Poll

What hosting company do you recommend? (recommend one or two)

GoDaddy
6 (8.2%)
Bluehost
2 (2.7%)
Hostgator
2 (2.7%)
NameCheap
2 (2.7%)
1&1
3 (4.1%)
SiteGround
2 (2.7%)
iPage
0 (0%)
inmotion
1 (1.4%)
Hostinger
1 (1.4%)
Dreamhost
3 (4.1%)
MDDHosting
7 (9.6%)
A2 Hosting
1 (1.4%)
HostFav
0 (0%)
HostMonster
2 (2.7%)
Your own server
14 (19.2%)
Other
21 (28.8%)
ICDSoft
6 (8.2%)

Total Members Voted: 68

Author Topic: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS  (Read 6878 times)

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Offline galfert

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POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« 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.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 12:36:08 PM by galfert »
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
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Offline txweather.org

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #1 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.

----
Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus +FARS|Meteobridge Nano SD|Meteohub|Meteobridge MR-3020|WU KTXSPRIN75/PWS JRARGWX75/CWOP EW2972/WBB TXWDVUE75/Blitzortung ID: 1142|AWEKAS: 12095
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Offline AWL

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #2 on: May 13, 2019, 12:07:33 PM »
MDD Hosting has served me well.

Doug

Offline Bashy

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #3 on: May 13, 2019, 11:00:56 PM »
Bashys Hosting  oh, wait, thats me :roll: ;) \:D/
Kind regards
Bashy

Offline ValentineWeather

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #4 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. 
Randy

Offline Bashy

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #5 on: May 14, 2019, 06:05:21 AM »
Unlimited is never unlimited...... More so for is that update every few seconds
Kind regards
Bashy

Offline Maumelle Weather

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #6 on: May 14, 2019, 07:06:24 AM »
I highly recommend ICDSoft. 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
GR2AE, GR3, Cumulus

Offline Cutty Sark Sailor

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #7 on: May 14, 2019, 10:07:12 AM »
LunarPages
Drives
NOAA Weather Radio Org
Sferics US
Frankfort Weather
and others...
on Basic Shared Linux
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.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2021, 03:25:19 PM by Cutty Sark Sailor »
 


Offline Jumpin Joe

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #8 on: May 14, 2019, 10:38:51 AM »
I highly recommend ICDSoft. 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
https://joesweather.info
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Offline Bunty

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #9 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

Also the 2nd home page using modified AltDashboard 6.95 at http://stillwaterweather.com/2ndhome.php

Offline WeatherHost

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #10 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.


Offline openvista

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #11 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.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 08:36:59 AM by openvista »
Davis Vantage Pro2 AC FARS | https://marquetteweather.com | EW7933

Offline galfert

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #12 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.
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
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Offline miraculon

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #13 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.




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CWOP: CW4114 and KE8DAF-13
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Amateur Radio Callsign: KE8DAF

Offline galfert

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #14 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.
  • They are the cheapest
  • They are the 2nd largest domain registrar after GoDaddy
  • I read some reviews and they were mostly pretty good
  • The bad things I read had to do with perhaps uptime of only 99.98% instead of 99.99%. Seems meaningless for a weather site. Also a few bad reviews regarding performance....but we'lll see about that.
  • I can always change and I don't mind the introductory price of $15.44 for the year to find out for myself. Perhaps they are a good name registrar and not as great at hosting.
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.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 01:10:20 PM by galfert »
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
Weather Underground Issue Tracking
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Offline galfert

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #15 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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« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 04:10:19 PM by galfert »
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
Weather Underground Issue Tracking
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Offline weather34

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #16 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 .


Offline txweather.org

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #17 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/

----
Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus +FARS|Meteobridge Nano SD|Meteohub|Meteobridge MR-3020|WU KTXSPRIN75/PWS JRARGWX75/CWOP EW2972/WBB TXWDVUE75/Blitzortung ID: 1142|AWEKAS: 12095
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Offline AWL

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #18 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

Offline galfert

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #19 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.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 03:22:41 PM by galfert »
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
Weather Underground Issue Tracking
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Offline galfert

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #20 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.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 04:12:55 PM by galfert »
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
Weather Underground Issue Tracking
Tele-Pole

Offline galfert

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #21 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.
Ecowitt GW1000 | Meteobridge on Raspberry Pi
WU: KFLWINTE111  |  PWSweather: KFLWINTE111
CWOP: FW3708  |  AWEKAS: 14814
Windy: pws-f075acbe
Weather Underground Issue Tracking
Tele-Pole

Offline AWL

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #22 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?
« Last Edit: May 15, 2019, 04:10:50 PM by AWL »

Offline txweather.org

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #23 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!

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Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus +FARS|Meteobridge Nano SD|Meteohub|Meteobridge MR-3020|WU KTXSPRIN75/PWS JRARGWX75/CWOP EW2972/WBB TXWDVUE75/Blitzortung ID: 1142|AWEKAS: 12095
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Offline openvista

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Re: POLL: What hosting provider do you recommend for a PWS
« Reply #24 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.
Davis Vantage Pro2 AC FARS | https://marquetteweather.com | EW7933