Hosting Blues - The Light at the End of the Tunnel!

Over the past few weeks I have been looking for a new hosting service.  The service I need is for a number of small sites I maintain that are low traffic Drupal sites.  By using a Reseller account I can reduce the cost of hosting 10-20 sites to a single large account.  For larger mission critical commercial sites, I use either Advanttage Labs (Pajunas) or Sundays Energy, as they provide another level of backups and support. 

Needs:

• Large Operation which hosts lots of websites and has support staff
• Online Chat Support
• Cheap Reseller Prices
• WHM (Web Host Manager) software to manage the reseller accounts
• cPanel for each account
• Shared disk space and bandwidth
• Overbooking (allocating storage and bandwidth that is not actually used) 
• Unlimited accounts

Here's a review of my experiences so far:

HostGator

A few weeks ago I tried HostGator.   They met all of the criteria listed above, and it was a breeze to get setup.  Best of all, they charged a low monthly hosting fee with no need for a long contract to get the discounted price!  

The problem was with Email.  It seems that HostGator has some issues with YahooMail, so sending and receiving email from 260 million users was impossible or extremely delayed and problematic.  This is a BIG problem.  After a few weeks of support tickets and chatting, the only response was 'it's Yahoo's problem'.  This is enough to close the support tickets, but not enough to maintain customers!  

If you google search 'HostGator Yahoo Email' you will get lots of hits detailing situations just like mine.  This is not a new problem, or one that has been resolved to date.

Site5

This last week I have been working on a few sites with an account at Site5.   They have a very similar form and feel to HostGator, but require a one year pre-paid contract for reseller accounts.  They also had a 13% halloween discount the day I signed up for the account (nice!). 

As I write this email, I am sending and receiving posts to a support ticket for - EMAIL problems!  No problem with Yahoo, but now I can't send to my sister at Target Corporate, and to sites hosted at IVHosting.  So far we have resolved me sending emails to these accounts, but now I am not receiving email from them.  

Next Steps

Next move is to drop HostGator and concentrate on getting Site5 hosted sites working.  Once this stabilizes, we will drop IVHosting as soon as possible!