How do I find a "good" webhost

Do I look at some webhost reviews?
Do I try and get anecdotal evidence?
Do i put a poll on the general thread?
Do I play pin the tail on the host?
Or do I do all of these and weigh up the statistics?

Basically, I don't want to fall victim to statistically invalid recommendations.
ie "john said this is good" "paul said this is good" blah blah.

So, any ideas, please..

Edited by deleted (Sun 17-Jan-10 15:03:37)

Difficult one - as doesn't take much to turn a good company into a bad one (or one user's experience being very different to another's)

When I wanted a host - I looked at threads on here asking for recommend host and went with http://nethosted.co.uk - if they hadn't been great I was prepared to write off the costs and move, but just renewed for another year so and no complaints so far

In reply to a post by Kenneth:

When I wanted a host - I looked at threads on here asking for recommend host and went with http://nethosted.co.uk - if they hadn't been great I was prepared to write off the costs and move, but just renewed for another year so and no complaints so far

Pretty well exactly the same as myself - except I've been renewing with them for nearly five years now.

If haven't got any personal recommendations available, then draw up your list of requirements, have a look at what's on offer and go with the one that feels right. At the end of the day you can always move on and learn from the experience. Similar to any other purchase really.

I'm aware that some here have had problems with them, but I've been with Streamline.net for 3 or 4 years, occasional niggle, but no real problems and it works. Also has unlimited bandwidth which may be a factor for some.

Edited by cheshire_man (Sun 17-Jan-10 20:58:03)

How much is unlimited?

Unlimited web site traffic it says.

I can't find anything in the Ts & Cs that imposes any sort of limit. Clearly though that doesn't refer to speed - I've just downloaded 5Mb and 6Mb files from one of my websites and they downloaded at c.450Kbytes/sec. That'll do me.

Same here - saw the recommendation in this forum .....
..... and am just coming up to two years with no issues at all.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Unlimited web site traffic it says.

I can't find anything in the Ts & Cs that imposes any sort of limit. Clearly though that doesn't refer to speed - I've just downloaded 5Mb and 6Mb files from one of my websites and they downloaded at c.450Kbytes/sec. That'll do me.

unlimited bandwidth or disk space doesn't exsit and those who do promote it such as the above have t&c to prevent excessive use

1.4
"(vii) sites must not use excessive amounts of server resources. These include Bandwidth, processor utilization and / or disk space. Please refer to the 'High Resource Use Policy' in the General Terms & Conditions;"

http://www.streamline.net/about-us/terms-and-conditi...

Well spotted.

As ever it's sufficiently vague to cover all scenarios. I guess it depends on what the OP wants.

It depends what you want to do.

I've used Easily for 10 years and found them pretty good. They've recently added an SQL database to their base product and upped the price. If you don't want that I'd ask if you can have the old one. Although the new one has unlimited bandwidth as well.

I've used a few with different clients but if I've a choice I like Easily although I don't do very big or fancy websites. The MySQL works very easy as well, I've used two databases.

Their domain names aren't the cheapest but I'm not worrying about a few pounds.