I recently realized that despite the popular demand from my visitors, I’ve never taken the opportunity to blog about my brand spanking new web host. Well, now I’m going to take the opportunity.
You’ll recall that during the month of December, both Webmacster87.info and phpBB Weekly suffered significant downtime, none of which was my fault. After a series of communication feuds, I found out why. My old webhost, Kazix, had merged with this Fat Network group of people, and so the excellent support that I had remembered having with Kazix was reduced to a very poor support desk “maintained” by Fat Network. My cPanel username/password kept changing under their watch, and they moved to new DNS nameservers without warning me (causing me to lose a handful of posts on here), and they were continuously having downtime. But worse, when I reported to them these problems, they would respond as though I had obviously done something to cause the problem. At the end, I got fed up and gave them a reply that I am not a total idiot and that I know what I’m doing here, thus I should know why these errors are coming up, and furthermore giving it to them about their horrible service and brutal customer support. Their reply was a pretty “we’ll look into the problem” response.
So, even though my hosting with them is supposed to continue into April, I got fed up with having to deal with these people and the continuous stress that I had to deal with in December of trying to keep my websites up somewhat. In particular, I was having to deal with a flurry of outcries from the relentless community of phpBB Weekly listeners. I’ve essentially declared my investment in hosting from Kazix to be a case where I was completely suckered.
However, I did have an alternative option. Back in June or July, Caitlyn Imburgo had pointed me out to Web Hosting Buzz, a link which I had remembered, although, looking at the packages they offer, it seemed like a “too good to be true” offer. However, at the end of December, with Kazix flailing out from under me, I went ahead and purchased their cheapest Silver plan.
For $59.40/year (=$4.95/month), this is one awesome plan. They have no setup fees, and the plan comes with 375 GB (that’s right, gigabyptes) of disk space, along with a whopping 2.5 TB (2500 GB) of bandwidth. Just to put that into perspective, right now, I’m only using about 64 MB of disk space (about 0.017% of my total allotment), and have used 4.54 gigabytes of bandwidth (which, although that’s a lot for most other webhosts, again is only 0.178% of my available total).
It gets better, because this plan has everything. If I had chosen to (I didn’t at the time), this plan would have come with one free .com, .net, or .org domain name, and the domain name would be mine (for free) for life as long as I was still a Web Hosting Buzz customer. But even then, the plan allows not only unlimited subdomains, but also unlimited parked and addon domains as well. (Back when I had Kazix, I had to shell out an extra $15/year for each addon domain I wanted!) They also have all of the major support for e-mail, PHP, MySQL, FTP, multimedia support, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. They run their servers on dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM and standard RAID hard drives to protect against data loss. They even support all the fancy stuff like Zend Optimizer, GD, ImageMagick, SSL, and all that jazz.
But the part that I was happiest to see (particularly after my recent debacle) was all the support functionality they offered. As opposed to the phantom e-mail only support of my old host, Web Hosting Buzz not only offers 24/7 e-mail AND online help desk ticket support (they claim that they’re there 24/7 but I haven’t had a reason to find out yet), but they also provide a customer support phone number (9 AM-5 PM M-F), an online wiki for support, and even their own community support forums! (Although nothing is entirely perfect; they use vBulletin.) With all of these support options available, I’m feeling much more secure about being on this webhost. Plus, after my first four weeks of using them, service has been reliable, fast, and perfect, so I haven’t even needed to try their support services yet!
In addition, they guarantee 99.95% uptime, and they even have a section of their website which tracks the uptime of their servers. Their setup was very fast, and I was ready to go with their hosting within a few hours. However, the best part has to be their Price Freeze guarantee, something which I have not seen from any other webhost: they guarantee that they will never raise prices for existing customers. The price you pay when you first sign up, even if you sign up with a discounted coupon code, will be the price you’ll pay to renew for the life of your hosting. Talk about awesome.
Anyway, so far, I’m really satisfied with my new web host. Not only have they been super-reliable, but at an unbeatable price, they’ve opened up so much more stretching room which will make it possible for me to easily expand my online presence should I choose to. If you’re interested, be sure to check them out.
Tags: bandwidth, disk space, features, hosting, Kazix, new, web host, Web Hosting Buzz, website
