HijiNKS ENSUE - A Geek Webcomic » Archive » Bluehost.com: I invite you

[From HijiNKS ENSUE - A Geek Webcomic » Archive » Bluehost.com: I invite you to eat a dick]

This is required reading for anyone that is shopping around for a new web host. There is just no excuse to put up with that bullshit level of tech support. The company where I run my hosting company will bend backwards for you even if you are a $5/month customer. If you are a reseller or higher they treat you as if you own their company, it is just plain awesome.

Of course, sometimes the customers can be just plain impossible to please, but what happened to hijinksensue.com is just plain bullshit. If they were using too many resources, then they should have tried to up-sell them or tell them to move on before they brought the rest of the network down. Instead they kept milking the account for as long as they could. Dumbasses.

Here are some things I look for whenever I need to pick a new host:

1. Is their support forum public? If yes, read it. See how often the staff will help people in the board. Also see if users volunteer to help.

2. Have they published specs on their network? I always like when the host is at least triple-homed, this means that they are connected to the tubes through three separate major carriers.

3. Look for weasel pricing. Are they charging you a lot of money for setup for an individual account? Are they pricing email by individual address?

4. Look for blatant lies. Are they promising unlimited bandwidth and space? If yes, then it is bullshit, that is not sustainable. Even Google has storage limits.

5. Do they enforce bandwidth throttling for stand alone servers? Or do they have hidden clauses to charge you for additional traffic above an average? At a previous job we once got charged $8000 in bandwidth for one month because of a one-day spike.