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Web Weather => Weather Web Site Help => Topic started by: galfert on May 13, 2019, 10:30:52 AM

Title: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 13, 2019, 10:30:52 AM
I can't possibly name every hosting company out there as there are hundreds. I tried to come up with a list of the popular ones. I may have missed a popular one. If that is the case please select Other and let use know in a post. If you feel I really missed a big popular choice mention that bellow in a post and I can edit the voting poll and include it.

I've also made it so that you can enter in two votes. Perhaps you can enter your current provider and whom you think you are thinking about switching to. Or you can name two providers that you feel are worthy of recommending. You can of course just vote for one. And you can come back and change your vote at any time as I've allowed that feature. UPDATE: You can't change your vote as once the poll has been edited there is SMF bug that then breaks the ability to change your vote.

I'm getting ready to put up my own personal weather website. I'm an IT person but as I deal in the corporate world and money is no object I'm just used to dealing with the big dogs, GoDaddy and Amazon. A personal weather website is a different matter which I'd like input on.

Please share your thoughts as to which hosting company you'd recommend and maybe even mention which plan you are on. This is mostly intended to cover the shared infrastructure plans and not dedicated IP and dedicated VPS.

It seems that seemingly all hosting companies will provide the required building blocks to set up a weather website; php, SQL, SSH, FTP...etc. If you know of any issues please share. Also let keep these comments to recent events as I've read that companies like Bluehost for example may have had a bad wrap but have recently upgraded their infrastructure and now provide better uptime and better performance. If one of the listed choices in this voting poll does not allow a required function I would not want to stray people into thinking that they can use it for a weather website so let me know if you really feel it needs to be addressed and then I'll remove it as a choice.

TIP: As I IT professional I recommend keeping your domain name registration with a large company. You can register a domain with one company and host it with different company. If the hosting company goes belly up, no big deal as you just restore it from backup with someone else. If the registrar goes belly up then you can be SOL and it can turn into a real nightmare.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: txweather.org on May 13, 2019, 11:57:17 AM
Dreamhost, While they are on the expensive side their support is amazing. Also they give you granularity to no end and their VPS is super awesome.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: AWL on May 13, 2019, 12:07:33 PM
MDD Hosting (https://www.mddhosting.com/) has served me well.

Doug
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Bashy on May 13, 2019, 11:00:56 PM
Bashys Hosting (http://bashys-hosting.com)  oh, wait, thats me :roll: ;) \:D/
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: ValentineWeather on May 14, 2019, 03:18:23 AM
I have GoDaddy and can't recommend at all. Good support but way too expensive for a hobby. They sent me an email yesterday suggesting I'm maxed out (What? thought I was unlimited ) and I should upgrade to a business account. Hell will freeze over before that happens. 
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Bashy on May 14, 2019, 06:05:21 AM
Unlimited is never unlimited...... More so for is that update every few seconds
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Maumelle Weather on May 14, 2019, 07:06:24 AM
I highly recommend ICDSoft (https://www.icdsoft.com/en/hosting/usa/shared). Have been with them for over 8 years. Top notch support and their uptime is very impressive. Outside of scheduled outages, the most they have been down since I have been with them is about 6 hours when Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy knocked out their fiber connection.


John
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Cutty Sark Sailor on May 14, 2019, 10:07:12 AM
LunarPages (https://www.lunarpages.com/)
Drives
NOAA Weather Radio Org (https://noaaweatherradio.org/)
Sferics US (http://sferics.us/)
Frankfort Weather (http://frankfortweather.us/)
and others...
on Basic Shared Linux (https://lunarpages.com/web-hosting/shared-hosting/compare-plans/)
And accomodating enough to Whitelist my IP and auto restore for 'excess' connections, and extend maximum FTP connections... etc...  Also fantastic when run a "special", and I ask to extend under the 'special' terms... saves $$$$$ =D> Good folks, Great service, (maybe a tad slow support on weekend through ticket.. :roll: }since 2003

UPDATE:

LP bought by HOST PAPA.... service et.al. even better..."instant" 'chat' fixes 99% of the time if any issues. Only had one issuse had to refer to 'level 2'... re a domain problem.  fixed within hours.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Jumpin Joe on May 14, 2019, 10:38:51 AM
I highly recommend ICDSoft (https://www.icdsoft.com/en/hosting/usa/shared). Have been with them for over 8 years. Top notch support and their uptime is very impressive. Outside of scheduled outages, the most they have been down since I have been with them is about 6 hours when Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy knocked out their fiber connection.


