In the modern, competitive Web Hosting market, one of the top priorities for
all webhosting companies is to get new customers. Before paying and setting up
an account with a specific host, most people like to e-mail their sales
department to ask a few questions and find out how good the sales advice and
response time is.

Yesterday, under the alias of Dave Jones, I e-mailed 39 of the top web
hosting companies with one message to find out how good their response times and
the advice given was. I posed as a personal homepage owner who supposedly didn't
know much about the internet to test their response - mainly to see if they
explained things so I could understand and realised that I didn't need a fully
blown hosting account. In my message, I told them my site was a personal site
with only 30 - 40 visitors a month, although I use a MySQL database for news
management. I also said that it was primarily for e-mail. After receiving a
reply, I then sent another message with a set of questions in to find out how
they responded to those. I set a cut off point of the same time today at which
time all companies who had not responded would be given a NR (No Response)
rating.

The results of this survey were very interesting, I am going to go through
what kind of replies I received and at the end of the article there is a chart
showing the response times for each host.

The Messages

At 11:10am yesterday morning, I sent an e-mail out to the sales departments
of 39 hosting companies. I acquired the list from the UK Top Hosts website as
well as from the Classifieds section of .net magazine visiting each website to
obtain the correct e-mail address for each company. I then send this message to
each and every one of them:

"I am currently investigating moving hosting
companies for my personal website as was wondering if you would be able to
provide hosting for me. My site is very small, only a few pages but uses a small
PHP script and a MySQL database to allow me to post news on. I am not having
many visitors, only about 30-40 a month so it is a small site. I use it
primarily for my personal e-mail account (I'm using my work one now).

Could you advise on which account I should go with
or if you could create something special for me?"

This was sent from one of my many domain names that I
own under the alias of David Jones. I then waited for the responses to come
back. With most of the replies, I then sent a set of questions back to find out
how they answered my queries.

"Thank you for your quick response. I have a few
questions if you could answer them for me please:

1. How many people do you have available to provide
support?

2. What access speeds can I expect from the website?

3. What kind of redundancy do you have available if the site goes down?

4. What happens if I exceed my diskspace/bandwidth allowance?

5. Do you offer backup on your servers?

6. Can I transfer my domain name in?

7. What happens if I want to leave?

I am relatively new to hosting so any additional
help you could provide would be excellent!"

These questions received various, and some interesting
responses.

Responses - Initial Message

The level of information provided in the reply to my
first e-mail varied for each company. For example, I received a one line reply
from SupaNames:

"From the sounds of your requirements our Value
Host account should be suitable for you."

Not very informative and not really explaining why it would be good for my
requirements. CWCS also sent me a one line reply and Virtual ISP sent me a two
liner.

I was very impressed with the response from 'Scott' from Rackspace. It was
probably unfair to include them as they do not provide Shared Hosting, which is
what I required. He said that I would require a shared hosting account, which is
not what Rackspace provide, although I could purchase a dedicated server from
them if I wished:

"After reading your email it seems to me that you
are looking for a shared hosting solution. I think what you are looking for is a
low cost solution that offers some webspace, and email accounts. Although you
could host your site at Rackspace, I think we are a little larger scale than
what you need."

I responded to his recommendation with the standard
questions which he answered well. He even gave me a URL to trace route to so I
could see the real speed of the connection which was impressive. He also sent me
a 6 page PDF all about RackSpace and how I could benefit from their services.
Although this is not what I needed for my small site, it shows how they deal
with their potential customers.

The response from Hostway UK was very good. Before I
had sent the 7 questions, I was told exactly what the plan recommended to me
(Linux Gold) featured and the cost of it. Paul also picked up on the fact that I
wanted to use the account for e-mail so said that I could use their webmail
facility and could manage e-mail accounts via their control panel. However, this
plan was probably a little too much for what I needed and at £14.95 per month,
quite expensive for just a personal site with e-mail. Although their Linux
Silver account only comes with 1Gb of bandwidth which might be a problem. But
overall, very good.

Positive Internet replied second fastest to my enquiry
with a useful amount of information. They also picked up on the fact I wanted
e-mail and told me that I could control all my mailboxes via their control panel
as well as the fact I can use their webmail or my own e-mail client. They also
provide very good support - maximum response time of 3 hours as well as an
emergency SMS service. But I'd expect that for the price they quoted me -
£250+VAT. Way too much for my needs. I was also offered a direct contact number
to speak to Darren if I wanted!

9NetAvenue told me I needed their corporate service
just to use MySQL even though I only needed a small site. This was a huge £39.95
per month, although if I paid up front, I could get the 2nd year free. That
price is too high to pay for a personal site.

