I’ve been a full-stack developer for over 20 years, and I have a broad range of clients, with an even broader range of needs. The one thing I don’t need is headaches from the hosting company. I want fast, reliable, secure service that WORKS. I don’t want to get bombarded with sales emails and nickel and dimed like most of the larger companies do. The fast answer? HostXNow. If you want the best, click the link and pick the hosting plan the suits your needs now. If you want to learn more about how I came to that conclusion, read on!
Resources, Resources, Resources
When choosing a web hosting provider, there’s a lot to take into consideration. Most companies talk about their uptime and use other bullshit buzzwords to sell you on their service. Here’s what you need to know: IO (IOPS), SSD Drives, System specs?, Cloud Based?, Bandwidth limits, database limits, cPanel access? Does email cost extra? What about SSL certificates? This is just a taste of the questions I threw at the team at HostXNow when I was searching for a new web hosting company.
Now, you might think that’s a lot of technical questions, and you may or may not understand all of it, and that’s okay. Here’s what matters. Performance. Those are the pieces of the web hosting puzzle that make up your site’s performance.
IO (or IOPS) is essentially the amount of data that can be transferred per second on your website. Most companies limit each account to only 1 or 2 megs (more expensive accounts at 10 megs). HostXNow has most of their accounts set to at least 50 megs!!! What does this mean for you? Let’s say you’re hosting a WordPress website (like this one) and you have multiple users viewing the site at the same time. Every person using the site increases the bandwidth and IO and database usage at the same time. If you’re limited to 1 or 2 megs, you’ll reach your server limits very quickly. That will cause your site to run very slowly, or stop all together, potentially causing server errors (this happened to me all the time on that famous race car driver’s favorite hosting company).
My Hosting Experience
What first brought me to switch my clients to HostXNow was over 3 days of downtime on that aforementioned hosting company, not long after their databases failed. My experience here has been…different. Instead of periodic massive failure, there’s been periodic major upgrades. WHAT?! Yeah, upgrades.
In my previous experience, no matter what you pay, the previous company would keep you at the same speed and resources unless you go through a painful upgraded process and switch servers.
HostXNow has constantly been upgrading and maintaining their servers for the best services for their clients, and now we’re all getting cloud hosting at no extra cost.
In a nutshell: when everybody on the hosting discussion forums told me I needed to pay for expensive VPS servers for what I was running, HostXNow‘s basic plans cover everything I need and more. Oh, did I mention, the email accounts and SSL certs are free too? Yeah.
What don’t I like?
Well, nobody is perfect and here’s the only issue I’ve had to deal with…and it’s not their fault. My company, and most of my clients, are based in the USA, and HostXNow is in the UK. So what’s the problem? Well, banks and credit card issuers can make it a pain in the ass when making international payments. That’s it. That’s my only issue. A simple call or a text message to the bank usually fixes it, and for most people, it’s only once a year. Another workaround is to load credit in your account so it bills your account instead of your card, and then you can wait longer before dealing with your bank again.
Well, I’m happy to report this isn’t an issue anymore. HostXNow has started using Stripe as their payment gateway, and I haven’t had any billing issues since with any of my clients.