John

I have to agree with John. ICDSoft is great and that includes their support, very quick to respond and have always pointed me in the right direction, even if it was not related to them.

Joe
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Bunty on May 14, 2019, 06:30:20 PM
KVC Hosting isn't bad for a cheap provider.  Besides being cheap,  another reason I like them is that they are headquartered in my home state in Oklahoma City.  The only downside is the default settings at their server may not work with your files, so you have to contact them to make adjustments.  Service is fast, though.  PHP available up to 7.1.  https://www.kvchosting.net/unlimited-hosting.html (https://www.kvchosting.net/unlimited-hosting.html)
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: WeatherHost on May 14, 2019, 07:24:13 PM
I turned a bunch of people on to ICDSoft about the time this forum started, maybe before on the previous forum.  Not sure how many are still using it or even still have a site or log in here.

Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: openvista on May 14, 2019, 07:24:38 PM
This seems to be one of those situations, like so many in life, where you get what you pay for. I tried shared hosting. It sucks. I say that as a local weather site operator and as a professional web dev & server admin. Not saying others here are lying. I haven't tried most of these hosts, although I have worked with several on behalf of clients. I just have different needs because I customize everything myself. Plus I can tell when "support" is giving me the run around.

I would most definitely NOT recommend A2Hosting. They had an outage a couple years ago that lasted for several DAYS. If you were hosted in their Michigan Data Center at that time, so sorry for you! I got sick of the repeated downtime, excuses and poor communication.

So I switched to Liquid Web. It's a Tier IV facility, one of very few in the world. That means, in layman's terms, they've got belt & suspenders with another pair of suspenders just in case. Since I migrated to them last year, I've had zero downtime. But you will pay, because they sold off all their shared accounts. Now they only do VPS, cloud, dedicated plans. I pay just north of $60/mo for VPS. I realize that's out of most people's range, but I thought I'd add my $0.02 since you, too, are an IT guy. You might have to step up to avoid frustration, especially when it comes to support. YMMV.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 15, 2019, 08:29:45 AM
I removed Wix from the list. I found it out doesn't support PHP. I added ICDSoft.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: miraculon on May 15, 2019, 08:46:46 AM
I use Hostinger (Hosting24), but there is one caveat.

Although their support is good, they limit the number of concurrent FTP sessions.

With the number of meteohubs, meteobridge and other doodads that I have, I exceeded the quota. I use my own FTP server to aggregate then upload all of the data in a single session. If you just have one or two devices doing the uploads, there probably wouldn't be any problem.

Greg H.


Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 15, 2019, 01:06:07 PM
UPDATE on changing vote
Turns out that I initially made this poll so that you could switch your vote if you change your mind or if I add another hosting company so that you could change from Other to the newly added option. Well it doesn't work with SMF (this forums web software). Ken has confirmed that he has seen this issue as a complaint since 2013 lurking in the SMF user forums. Since I changed the poll your vote is now stuck. Good to know for future polls if you want to allow people to change their vote you cannot edit the poll. In most circumstances you wouldn't want to edit the poll as that would skew the results. In this case though I thought I was an acceptable method of using that feature (if it had worked).

Regarding the Hosting choice to make
Thank you to all whom have participated in this thread. I've seen a few threads that keep asking this question of what to use for web hosting. It always ends up pretty much the same with a reply of a few people sharing what they use and that they are happy. Everyone has different needs so it is not easy knowing what they are going to need or what they will value. At least we have choices and we can switch (with some effort).

