Honest Marketing Secrets

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UPDATE: The honeymoon is over, apparently. Since the new year arrived there have been a few posts by users having some possible big issues with Hostican. [post 1, post 2] I have not had any troubles with 2 of the accounts I’ve worked on, however, a BIG complaint that I have seen has to do with the hyper-sensitivity of their resource monitoring algorithm. If your site has a busy blog, or a busy forum, you may suddenly get a Hostican resource warning page instead of your web site. And I HAVE seen this on one account where a WordPress theme was using a particular image plugin and it was getting the warning page. So that was not good.

We did trace it back to a PHP configuration that was using 100% of memory and when we dialed it back the trouble went away, but the image plugin eventually had to be removed as it needed more memory than Hostican’s servers were going to permit. So there ya go.

While the support was helpful in getting the problem solved, the fact remains that I have never once used up resources with such a small WordPress blog on any of my other servers and this very account never had a single problem on the old server (to be fair, their old server was a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at Liquidweb, but this was one of over 100 accounts on a single VPS and still no problem on the Liquidweb VPS. I have no doubt that a shared hosting account at Liquidweb would also have no trouble with that blog since Liquidweb doesn’t oversell.).

Usually I stay away from any hosting companies that oversell unless they have a proven record for being a good company and my client absolutely, positively cannot afford anything better to get started. I had hoped that Hostican would be a good starter host for beginners and small business web sites and for the most part it probably is, unless you have a highly trafficked blog or forum.

So I am removing my links and recommendations for Hostican and will not recommend them unless they make significant changes to their resource use policy which, I feel, is way too stringent and makes their hosting useful only for small sites with no dynamic content (no blogs, no forums) that receive very little traffic.

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Hello! As you know, I don’t post to my blog too often and that’s because I usually spend a lot of time using the things I tell you about and only pass along the stuff that I really like. Well, guess what? I found something I really like!

I’ve been working with a Web hosting company for the last 5 months and they have surpassed my expectations every time. I’m pretty picky when it comes to the most important thing you MUST have in a good web host. What might that thing be? Glad you asked . . .

It’s customer service, of course. We expect that every web hosting company will have all the bells and whistles that their competitors have, and so the only things separating mediocre (or terrible) hosting companies from great ones is how well and quickly they respond to your request for help, as well as the quality of their educational materials.

I’m happy to say that, of all the companies I’ve dealt with in the past 8 years, this is one of the absolute best.

If you don’t really understand hosting, or know you should put up a web site and don’t know where to go, these folks have a wonderful support site with telephone access to real humans at all hours and great training videos embedded contextually in their control panel (the thing you use to manage your hosting plan).

Altogether they have won me over and I’m thrilled to be able to recommend them. I expect to be hosting many of my sites with them for many years to come.

Review their program even if you don’t think you’ll need it right away. It’s a great site to bookmark for future reference.

Hope your holidays are joyous!
See you in 2008!