Finding reliable shared Windows hosting is much harder than it should be. I’ve been through a few over the past several years. I’ve more or less become a hosting Sherpa for my friends, family and co-workers. I test the waters and they follow when I say it’s safe.

Once again, I’m in the process of trying out yet another Windows host. In the meantime, I’ve moved this blog to a Linux host I use for experimenting with TurboGears and Rails. For my first post with this other host, I thought I’d share some experiences I’ve had with these companies.

M6
To be fair, it’s been many years since I’ve been with M6.net. Some of my experiences might be a bit dated at this point. That said, a friend who stayed with M6 long after I left lost her entire site during some outage. She is a designer and thought nothing of working with Dreamweaver (or maybe FrontPage) right on the server… That event was enough to stop my plans to reconsider M6 recently…

M6 was early to deploy ASP.NET 1.0. They offer lots of storage and features. But at the time, their control panel was horrible. It was home-grown and full of bugs. I forget most of what it was I wanted to do with the panel, but I recall long delays getting responses from support. But I do seem to recall them being somewhat helpful when engaged on a problem…

I’d personally pass on M6, but wouldn’t say they were any worse than the hosts that followed…

Exist Hosting

Exist Hosting came next. They were OK at first. Again, lots of features, space, etc. Exist uses H-Sphere for its control panel. I actually liked H-Sphere quite a bit. Domain management was really simple. Sites were easy to create. There were some limitations with Windows vs. Linux (single FTP user for example). But overall, the control panel was solid and that was better than M6.

Eventually, as with all shared hosts, problems arise. I had a few issues with email bouncing, canned-installers not working (phpBB), etc… The problem was tech support. It was just plain awful. It took forever to resolve any simple issue. Support would take days when hours were appropriate. Support definitely was the pain point here. Performance/reliability wasn’t any worse than most shared hosts. But that support team was useless (and rude).

When I signed up, there was a money back guarantee with a pro-rated refund for unused, prepaid time. When I canceled and tried to collect my refund, calls and emails to Exist went unanswered. Ultimately, I had to charge back through my credit card company to get my refund. These guys are pretty bad. I definitely would not consider them.

ASPnix

ASPnix offers standard fare for Windows hosting. HELM was the control panel there. It’s a nice application, but had some awkward workflows. I liked H-Sphere better. These guys were OK for a while, just like Exist. But like Exist, they had support issues.

I recall a few significant outages. Email or sites would be unavailable for hours at a time. My tolerance for such problems was definitely higher back then. Around the time I started with ASPnix, I started using Spring.NET, NHibernate and Castle. The first time I tried to run a Spring.NET site on their servers, I realized that they were restricting trust levels to medium only.

I tried to work with them on this. They’d been burned recently and made this decision to prevent issues from malicious code. I didn’t like it, but I got it. So having pre-paid for a year and having not been informed that the trust levels were limited, I asked for a pro-rata refund. What I got was a ton of attitude from one of their tech support guys. After a few unpleasant exchanges, I finally got a refund thanks to a very reasonable, senior staff member. I definitely would not consider ASPnix, again because of support.

Hosting Fest

Hosting Fest is another host cut from the same cloth as Exist and ASPnix. Their plans offered a little more for the money and used HELM for a control panel. Servers would be down for hours with seemingly no response plan. Hosting Fest supported full trust, so that kept me there for a while. And occasional server issues aside, they had some helpful and reasonably responsive tech support. I’d consider HostingFest for personal or hobby sites. They weren’t reliable enough for a site you’d like to have available 24/7. But for the money, I’d call them a maybe. I seem to recall telling them when I left I’d still recommend them (and I did a few times).

Ultima Hosts

I left Hosting Fest for Ultima Hosts. It was about 2 years ago and they were running a 2 for 1 (year) special. I couldn’t resist the Unlimited plan. Unlimited websites, email, MySQL, SQL Server… When I first signed up, Plesk was the control panel. Plesk is shiny, but wicked slow with Windows. It was eventually replaced with DotNetPanel. I don’t much care for DotNetPanel. The workflows are awkward. For example, email addresses are managed across an entire hosting plan and not for a single domain. It gets messy with a lot of domains. But for the most part, it’s a reasonably well featured control panel.

Ultima started off strong. They seemed to have fast, reliable servers. But over time, they’ve become perhaps the worst host with which I have worked. The first full site I deployed on their servers was Code Voyeur. The original SQL Server was fast enough, but I got constant errors. I was convinced it was something I was doing wrong with Spring.NET’s data API. Eventually, I tried moving to a different SQL Server and no problems.

Jeopardy Story and dll Hell both ran against a MySQL server that would at times run painfully slow. Ultima gave me access to a new server with better performance. This new server eventually became subject to regular outages. Again, I was given MySQL space on a new server. So I once again packed up my data and moved to another MySQL server.

I was happy with the new space at first. It was fast and reliable. But last Friday (5/2), that server went offline until the morning of 5/7. Three of my sites were down during this period. Ultima had no recovery plan and no tape backups of the server. It was an incredibly frustrating experience. Had Ultima not been plagued by the same periodic outages that other hosts experience, this offense would be more forgivable. But Ultima’s track record is no better than any of the hosts I’ve described (and they charge more). I would absolutely not consider Ultima Hosts.

Update: Ultima Hosts removed the forum posts relating to the outage described above. When I read that they had done this on an asp.net forum post I set Firefox to work offline and I saved out the cached version of those threads. I’ve attached them to this posting here and here.

WebHost4Life

So once again I’ll be packing up my bits and moving to a new host. This time I’m going to give WebHost4Life a try. I’ve only had my plan for a couple of hours now so I won’t opine just yet. I’ll save that for part III. They have a home-grown control panel that seems plenty powerful, but it’s not too pretty. My first site migration (Jeopardy Story) went very smoothly (almost too smoothly)… Performance is decent so far. More to come after some time passes.

Lessons learned

  1. If you choose a host that forces medium trust, make sure you understand the impact to your site. Set the trust level to medium in the config file. Full is the default…
  2. Don’t get a domain through the host. Use GoDaddy or another registrar. I’ve heard of hosts not letting domains go when people switch hosts.
  3. Use Google Apps for email. All of these hosts have adequate spam detection at best. Google’s is pretty amazing.