Forget everything you’ve ever heard or seen about web hosting for a minute and note I am not getting paid a dime for what I am about to write. This is totally unsolicited. As a former Senior Technical Officer and Supervisor of Local Area Network Operations for the Smith Barney World Headquarters in NYC, The Citibank World HQ, Chase World HQ, and as a Technical Officer at the World Headquarters of AIG and Kidder Peadbody… and a consultant to the World HQ of Hertz, I’ve had a million road miles with iSP’s and hosting vendors. I’ve used at least 50 over the years in various capacities.

My recommendation to you right now in October 2010 is go to HostGator for any and all of your hosting needs. There is simply no way to beat their outstanding level of support at any price. And on top of that, there is no way to beat their price either.

After 7 years with a smaller vendor who was run by a a person I had previously described as “brilliant” and “impeccably honest”, I lost 30 WordPress sites to a cross site SQL Injection. I found out that this small vendor still had never learned to do a backup properly 7 years after loosing an entire server with no backups. They had no monthly backups, no archives. No yearlies. Only 2 weeks worth of incrementals. And when I asked for the restore a technician told me they did not have them at all. Wow. I spent the next 16 hours rebuilding the top 15 sites from scratch and then another technician told me like a clown walking in uninvited that he had “found” the backup tape… knowing well that I had just spent the last 16 hours rebuilding from the point I was told there were no backups. Nightmare. That is unfortunately typical for what you can expect at a small vendor. I have many more nightmare episodes to tell you about that vendor later but the lesson learned: Avoid small Hosting vendors like the plague.

Here is the main page for HostGator. Probably the nicest looking Hosting website anywhere and there is a ton of plan information if you look around and shop. There are regular hosting plans, reseller, VPS, and dedicated. Standard mix really. I’ve used them all with the exception of dedicated. I’ve used their chat line at least 50 times. It rocks. The technicians are super well educated. They are better educated than technicians I have worked with at any other hosting vendor ever. I’d put them in a support class like the former legendary Netware Premium Support which was 10 grand a year back in the day and only available to Enterprise users.

OK Here is a sticky caveat. I’m an SEO and I use dedicated unique class c IP addresses all the time. If you want to get an account with unique class c ip addresses from HostGator, you have to use this chinsey website called SEOHosting.com to buy a bundle of 5 IP’s minimum. OK I see how it works, but I don’t really get why the website looks so bare bones… even sexually suggestive. The website is Thumbs Down – Beneath Grade – Not Commensurate with the product offering or level of support. I do hope they get their act together on this and get a better website. I could certainly build them one Affordably!

So I just bought a SEOHosting Reseller with 5 IP’s and I setup private nameservers. I’ll let you all know how well it is working out in a month or two. Until then I can tell you the same 200 support people that pick up the chat line for HostGator also pick up the chat line for SEOHosting. It’s the same company. Different front end for the sale.

OK some standard stuff to show. This is a CPanel for the VPS3 package I bought with HostGator. The support was just over the top excellent. I’m a former Master CNE and MCSE but learning how to fly in my first Virtual Private Server was a bit daunting… the HG support made it good. The VPS turned out to be a little under powered for the number WordPress plugins I needed to run but the speed was excellent when I used fastCGI and WP-Super-Cache.

Many of their plans come with a WHM or WebHost Manager. This is the one for the VPS3 I bought. I spent 40 a month just for the VPS3 and an additional 10 a month for the Cpanel. I also has a couple extra dedicated IP addresses which were cheap, only 1 buck a month each.

Here’s a look at VZ or the Parallels® Virtuozzo container manager. There is not much to configure here but it provides a graphical interface to control the VPS under Apache on a Linux server. It’s free with most HG VPS solutions.

Here’s the proof in the pudding. I setup a test account on Pingdom which runs an http load test on the homepage every 5 minutes. I ran it from the wee hours on Sunday morning all through the wee hours of Monday AM and found ZERO defects in uptime. Outstanding. I know they ran backups during this time period. A bad hosting company will allow the websites to drop during backups and they will still call that “uptime”. That should be considered false advertising and it should be illegal really. HostGator was flawless in this particular test. I will report when they stumble to be fair of course but this is the good start I anticipated after all my favorable interactions with support during the last 3 weeks. Check them out.