recommended it for you guys who wanted to host their servers anyways after a couple of months i couldn't keep the hosting available lack of resources so i decided to close it and move on at that time i was 14 year old only ahah, year after year after learning some html and php and used to do some with photoshop and editing websites templets i finally decided to start my offical Hosting company that time i was 17,i bough a good domain name and got a web site hosting and installed both open game panel and uploaded my templets, so i started alone with no help and no partners and a that time i can trust anyone because people won't apply on my country for those type of jobs and even some kids did i refused them because i can no trust them and give them access to my hosting they will ruined everything and even that counties alone i got some visiters and rent some VPS's but unfortunately i decided to close my Hosting because i don't have time to manage it and i couldn't hire supporters, so this is my experience with Hosting companies, i didn't join any hosting even i got some deals to work with other hostings but i refused because i wanted myslef to be the only boss in the game :p, i think for a kid that's not a bad experience i also learned from it many things.i really do not regret it.

[fChk]

(...) for a while but have switched to my own Dedicated servers in recent years. Pure that I can set my own rules and manage the server myself.

Hope you'll fill us in about your experience in this latest endeavour too!.. What are the challenges?.. how is the market demand these days? etc...

I have also had bad experiences with certain companies in the past, but also good experiences with some.

There isn't much information in that sentence!.. Which ones you meant?..

I am also curious about your experience. Let me know what kind of experiences you had with your Shared, Reseller (Master and/or Alpha), VPS (OVZ/KVM), Colo, Dedicated etc..

First off!.. I have one corner-stone principal when it comes to my Online journey which started back in 1995/6: No cash-transaction shall ever be conducted on the Internet (yes, I'm an idealist on many levels..) and Sorry, if I won't ever be a paying customer :-)

That above-mentioned principal has narrowed down the scope of that journey, in the matters you're asking about, to essentially using shared-hosting via Post2host forums or more recently VPS-hosting also via Post4VPS services. But as a hobbyist Web developer, I've also used big Corps (Google, IBM, RedHat ..) PaaS services.

The longest ride (and the best too) we had regarding shared-hosting was with a now-defunct service called FreeFTPSpace (FFS). It was a post2host service where we enjoyed lenghty but very insightful discussions with fellow members, one of whom is with us here by-the-way :-)

For VPS hosting, my first experience was short-lived with GigaRocket due to an unfortunate incident 4/5 years ago, which leaves NanoKVM's NAT-VPS and Post4VPS's Virmach VPS-9 as the still ongoing stories that I've started to document in various threads; the rest is pending..

NanoKVM's NAT-VPS is without a doubt a reliable box that, despite its specs, is a corner-stone of my Online presence; so thanks again @Neoon for the service.

Post4VPS's Virmach VPS-9 is quite a beast and I'll leave my comments on it to an upcoming review. In the meantime, my thanks to @Dynamo, @deanhills and @'Hidden Refuge' for keeping this community/service running.

I'm sure @Dynamo is doing a lot behind the scene, but it's @deanhills's moderation skills and @'Hidden Refuge' 's expertise that makes this place tick IMHO. Keep it up Folks!

[ikk157]

I was thinking about your experiences with hosting companies. I myself have also used reseller hosting for a while but have switched to my own Dedicated servers in recent years. Pure that I can set my own rules and manage the server myself. I have also had bad experiences with certain companies in the past, but also good experiences with some. I am also curious about your experience. Let me know what kind of experiences you had with your Shared, Reseller (Master and/or Alpha), VPS (OVZ/KVM), Colo, Dedicated etc..

I’ve previously used HelioHost before I even thought a free VPS was possible (I don’t have a credit card to buy myself a VPS, otherwise I would’ve done so ages ago).

Unlike other hosts that put in a lot of limitations to force you to upgrade (even if the limitations have absolutely NOTHING to do with consuming resources), HelioHost doesn’t do that.

They are a non-profit and have no paid plans, their web hosting is completely free. And because of that, putting in limitations to get you to upgrade isn’t a thing because they simply don’t have any paid plans to force you to upgrade to! 

The result would be a web host with tons of features that I’ve never ever seen enabled on any other free host. For a matter of fact, their limitations are so minor and those are only to allow more space for other users to be able to register an account.

However, now that I finally have a VPS, I host everything on it rather than any other web host. That allowed me to fully “break free” from all the limitations and was a much needed upgrade.