Tagweb hosting

Why Reddit moderation is corrupt

Since a few months back, I’m a regular user of Reddit. Initially on the webhosting area, but also the Bitcoin area.

One thing I’ve noticed is how biased/corrupt the moderators on each sub-reddit area can be.

Let’s take the webhosting area as an example. I’ll often reply to posts for people looking for web hosting.

However, I recently got banned for ‘spamming’, even though I rarely recommend companies.

After a little research, it seems (at least) three of the four moderators in the web hosting sub-Reddit work for various web hosting providers. Hardly impartial moderation…

HostGator vs. WebHostingBuzz

Having my website and blog hosted with WebHostingBuzz, I’m always interested to see how they compare to other web hosts.
I’ve got a friend who currently has his website currently hosted with HostGator, so I thought I’d use the opportunity to do a comparison/review of the two.

When I was initially looking for a web host a few years ago, I made the (bad) decision to go with Arvixe. It wasn’t long before I began to regret my choice of host. Yes, the hosting was cheap but I was suffering from constant downtime and very poor support. So when it came to renewal time, I spent a while researching for a web host which would be reliable and affordable. WebHostingBuzz had lots of good reviews and the pricing was competitive, so I decided to go with them.

WebHostingBuzz operate in the UK and US (with .co.uk and .com websites), so you can choose a server location based on which side of the Atlantic the majority of your audience are.
Also, if you manage a website which has a lot of traffic or you want to implement a level of redundancy, they give you the option to buy servers at two or more datacentres and then load balance the traffic. I haven’t taken advantage of this, but can imagine it would be beneficial for businesses.

However, HostGator only have servers in the US which isn’t ideal as I’m based in the UK and so are the majority of my visitors. Also, they don’t give you a choice of datacentre like WebHostingBuzz do, and your server location will instead be chosen at random.

Locations:

The locations each provider has servers at are:

 webhostingbuzz_logoedit
us Atlanta, GA (Primary datacentre)
us Dallas, TX (Primary datacentre)
us Clifton, NJ (Secondary datacentre)
us Phoenix, AZ (Secondary datacentre)
gb Newark, UK (I’m currently hosted here!)

cropped-hostgator
us Provo, UT (Ace Data Centers)
us Dallas, TX (Softlayer)
us Houston, TX (Softlayer)

 

Uptime:

I use Pingdom to monitor the uptime and ping of my sites, nameservers and webservers – here are a few screenshots comparing the uptime of each provider:

WebHostingBuzz:WHBIP

HostGator:
HostgatorIP

As you can see, HostGator recently suffered from downtime which was quite severe (more info can be found here). I had around 3-4 hours of downtime, but from looking on forums it seems some had 12 hours and more of downtime.

 

Ping:

Here’s a comparison of ping times using Pingdom (with faster ping times in green, fading to yellow green and yellow indicating slower ping times):

WebHostingBuzz (Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK):WHBRESPONSE

HostGator (Provo, UT, USA):

HostgatorRESPONSE

As you can see, whilst my server with WebHostingBuzz is located in the UK, it offers a consistent fast ping across the world. HostGator’s US server does offer a good ping in the US, but as soon as you access a website from across the Atlantic the ping time slows substantially. This may be a problem if you manage a high traffic website with visitors from across the globe (specifically outside of the US).

You will also notice that some countries in Europe are missing on each of the world maps – this is simply down to the ping servers and their availability, and doesn’t mean there was a connection issue.

 

I’ll wrap this post by saying that you really do get what you pay for when it comes to web hosting. If you go with a cheap host, don’t expect the same level of service you would get from a more expensive provider. It may be wise to invest a little more so you have the extra capacity and 24/7 expert support if you need it in the future.

My journey from Arvixe to WebHostingBuzz

Having had my website and email hosted with Arvixe over the past few years, I’ve had ongoing issues with websites loading slow, regular downtime and general bad service, so I decided the time was right to upgrade to a better provider.

Having seen Web Hosting Buzz had a relatively local UK location, I decided to have a look at the services they could offer which included web hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers.

Rather than going for a basic web hosting plan, I decided to rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) which would give me extra processing power should I need it.

I’m on the Silver plan (£28.95/mo), which has the following specs:

VPS Silver
Disk Space: 40GB
Bandwidth: 5000GB (5TB)
CPU: 1.5Ghz
RAM: 1.5GB (Burstable to 2GB)
Dedicated IP’s: 2

I also went for the cPanel/WHM upgrade which is £6/month and well worth it as it can make the setting up of websites and emails a lot easier.

After placing the order, I received an email from the billing/admin department to confirm that the order was being processed. Not long after, I then had an email from informing me that my VPS was being installed and configured.

Once it was setup (which didn’t take long!), I asked if they would be able to migrate my old files from Arvixe over. This was no problem, and I simply gave the details of my previous provider and the rest was taken care of.

The whole process took maybe an hour (the majority of the time being the time taken to backup and copy the files). Compared to Arvixe who used to take a day to respond to my tickets and shrug off issues, I’m fairly pleased with the support I’ve had so far.

As the package provided two dedicated IP’s, I decided to set up two personal nameservers (ns1.adamowen.co.uk & ns2.adamowen.co.uk).

It’s running CentOS, and I’m hoping to use it to host my personal website, blog and a couple of other things. I’m also testing Boundary and NewRelic monitoring software with it.

Having bought the Raspberry Pi last year, as a relative newbie to the world of Linux I’m hoping to gain further Linux sysadmin experience with this new VPS.

I’ll be updating this shortly with uptime stats. After having my services hosted with WHB for a week, here are the uptime stats for my website. 100% uptime with a great ping!

Pingdom

UK site: webhostingbuzz.co.uk
US site: webhostingbuzz.com

© 2024 Adam's Blog

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