» A Quick review of my recent hosts aka the Host Sucks List | Chris Mckee Designs, by Chris McKee, who'd of guessed | ChrisMcKee.co.uk

APlus.net Review (2004-2007 then again post media temple 2007 -> 2009)

Fantastic host, great support; I had a saver server with them for 2 years before deciding to cut my expenditure. Their hosting was genuinely 24 hour support, the fixes and re-imaging I required was done in an hour or so each time I requested it. Basically an A+ service from Aplus.net.

I eventually though decided I could cut my costs a bit, and I’d stuffed my server, so I’d have a look at moving to a Virtual Server… so off I trotted to Media Temple…

Mental Temple (media temple) Review (2007)

… So the old server decides to pack-in. 20 hours of uptime a day isn’t exactly a good thing and having to have the server physically restarted is as good as it shouting KILL ME DAMNIT. So I decided to have a mooch over to the hostess with the mostess (publicity), the one and only Media Temple.

Now to say this was a painless experience would be an outright lie, in fact thanks to their lazy non-existent slow, technical support and the inability to provide the server with the basic dev-tools required to even install updates yourself… yep the experience was much like crawling through glass butt naked with a 300lb weight lifter on your back randomly stamping on your head and telling you to eat glass.
Worth the hype; no. Although their control panel does give the option to restart your server yourself outside of plesk using virtuoso, that alone in no way outweighs the lack of the customer support.

My previous host was Aplus.net, who although fobbed me off with a server that had the spec of a gameboy, had a good live chat support, and an excellent return time on email support. So much so it took me a while to decide to leave their service.
Anyway boiling furnace of anger aside, it wasn’t all bad; they refunded every penny.

Anyway, after shitting blood for a week and lowering my blood pressure from Moron tip, I moved back to aplus.net.

Webfusion Virtual Private Server (vps) Review (2009 personal, 2007-9 corporate)

Two years later because I’m a sucker for punishment I attempted to move to a webfusion virtual server. Basically if you go with webfusion hosting the policy I like to have is, hope nothing goes wrong.
Notably I moved during them moving their server farm to Leeds (invoke imagery of sheep chewing network cables) and therefore everyone had to suffer while they sorted themselves the fuck out.

Setting up was a mess, their automation pretty much sucks and it took 48 hours to get a server, which considering its virtuosso blew. The server OS was an old version of ubuntu that locks you into a CHRoot; the problem of course here being, as its an old version of Ubuntu you cant update PHP to 5.2, and as such cant use lovely functions like filter. Excuse me while I go recode some things… or not.

Their support was useless and slow to answer, and generally unable to do anything; they advertised at one price, sent me an invoice for that price then charged my credit card another. Which then cost me another 8 quid on the phone listening to god awful music and some idiot passing me from pillar to post.

Christ they made Media temple look good.

Latest host…

Tagadab.com Review (2009+)

Tagadab have been great, the setup was quick, even thought it was in beta; their support has been direct and helpful. I made the poor sods reimage the server about 14 times while I faffed with control panels (none of which I used in the end) . The servers stable, the cost is pretty damn decent (especially for the UK), their control panels getting better and better, and basically I cant fault them yet.

So if your looking for a hardware server at a low cost and great support I’d advise going to Aplus.net
If your looking for a UK based host, and you have some technical knowledge go for Tagadab.com;