I have had the same web host for a couple of years now. When I first signed up with them, the sites I created were fast and their 99.9% uptime guarantee seemed to mean something. I had no problems with them until my sites became unavailable.
May 2016 – Their explanation was that their servers had been attacked and they were fixing the problem as quickly as possible. It took about a week to fix. Days offline are destructive. I was looking for a job at the time. Because I had no access to email, I ended up having to create a Gmail account for my work search.
June 2016 – I started getting timeout errors when I tried to sign in to control panel. I created a ticket and, when they responded, they told me that I was trying to log in to the old server, that I should update the IP address. This worked, but I shouldn’t have to create a support ticket to find that out.
September 2016 – Another outage. I created a support ticket, and they eventually fixed it, but I can’t find the response about what caused the problem. When I reminded them of the 99.9% guarantee, I received a free month.
January 2017 – My sites started returning 503 errors. Their response was, “Have you tried stopping and restarting your application pool?” No, I hadn’t. My websites do not have complicated applications running on them. I can’t see why I should have to start and stop the application pool. Perhaps this is a lack of knowledge on my part.
I am now very dissatisfied.
In the past two days, I have been trying to develop a WordPress site. The response of the WordPress dashboard is sluggish, to say the least, and I cannot install plugins or themes. The installation may have become corrupted, but I’m not entirely sure. When I try to install a plugin or theme, the process constantly times out, and there is only ONE post on that site, so it isn’t as though it was a complicated site that consumes lots of resources.
The search for a new host begins.
The provider where I have this site is only temporary. I have it because I have taken a web design course, and gotten a free year of hosting. Once the year is up, I will have to find new homes for the sites I create here. Not because I’m dissatisfied, but because the provider’s company is based in the UK and I live in the US.
I started looking, but am having a hard time finding the features I want. I’ve looked into HostGator, but while their introductory price is low, they want me to pay for three years of hosting at once. Not something I can afford to do right now.
I’m looking into AWS, Azure, and Google, but I feel uncomfortable about paying by the hour. Both regular and cloud hosting platforms seem to want to get you to pay one to three years in advance. Since I am currently trying to transition from working for others to providing development and writing services to customers, I can’t afford to invest a lot of money.
Here is what I need
- Unlimited domains and subdomains
- Unlimited email addresses
- WordPress as well as the ability to build sites using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JavaScript libraries such as AngularJS
- A good cpanel
- Multiple MySql databases
- Ideally, I would like to spend less than $20 a month and I would prefer to spend less than $10.
So, what do you suggest?