I think I've decided to give a hosting company a try that nobody has yet voted for. I've decided to try Namecheap for a few reasons.
I get that you get what you pay for. But I don't want to start off overpaying for more than I need. If you only experience the best then you can't value what you have. Sure I take everyone's word and that is what this is all about and to not make regrettable mistakes, but in this case I'm looking for value. I already know what it is like to host a corporate site on GoDaddy and Amazon services. This is personal so every penny counts.

It was unfortunate to read recently that one of our forum members turned off their weather website because they felt it was costing them too much and nobody was using it. I don't want to come out and put them on the spot but their name starts with an "A." I wonder if they had gone with Namecheap and it worked out if they would have reconsidered? I want to venture and find out what Namecheap is like. I'll start off small with just Weather34 Home Weatherstation dashboard. Eventually I'll put up webcam(s) and and other more elaborate and customized templates and see how it goes.

I hope that people continue to use the poll and vote and continue to share your hosting experiences.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 15, 2019, 02:20:18 PM
I made a quick spreadsheet to compare what I think are some important features for a weather site hosting service. I may be totally wrong here and I may have left out a critical comparison point but I have no experience with a weather site so this is what I've got so far. Most hosting companies list a multitude of features. Whether they offer mySQL or MariaDB does not matter to me. I don't care if SSL is included or not as I can always use Let's Encrypt for free (I think). I don't care if they do backup or not (I'll do my own backup.) So I don't think other features I've not mentioned are critical except for the ones I listed below in my spreadsheet. What I'm saying is that the basics are all there for these involved; cPanel, php, sql, and they all seem to now be advertising use of SSD. I'm only considering the low entry basic shared hosting plan to try and keep things even. Of course there are other intangibles like customer support, up-time, ease of use, performance. But I have to start somewhere. I only listed CDN because I thought it was really nice that Bluehost and SiteGround included it on their base plan, but it isn't a must have and you can added it 3rd party (Cloudflare) to all or most services I think. These are the hosting services that seemed most interesting from the responses so far. MDDHosting also looks very impressive in how much they offer.

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Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: weather34 on May 15, 2019, 02:27:40 PM
icdsoft been with them for four years will be 5th year next renewal. in twenty years of using
some form of paid hosting i have never come across anything that compares . ive tried many of the names in the poll over the years and came to conclusion the more popular and larger companies just lose touch of there customer needs and fob you off with non technical responses that seem to come of a screen . i recall a telephone support call with godaddy years ago two different operators gave me an identical word for word response on two different days all i wanted is to transfer one site to there hosting from a backup they told me at the time unless i upgrade the package i could not do it myself or i would have to pay an additional one off fee  for the there  time..for me anyone contemplating running a dedicated pws website with realtime data not static images and frames should could consider ICDSOFT and they are not the most expensive and offer renewal discount when renewing hosting and the end of each term.

however not every country has a salary rate that creates a disposable income .

Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: txweather.org on May 15, 2019, 02:31:57 PM
galfert, Your dreamhost info is wrong. Where did you get this information?

https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared/
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: AWL on May 15, 2019, 03:02:55 PM
 Thanks for putting the table together. A couple of other things that are important to me are the number of concurrent FTP connections and the ability to run cron jobs frequently. If you just run a site with no extras you will be fine but if you are like me and run WD, 3 instances of GR3, web cam, and try to log on to edit you might find yourself in a “time out”. Know you can use a 3rd party software to run cron jobs but I would rather have that as a service of the host.
 
  One of the guys at work ask me one time how much did it cost to run my site per year. Replied probably somewhere around $200-300. He said this was an expensive hobby I had got myself into. I said "EXPENSIVE! Dang Spot(nickname) not much compared to your new bass boat or you golf cart! Everything is relative....


Doug
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 15, 2019, 03:10:15 PM
galfert, Your dreamhost info is wrong. Where did you get this information?

https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared/
I used the very same link you posted and I followed up in more detail on other places of the site and/or I chatted with support.

