Okay, so I know that my current webhost, aplus.net, has got more than its share of bad press in the past, including a particularly vitriolic diatribe here. But I honestly feel that’s complete bunk. These guys are incredibly good.
My experience with them, in the last six weeks, has been uniformly good. Not just good but truly wonderful. There’s a sense of comfort and security that’s unusual.
Arguably the most important element in webhosting. I operate out of India and it’s absolute hell to put a call through to support and be kept on hold for 20 minutes or more — only to be finally told to “call your floor supervisor”. My floor supervisor? Who the heck is my floor supervisor? Turns out that it’s the host’s off-hours. I have to synch my support issues to PST or something. Ridiculous.
Not so with aplus. The call is answered inside of 20 seconds and in another 5 I have a live person answering my questions — and some of the things I flung at them were pretty hard ones.
Anyone who cribs about their sales needs his head examined. It is simply outstanding. Live chat and a salesperson to walk and talk you through the whole process and look after you later. I had an exceptional person myself, Dennis Neychev — amazingly, we’ve actually become pals after I put through several transactions.
Rock solid dependable. Erroneous charges (my mistake entirely, I chose the wrong option) were reversed in no time at all and they have never, I mean never made a wrong charge that I had to fight about.
Not just can’t complain — the basket of features they give you is just amazing and, for the price, totally unbeatable. Webspace, bandwidth, add-ons, free link submissions, counters, cgi, mysql, php, imagemagick and image manipulation tools, website development tools and html editors, thumbnail generators, miva, they’ve got it all. On the Solo XR plan they pretty much thrown in everything except the kitchen sink and I’m sure they’d do that too if you only nudged.
In one word — unbeatable. For all the above and more, under $10 a month! That’s a damned hard act to follow. And their server speeds and stability are amazing. Plus they’re caring enough to thrown in some really good antispam and antivirus protection. These guys have everything and they’re at 1/10th the price of my previous hosts in India.
Today, there’s no basis for it. The guy who complained about Aplus taking his site off had a gripe that’s at least 3 or 4 years old. They’re not the same anymore, obviously. Besides, on his own showing, he’d exceeded all decent bounds of bandwidth usage. Even in those days if he’d cared to read the fine print, he’d have seen the limits they imposed. He was well over those with his movie on the WTC attacks. Anyone with any sense knows that it’s not diskspace that’s expensive (it’s dirt cheap, in fact), it’s bandwidth, and there’s really no such thing as “free bandwidth” or “unlimited bandwidth”. There can’t be. They have a pretty generous allowance (45GB/mo is more than most people need) and if you’re going to overshoot that, you should damn well pay for it.
What these guys all forget is that these are business transactions. Nobody’s doing anyone a favour. You just can’t take advantage of your host. If you’re going to run a movie and getting 600,000 hits or more in 2 weeks, is there any reason the host should be at a commercial loss just because you’ve got a shining cause? There’s lots of causes out there and lots of hosts that cater to causes — go with them. Why expect the host to subsidize your campaigns? Where was that part of the deal?
And finally, it might be worth while noting what these guys say on their pages about their company — they cater to small and medium businesses. They’re not catering to megasites and megausers at all. Of course, the guy who started the flame war (and it’s particularly nasty and intemperate, totally self-centered) did it in 2001 or earlier. But there are posts are recently as 2004 June and those guys certainly don’t know what they’re missing.
I’m sticking with this crew and can’t think of a single reason to shift.