The Internet Entrepreneur Diary

I have been with ANHosting for sometimes. It was a bumpy ride at beginning for few weeks. Even though there were some problems here and there, but ANHosting has been the best shared hosting service that I have ever hosted on.

ANHosting is going crazy!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Being with ANHosting.com for almost a year, I have to say that I am happy with their services so far. Although there are many instances that the server was unstable, they were resolved in reasonable manners. So what is next?

ANHosting will start rolling out PHP5 on all servers beginning Nov 1st.

Popularity: 10% [?]

As WordPress user, I have to say that WordPress is the world best blog software. If you don’t want to host your own blog, you can setup a free account on WordPress.com, or you can host it on your own. I have host my site on ANHosting.com and MediaTemple.net. Just saw the post on MediaTemple.net that you can have one click to install the most current version of WordPress 2.2.1. You don’t have to worry about the newest update. What a great features.

Popularity: 12% [?]

For the past 7 days, I have not had any instance of down time with my blog hosted on ANHosting.com. It was great. About two weeks ago, my site was down for almost every 2-3 days. It was not a good experience while I have low traffic. I even found out that my site was not fully indexed by Google while my site was down. I look at Google Webmaster tools and found many “Network unreachable” error under Web Crawler section.

I have post many and many problems I have had on my other “Never Down” blog on Blogger.com. I have list few of the post here for you to read what was killing me.

ANHosting.com was down twice in 5 days
ANHosting is back - Two hours after cooling problem at datacenter
Experience with ANHosting.com - Two Thumbs Up!
ANHosting.com is UP
ANHosting.com down 3 times in 8 days
ANHosting.com - Power Outage for 2+ hours
ANHosting.com down again in 5 days
ANHosing Outage - Over Heating
ANhosting unreachable - No phone, no online support

I was on and off with ANhosting.com. Now I am happy with ANhosting for the past 7 days. Even better, I have made a little profit and already covered my cost to host at ANHosting.com for the whole year. Isn’t that nice? I can pretty much say that I host on ANHosting for FREE!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Just found a small post on MediaTemple.net’s knowledgebase page. It says that existing customer can make profit by referring new customer. The post was created on May 9th, 2007. I have never heard about that offer. So I guess not a lot of people knowing this offer. So what exactly the referral program can offer to the existing customer? Is it worth? What’s the catch? You can find the page from the following link.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Few days ago, I published a small article on EzineArticles.com about “Small Business starts small - Does domain name matter?” Choosing a domain for your small business is as important as host your domain and web site. If you just start a new small business, you will have to host your domain somewhere and finally get your web site up. Now you have a domain name, but you have no idea where to host your web site.

First of all, it does matter how much your hosting budget allows and what you will do with your web site. Are you selling goods on the internet, or just provide web based services to others, or you just want to have a company web site to show people that you are in business. Most small business owners have no idea about the modern internet technology, they have spent a lot of time put together their business plan and ready to move forward. Now they are hesitate because they don’t know where to start their business with Internet. I will give you some basic guide line to choose your hosting company without getting ripped off by those ridiculous hosting plans.

Let’s assume you are selling products and requires a merchant account, which is the most complicated hosting for small business to end with. These are the requirements you need to operate your business.

A Merchant account to accept online online payment.
A web site with shopping cart that can process customer order and process payment.
Hosting at least one domain. Sometimes with multiple domains. This can be done through parked domain, domain forwarding, or add-on domain features.
Lots email address to use. Let’s assume you need 200 email address. That is a lot of email to do small business. I have never use more than the following emails. info, sales, customerservices, webmaster, security, privacy, admin and so on. Of course, you will need one email for each of your employees. Most of hosting companies give you more than 1000 email address, which is enough to run a corporation.
Mailing List for people to subscribe your newsletter or company press release
A stable server that you can count on without change your hosting provider every few months.
A true 24/7 customer services and tech support with really phone number to contact.
A fast and easy to use web control panel to manage your web hosting account.

So how do we choose the hosting company to start with? In my case, I need an e-commerce web site to host my online store.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Today, I have issues with ANHosting again. Checked their status blog. I have found the #4 excuse “Network Outage”, since I switched to their shared hosting server from HostingZoom.com.

I have post the summary about ANhosting on my Blogger.com account here.

Here are the blog entries I wrote on this site or on my Blog more blogger site while my site is down.

ANHosting.com was down twice in 5 days
ANHosting is back - Two hours after cooling problem at datacenter
Experience with ANHosting.com - Two Thumbs Up!
ANHosting.com is UP
ANHosting.com down 3 times in 8 days
ANHosting.com - Power Outage for 2+ hours
ANHosting.com down again in 5 days
ANHosing Outage - Over Heating
ANhosting unreachable - No phone, no online support

To shorten your reading, I have made conclusion.

I still recommend to host with ANHosting.com after all these troubles I have. I have dealt with HostingZoom.com, CrystalTech.com, GoDaddy.com, Globat.com and many other small hosting companies for my ex-clients.

HostingZoom.com is the worst - Their failover server has never fail. It’s just die.
CrystalTech.com is good for ColdFusion, ASP.NET and MSSQL hosting, but more expensive and less features.
Godaddy.com known to be the best for domain name, but their shared hosting server is too slow
Globat.com is cheap with lots of disk space, but not very stable for high traffic site.

If you are interested in ANHosting shared hosting. You can freely use the following discount code.

Popularity: 11% [?]

My blog site was down for about 3 hours without web access and 5 hours without FTP access. I have post the problem when it started on my blog more blog.
ANHosting.com - Power Outage for 2+ hours
I Called them 5 times and was getting “All circuit are curently busy” message and hung me up. Tried chat online and finally got hold with someone. “Power Outage” the excuse this time. It was “Cooling system failure” less than 5 days ago. I am wondering where are their backup power generator? Don’t they have any? I check their datacenter information, they seem to be very capable. How come their server is crashing twice in 5 days?

According to their status blog there was few servers affected by the outage.

ans08, backup10k, esc105, esc108, esc111, esc89, ans09, esc91, esc92, esc93, win04

Now what happens? Only the following server are up at this moment.

ans06 - Update 10:45pm CST: Server is up.
ans08 - Update 7:47pm CST: Server is up.
ans09 - Update 8:01pm CST: Server is up.
esc89 - Update 7:47pm CST: Server is up.
esc91 - Update 9:12pm CST: Server is up
esc92 - Update 8:50pm CST: Server is up.
esc93 - Update 8:01pm CST: Server is up.

What about the rest of servers?

After researching for 2 months prior switching to ANHosting.com, I truly believe that their server should well fit my currently web site need. I have been with the following SHARED web hosting company and none of them satisfied my need at this point. So I don’t have much to lose.

crystaltech.com - ColdFusion MX hosting - More expensive and less diskspace
GoDaddy.com - Small web site and email hosting - Slow. Good domain services.
Globat.com - limited MySQL connection.
1and1.com - limited MySQL connection and very slow sometimes
Hostingzoom.com shared hosting - limited disk …

Popularity: 10% [?]