With Dreamhost I selected 1 year pricing for Shared Starter Plan. Shows $3.95 per month. * 12 = $47.40. What info is wrong? Number of databases on starter plan was buried in knowledge base or I chatted with support (I can't remember which as I've pretty much chatted with all providers). So please do tell what you think I got wrong with Dreamhost.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 15, 2019, 03:20:40 PM
AWL,
I thought about FTP but they all seem to have allowed 15 or more FTP accounts. I don't know about concurrent FTP and I don't know how many I would need. So FTP seemed like it wouldn't be an issue. Maybe there is some hidden shenanigans that would be interesting to discover. I'll keep an eye out for that. Thanks for the tip.

Can you tell us what your cron jobs do?  Is it for backup? Are you moving data from one directory to another to share FTP uploaded data? Help me understand when I would need a cron job. Lots of these providers advertised cron jobs. Many advertised hundreds of cPanel Softaculous app installer and I can't imagine that they don't all offer cron jobs even though they don't come out and say it. It would be a shock is what I'm saying, but I suppose I wouldn't be totally surprised. I see your point and I think I would take my business elsewhere if there was a tool I needed if it wasn't offered.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: galfert on May 15, 2019, 03:26:49 PM
Weather34,
ICDSoft looks good and I like that it got several recommendations, and you are right that their pricing is among the lowest after 1st year. But what worries me is that they don't have unlimited bandwidth on that basic plan that only has 20 GB. That might or might not be a problem that may force you to the next highest tier. I have no experience and I have no idea how much bandwidth I'll need. If it is just weather data then I may be alright, but if I upload webcam then I think it will be a problem.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: AWL on May 15, 2019, 03:48:17 PM
Can you tell us what your cron jobs do?

From memory, I hit the NWS every five minutes for warnings, refresh/re-size three radar stills and a web-cam still every five minutes also. Maybe more, would have to check.

After going thru the E-Rice hosting failure many years age then on to FastWebHost (big mistake there ](*,)) I landed on MDD Hosting. Seems as I was searching around I remember that most companies only offer 10 minute crons. but that may have changed?
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: txweather.org on May 15, 2019, 04:24:35 PM
I have shared hosting with unlimited databases, unlimited storage, and email. Not sure how yo got is limited. and is there as well:

Unlimited Disk Space & Bandwidth
We put no limitation on the size or number of files related to your website.

Unlimited Email Addresses

You have it as 50GB 6DB and No emails.

But TBH, I dont get pay by dreamhost so to me I can care less. lol!
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: openvista on May 15, 2019, 05:15:05 PM
Seems as I was searching around I remember that most companies only offer 10 minute crons. but that may have changed?

Possibly 15 minutes. According to my previous host, A2Hosting, this is a limitation of CloudLinux (and it's "hooks" into cPanel), a common shared hosting platform.  I was on one of their "business" plans (maybe 3 or 4 levels up from the bottom level of shared hosting) and a 15 minute frequency limitation still applied.

I like to check alerts every minute, especially in the summer during severe weather season. Tornadoes can appear with almost no notice. I bill the site as "real-time weather". So I like to show alerts in as close to real time as possible. Certainly not everyone feels the need to do that, and so 15 minutes may be acceptable.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Maumelle Weather on May 15, 2019, 09:25:30 PM
Seems as I was searching around I remember that most companies only offer 10 minute crons. but that may have changed?

Possibly 15 minutes. According to my previous host, A2Hosting, this is a limitation of CloudLinux (and it's "hooks" into cPanel), a common shared hosting platform.  I was on one of their "business" plans (maybe 3 or 4 levels up from the bottom level of shared hosting) and a 15 minute frequency limitation still applied.

I like to check alerts every minute, especially in the summer during severe weather season. Tornadoes can appear with almost no notice. I bill the site as "real-time weather". So I like to show alerts in as close to real time as possible. Certainly not everyone feels the need to do that, and so 15 minutes may be acceptable.

ICDSoft will let you run 3 crons at 15 minutes intervals. The support at ICDSoft is hands down the best I've ever seen. Any issue that I have had or created on my own was resolved in 15 minutes or less.

I have used Easycron (https://www.easycron.com/) for the last 3 years. I have the Plus plan at $24 a year. NWS updates every 2 minutes, so I have a cron set to that and activate it when I know severe weather will be in my state. I have it update on odd minutes.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: txweather.org on May 15, 2019, 10:44:49 PM
I am not sure I understand why they limit crons... :/
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: ValentineWeather on May 16, 2019, 04:17:08 AM


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These are the shared hosting plans with Cpanel included at Godaddy being offered. Not exactly the same as the chart and they are sending me emails I need to upgrade to a business account. I currently have the Deluxe plan $14 a month as you can see nothing to brag about.
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Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: WeatherHost on May 16, 2019, 04:28:12 AM
My biggest beef with ICD is their lack of domain privacy.  I was going to switch the domain to another registrar this year but got sidetracked until too late.  Maybe next year.

Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: lightmaster on May 16, 2019, 06:56:34 AM
I'm a big fan of DigitalOcean (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/). $5/month for 1GB RAM, 25 GB storage, 1TB of transfer data per "droplet" (server). They have lots of images you can have installed for your server, from Ubuntu to Debain to Fedora to a preconfigured Ubuntu LAMP server. And can easily upgrade your server as your site grows. Best of all, is that it's a VPS so you have full control over every aspect of it, and aren't limited to just whatever your host wants to let you do/install.

Not sure if referral links are allowed here in what amounts to a mass advertising post, lol, but if you wanna join, this link will get you $100 in credits over 60 days, and me $25 in credits: https://m.do.co/c/d5123b5b5af5 (https://m.do.co/c/d5123b5b5af5).
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: lightmaster on May 16, 2019, 07:25:40 AM
Also, I've been using Google as a domain registrar for a couple years, and just bought BaxleyWeather.com from them for $12 a year. Instead of changing the nameservers to point at my DigitalOcean server, I just created a @ A record that points at my servers static IP, quicker startup than changing the nameservers and can still use Google's Domain page to set up other custom DNS records.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: icdsoft on May 16, 2019, 07:28:57 AM
Greetings,

Maybe it's not right a hosting provider from the list to take part in the discussions here, and we will definitely not submit the poll :)

Still, if the moderator considers our post inappropriate, please remove it.

There are two points in the discussion that we would like to clear out:

I am not sure I understand why they limit crons... :/

We do limit crons on shared servers to three, in a 15-minute interval, and this is done simply for stability reasons. If all users can run a large number of one-minute cron jobs, this would be a risk for higher server loads and server instability. Stability and performance are of course top concerns. We prefer to set rules, as clear as possible, so that customers are aware what to expect even before signing up.

My biggest beef with ICD is their lack of domain privacy.  I was going to switch the domain to another registrar this year but got sidetracked until too late.  Maybe next year.

We do offer domain privacy for all TLDs that allow it, and it is completely free with each domain registration. For example, .us domains are not allowed to be private, but .com/.net/.org/.info do allow domain privacy.

Actually, with the implementation of the European GDPR by most domain registrars, the WHOIS privacy service has lost its importance. Our domain registrar (Enom) hide domain WHOIS contacts from the public by default. However, there is a feature called "gated WHOIS" that is to be implemented in the near future. Our domain privacy feature would actually remove customer data from this gated WHOIS, so that even Enom do not have access to the data of our customers.

So WeatherHost, you can just contact our support service to inquire regarding domain privacy.

Best to all,
Zafir
ICDSoft.com
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: UpstateWeather.com on May 16, 2019, 09:13:39 AM
I personally use MDD Hosting and LOVE it! I've had them for a while and they are amazing to deal with. The customer service is what sells it. They are super responsive and actually helpful! I've had other hosting companies in the past and their customer service reps never provide detailed responses, or actually help for that matter. MDD Hosting does!



Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: txweather.org on May 16, 2019, 09:45:07 AM
Welcome to the forum icd, Good timing? :)
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: WeatherHost on May 16, 2019, 09:54:20 AM
Welcome to the forum icd, Good timing? :)


They've been around since the beginning:  Date Registered:  January 06, 2007, 03:13:47


They just don't post much.  And I can't say I've ever seen any of the other hosts here.



Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: txweather.org on May 16, 2019, 10:10:40 AM
Welcome to the forum icd, Good timing? :)


They've been around since the beginning:  Date Registered:  January 06, 2007, 03:13:47


They just don't post much.  And I can't say I've ever seen any of the other hosts here.





My point exactly :)
Nothing wrong with that.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Big Sky Weather on October 04, 2019, 09:27:29 PM
I just recently purchased a domain name and a hosting plan from Namecheap to start building my weather website. I've used them off and on for over 10 years for either domain names or hosting. Never had a problem with them.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Jumpin Joe on October 04, 2019, 09:37:28 PM
I have been using ICDSoft for 3 years and cannot say enough good things about them. Fantastic support that has patience and understanding for everyone regardless of their knowledge or skills.

Joe
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: graculus on October 04, 2019, 10:25:24 PM
SSL/HTTPS is a must these days, if only to avoid Chrome scaring away your visitors. It's shocking to see what some hosts are charging for a certificate, while others are including it for free.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: AWL on October 04, 2019, 10:32:17 PM
while others are including it for free.
MDD Hosting is one of the free ones.


Doug
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: lightmaster on October 04, 2019, 10:39:47 PM
SSL/HTTPS is a must these days, if only to avoid Chrome scaring away your visitors. It's shocking to see what some hosts are charging for a certificate, while others are including it for free.

Sad that all free hosts don't include Let'sEncrypt's free certificates.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Big Sky Weather on October 04, 2019, 10:54:24 PM
SSL/HTTPS is a must these days, if only to avoid Chrome scaring away your visitors. It's shocking to see what some hosts are charging for a certificate, while others are including it for free.

Namecheap offers a free SSLfrom Comodo.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: tshattuck on October 16, 2019, 01:35:12 PM
Hello
I have been looking to replace my current web host GoDaddy due to subscription price increase. Have any of you folks had any experience with FASTCOMET https://www.fastcomet.com/ (https://www.fastcomet.com/)?
If so any feedback will be appreciated.
Their service sounds good although some reviews on the Internet say their server response times are a little slow.

Tom
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: DeputyDawg on July 10, 2021, 11:22:18 AM
Hello all

I have been hosting my weather site for several years via GatorHost.

They are not awesome but not too bad.   

My renewal is coming  up and the prices are UN-Believable.  I will contact them to try and negotiate. Otherwise I will look elsewhere.

It was suggested to try IDC.  I looked.  Their into price is $2/month for the first year only then jumps to $6+   - thats too $$ for me for a simple weather site

Any other recommendations?
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Cutty Sark Sailor on July 10, 2021, 03:32:11 PM
https://www.hostpapa.com/
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: Aardvark on July 10, 2021, 05:50:50 PM
I had Hostmonster for 3 years.  I was always able to find someone if I ran into  a problem at any hour of the day.    I discontinued my site because it seemed from the stat counter I used, no one was interested so I took the site down.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: geno on September 27, 2021, 02:58:23 PM
I have been using HostGator for a while now.  Time to renew @ $250 -- I don't think so.
I'm looking to migrate my site to another hosting service -- so this thread was helpful.  Not sure where to start but will look into some of those mentioned here -- that I've never even heard of.  Hopefully one will be a good fit.  My site is probably simpler than most, so I can't justify spending big buck on keeping it up.  Frankly, I probably use it more than anyone I know.
www.genesweather.info :)
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: DeputyDawg on September 27, 2021, 03:13:19 PM
I have been using HostGator for a while now.  Time to renew @ $250 -- I don't think so.
I'm looking to migrate my site to another hosting service -- so this thread was helpful.  Not sure where to start but will look into some of those mentioned here -- that I've never even heard of.  Hopefully one will be a good fit.  My site is probably simpler than most, so I can't justify spending big buck on keeping it up.  Frankly, I probably use it more than anyone I know.
www.genesweather.info :)

Btw overall NOT happy with Hostgator, but all my stuff is there.  My site and all setup was done for me, so not sure how I would migrate.