Virtual Internet told me that:

"Our standard VI Host would be perfect for your
requirements. This costs £120.00 a year with no set up costs. You get 25 Mb web
space, 12 pop 3 accounts, PHP and MYSQL as standard. You would also get a VI
control panel to create pop accounts and manage any mail or web forwarding you
may require."

They even offered me a free .co.uk domain name as well,
unless I had my own domain name I wanted to transfer in!

Easy Space sent me a huge e-mail which almost told me about every package and
service they provided! I was disappointed to see that some of their accounts
come with banner adverts which is not good for a paid service. However, the
reply to my initial e-mail was good and they gave examples of a few websites
hosted with them which I could check out.

Datex UK went out of their way to help me. Steve offered to create a special
account for me as my needs were very small. He offered me their 'Level 1' plan
for £185 per year if I prepaid and said he would throw in PHP and MySQL for
free! This is what I wanted to see from the companies I e-mailed. Even though
they have set prices, it is nice to see that they are willing to create specific
plans for specific requirements.

Purple Paw, whom I had never heard of before, replied the fastest in an
astonishing 4 minutes! They recommended their Small Business package at £45 for
one year which comes with MySQL. They also offered the Personal package for £25
per year, but I would have to pay an extra £5 per year for the MySQL database.

Mistral provided a disappointing response saying that they did not support
MySQL on any accounts unless I purchased a managed server - which is definitely
not what I wanted for a personal account! Of the companies that responded, they
were the slowest almost taking 24 hours to reply.

Responses - Additional Questions

After receiving the response to the initial query, I
sent out some more questions, taken from the
Choosing a Web Host article.
The responses to these were mostly good.

1. How many people do you have available to provide
support?

Most companies had people available 24/7. Rackspace had the most with 300
employees, 2/3 of them being 'techs'. It is obvious that there would be fewer
people available in the evening, although Donhost provided the cryptic response
of:

"We have four people available."

Making it difficult to work out if they were available 24/7. Joshua Internet
provided the best response to this question:

"Sorry, that's commercially sensitive information
I'm afraid."

I cannot see how it is sensitive as all the other companies provided a
response! Virtual ISP also decided not to answer this question fully:

"We offer support to all our customers mon - fri
with out off hours cover being via Email."

2. What access speeds can I expect from the website?

Most responses to this question were that it depended on my connection but a
few provided specific connection details such as who their data carriers were
and the speeds of their internet backbones. As mentioned earlier, Rackspace even
provided an address so I could trace route it.

3. What kind of redundancy do you have available if
the site goes down?

As expected, the respondents had multiple connections to the internet in case
of failure. Positive Internet carry spare parts for all their servers. Datagate
have mirror servers ready to take over in case of the main server failing which
is a very good feature. Joshua Internet gave an interesting response again:

"As these are budget hosting accounts, sites are
not load balanced or mirrored across multiple servers (it would double our
prices). But our servers are carefully looked after, so such an event would be
rare. "

Dziner Solutions gave a detailed reply about how their
drives are hot swappable for extra redundancy. Virtual ISP do not appear to have
any kind of redundancy according to their response below:

"It's very rare that we loose servers for long
period of times."

4. What happens if I exceed my diskspace/bandwidth allowance?

The general view on this was that they didn't mind if you exceed your
allocation by a small amount but arrangements would need to be made if this
occurred frequently. Only Aventure Host said they might close your site if you
went over.

Host Supreme appeared very generous with their allowances:

"If you exceed your diskspace allocation, simply
notify us and we increase it at no extra charge. If you exceed your bandwidth,
you will be notified but your site will not be shut down. "

This is one of the main things to look out for with hosting - will they shut
your site down?

5. Do you offer backup on your servers?

Generally, the data on the server was backed up, but only for the recovery of
data in case of failure. You would have to backup your own data. Aventure Host
did not provide any form of backup on the servers at all for privacy reasons.

6. Can I transfer my domain name in?

This obvious answer to this was yes, for all concerned

7. What happens if I want to leave?

Again, there was no problem with this for any of the hosts.

Total Response Times

Of the 39 hosts contacted, I was disappointed to see only 20 of them
responded! The table below shows the response time for each host. NR = No
Response

Conclusion

It is obvious from the chart above that Purple Paw responded the fastest
yesterday. They win the Fastest Response Time award. However, the Best Response
has to go to Rack Space. Even though they couldn't provide what I needed for my
site/e-mail, they had the best e-mail response and answered the questions the
best. Close contender for this was DZINER Solutions. Datex UK are highly
commended for creating a special package for my needs, even if it was reasonably
expensive.

This survey has provided some very interesting results which I hope you
enjoyed reading!

Author: David Mytton

 www.olate.com

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | | | | |