Since two people recommended Hostmonster and I was a bit unhappy about the performance of Site5 at that time I thought I’d give them a try. The signup is pretty quick, no need to wait a whole day like I had to with Dreamhost. The control panel was pretty cool, still cpanel but they made it their own. For instance there was a search function for the various cpanel functions. If you type in “cron” at the search box it would pop up the cronjob link in cpanel. You can also drag and drop the cpanel elements and customize the “cpanel desktop”.
However after I uploaded my first site I got a server error when trying to load the index page. After talking to the support I found out that this happened because of the permissions. For some reasons newly uploaded files didn’t have the usual 644 permissions but 664. Until now I don’t know why this happened. I tried CuteFTP, Filezilla and CoreFTP but the same problem. The file permission was 644 if I didn’t upload in sFTP but normal unencrypted FTP. PenguiNet is the exception here, where I can upload with SCP (secure copy) without the permission problem. I still don’t know what the problem is since Site5 doesn’t have that problem, I can use secure FTP without the permission problem. After emailing the helpful “CuteFTP guys” they hinted that maybe Pure-FTPd might be the problem, since a few other CuteFTP customers had problem with this server.
I’ve used Hostmonster for a few days now and the server seems to be quite stable yet not perfect. The database was down for about 20 minutes but support was helpful and fixed it.
Hostmonster offers the all-important Shell access but one drawback is that you can’t have outbound FTP from the shell, only inbound. If you pay for a dedicated IP you can use “nonstandard ports for SCP” according to the live support. A dedicated IP costs 2.50 USD per month. The reason I wanted outbound FTP was to upload mysql dumps to Site5 for daily backup.
They also have a 50 emails per hour limit, but after talking to support they’ve increased it to 200 emails per hour. I liked the fact that they actually tell you that you’ve exceeded the limit not just ignore further emails.
All in all I like Hostmonster, obviously I still need more time to form an opinion but for the price of 6.95 / 5.95 USD is a good deal.
I’ve also tested Kiosk.ws for a few days. A few things I’ve noticed was that they seem to have a limit of 2000 files per directory (they are not the only host with that limit). Since I’ve got a lot of sound files and pictures (for eBay) this wouldn’t work for me. I’ve tried to sort this out with support but didn’t get anywhere. I also noticed that sometimes it takes them a couple of hours to answer my emails which is a bit slow for a relatively expensive host. A really cool feature is their Live Conference Room - called HotConference - where you can get support through talking to them with a microphone or textchat. Sometimes no support guy was there to provide help and suddenly other customer asked me for help because they didn’t realize I was a customer as well which was quite funny. You can also listen to the conversations when other customers ask for help. At one point a guy entered the room and was really upset that something wasn’t working and that this wasn’t good for his business. I haven’t really been with Kiosk.ws long enough to judge them properly but probably won’t continue after the 1 Dollar trial for one month.
Tags: reviews, web hosts by admin
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