Anyways...  They quoted me this astronomical renewal rate (3 year).  I negotiated them down substantially..

FYI to everyone to do this for anything including cell, internet, tv etc
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: geno on September 27, 2021, 04:29:02 PM
Update -- Sep 27, 2021

I checked out ICDSoft.com and man were they helpful.  I created an account (first year $24) next year $76.  They are doing the migration for me as we speak -- FREE.  I couldn't be happier. 

Thanks to those who posted recommendations based on their experience.

-geno
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: DeputyDawg on September 27, 2021, 05:05:03 PM
Update -- Sep 27, 2021

I checked out ICDSoft.com and man were they helpful.  I created an account (first year $24) next year $76.  They are doing the migration for me as we speak -- FREE.  I couldn't be happier. 

Thanks to those who posted recommendations based on their experience.

-geno
24 a year is great.  But 76 a year is NOT.  I got Hostgator down to 150-ish for 3 years
COOL they are doing the migration
Let me know how it works out. who knows may bail from HG
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: geno on September 27, 2021, 06:16:54 PM
Will keep you posted when the migration is complete.  You're a better negotiator then I am.  No one seemed interested in much of a discount when I talked with them.  I can live with $6.30 a month for hosting.

Hey, DeputyDawg -- I see you're in Atlanta.  Just moved from there (Alpharetta) a few years ago.  Got very tired of the congestion!
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: DeputyDawg on September 27, 2021, 06:22:29 PM
LOL...

Funny for 15+ years I worked in Alph
But thanks to covid my entire group was let go (2 weeks before xmas)
I live in midtown/bhead. Last month I finally got hired (3 miles from my house)
So no more Alph for me ):  Great city though
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: 92merc on September 28, 2021, 09:04:31 AM
$431 for my next GoDaddy renewal.  I don't think so...

I'll probably keep my my buying of host names through GD, but that'll depend on what ICD has to say about global certs.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: geno on September 28, 2021, 01:23:10 PM
Update

The folks at ICDSoft.com have been extremely helpful.  First, I'm not very good at this so I didn't really understand how the domain pointers work.  I purchased my domain name from inMotion years ago and completely forgot about them.  Since my site was being hosted by HostGator, of course their servers were named -- but, I didn't know how to change the name to the new servers at ICDSoft. 
I finally realized I needed to contact inMotion -- and they made the change for me. 
ICDSoft has a promo currently for $24 for the first year.  They do not offer telephone support -- only chat -- but they are very helpful -- and believe me, I needed it.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: DeputyDawg on September 28, 2021, 05:05:00 PM
I guess thats not bad.  Mine works out to 5.3 a month.

What did you think of host gator?  I'm not the biggest fan.

I got some email from them around may-tune stating they would be updating PHP to a current version. I then made sure all my weather stuff would work.

In my checking they had me on a  hideously old and totally unsupported version.

WOW im still on that SUPER OLD version, which they said they would be auto updating me to Mid June.  That and performance of my site will make me seriously re-think them.

Let me know performance is for you. Or heck ill just check out your site
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: DeputyDawg on September 28, 2021, 05:06:27 PM
btw I just checked out your page. MANY links don't work

Also check out mine which uses the FREE saratoga style page which many use and i LOVE

deputydawgwx.com

DUH.. forgot the link to scripts... https://saratoga-weather.org/scripts.php    click on the top templates then configuration - you will need the base USA plus any plugins (I use weatherdisplay)
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: geno on September 28, 2021, 06:34:56 PM
Frankly I don't care about the links within the program -- as long as I can see the key components and the maps -- I'm fine.
I'm pretty much the only one who goes to my site anyway -- so, it's largely for me.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: hmderek on September 29, 2021, 03:16:38 AM
Great experiences with Hetzner in Germany.
Title: Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
Post by: WeatherHost on March 14, 2022, 04:50:43 PM
Can't believe ICDSoft got so few votes.