2 years ago, I was made to sign up with Xehost after my initial host, Hastyhost was acquired by them. I first signed up with Hastyhost because it was really cheap, plus I became friends with the owner and I was able to contact him quite easily on MSN regarding any hosting matters. With Xehost, which was a bigger company, things was a little difficult. Over the 2 years with them, I encountered too many down times that last too long; one so major that I lost a bunch of advertisers costing me more than USD100 a month. Some of the many problems include virus attacks, bad dos attacks, a hard disk crash, high CPU Load, altogether at least 8 times in 2010 alone. My account with them doesn’t expire until end of 2011 so I had wanted to continue on till then but last month was really the last straw. I received numerous virus attacks that caused my site to disappear and I had to manually enter the code edit to remove lines of unwanted script that wasn’t supposed to be there. Finally, one day my site was completely suspended without getting any warning email from Xehost. That was when I wanted out immediately, so I pleaded with them to restore my site so that I can at least check on any unknown files uploaded to the server. After that I signed up for Site5 and over the weekend, everything was live and up again on Site5. It was so fast that I was surprised.
Granted, Site5 cost me a lot more for hosting sites that are just personal sites and not money generating business sites. For a year, I paid USD155.40 for Site5’s Hostpro+Turbo plan compared to only USD55 that I paid at Xehost for 2 years. But let me say, that it was well worth it.
Site5 uses Backstage, similar to Cpanel but I access it through my own Backstage url. It runs just the same like Cpanel though. After using Site5, I could easily update my Headway and WordPress to the latest with the click of a button in my WordPress Dashboard. Previously, I couldn’t do that somehow, there was always an error and I would have to do it manually with FTP. My sites have no downtime since I migrated, hurray! It’s such a rarity for me.
Customer service is fantastic as Site5 support is ALWAYS 24/7 available on chat. That is so important for me who lives in a different time zone, yet I can talk to someone from US without having to wait till the middle of the night here. The features offered by Site5 is unbeatable, Unlimited HDD Space. Websites and Bandwidth. Woot, never have to worry about exceeding the size again. I used to think website migration would be a pain, but not anymore. After sign up, all I did was put in a ticket to request site migration, and within 2 days I received an email saying my site is up and running. For me, I did face a small prob when my main site was running but not all my other sites. But that was resolved within another 2 days. The migration department doesn’t work 24 hours a day, so that one took some time. So go ahead and sign up if you need a new host, I am proudly hosted on Site5!
