The web hosting service I am using – HIVE, is having problem since 1st of January, when the website is frequently facing problem of database inaccessible. It took 2 days for HIVE to realise that the problem might be caused by part of the harddisk failure. They make an announcement saying that the server is estimated to be back online on the next day (4th January). However, the estimation is delayed for a few times, and the server is able to be back online until evening of 6th January. However, due to 2 hard disks of them are having problem at the same time, they can only retrieve the database backdated to 20th December. This means that more than 10 days of data is gone!

Furthermore, their support is unsatisfied as always. I was having hard time contacting them through e-mail, as when I replied them through e-mail, I could not get any replies. I have to go to their website to open ticket in order to reach them. I asked them for several times what is reason that I cannot reach them by replying their support mail, and the question was simply ignored. Furthermore, if you can get a reply from them in a few hours, that is considered as a fast response for them. Their technical support is always MIA.

My personal thought on HIVE is that, they have limited staffs and resources, possible a small organization with limited budget. This is the impression they imprinted on my mind, as a customer being 3 years with them.

Alternatively, I look for internet-webhosting again. They have a promotion with greater specification at lower price plan. As you know, internet-webhosting has great support team. Though not all the support personals have great knowledge, but they can response you in a short time. Mostly in less than 10-30 minutes. If you are in luck, you may reach their Level 3 technical assistant to solve the problem. I decided to subscribe to their Surfers Plan which allow me to host 15 domains at lower price and greater bandwidth (50GB/month). This is incomparable among the hosting packages  in Malaysia, base on my research.

Of course not all the things are perfect; internet-webhosting have to train their technical support to be more technical aware, or pass to a more capable person if they can’t solved the problem. I have bad experience as my IP was blocked from viewing my own website. They claimed that it is caused by the IP is connecting to FTP without port number. However, I never connect to FTP with the two IPs I am using last time.

I questioned them if the IPs are simply blocked. There is no reason for me to host my website on the server which simply block visitors. Unfortunately their level 2 technical support failed to give explanation for me.

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The 3 web hosting services I ever used are from: Hive, Malaysiahoster, and Internet-webhosting.

HIVE

I have been with Hive since November of 2006. Hive is a company based in Kuching, Sarawak; its location is the closest one with my hometown (in the same state).

Pros: The package offered is quite attracting. It does upgrade its hosting features, spaces, bandwidth too, from time to time (I seen it one time)

Cons: The company has been established for a long time, but they are weak in technical aspects. The web server is having problem from time to time. When i started to use this host back in 2006-2007, the uptime is roughly 95% or lower by using host tracker. What does the uptime of 95% means? It means for every 20 hours, there would be an hour of downtime, when the website is not available (browser cannot find the host).

The problem has been improved though, since 2008 I guess. However, there are still problems lies in the server, such as database and web configuration problems.

The customer support is fair. Normally the customer support reply would be hours or days later.

MalaysiaHoster

I can’t think of any pros, probably I stayed only for a short time with this host. So I am talking about the reason I left this company.

When I first saw the package being offered, I decided to sign up and I paid the money. However, they give me the different package as stated previously from their website. I questioned them, and not long after that, they changed their package criteria in the website. They gave me the reason that the package offered was overdue, and was not updated yet. I was unhappy with this, because they did not give customer what customer saw from their website. But think on other side, the price was still reasonable and I decided to stay on if their service is good.

From time to time, I found out that my template file, *.tpl was hacked from unknown. My payment gateway account number was modified, consequently the visitors will pay to the hacker through my website! I suspected the problem was from my script. However, after I changed the host, this problem never happened again.

The reason I decided to leave this host, besides the hacking problem, was that they gave the offer again as a promotion to attract more customers, without upgrading the existing customer account. I questioned them again, saying that I should have been given the same offer few months ago as they did not update their website properly. They just denied my appeal, and suggested me to get refund if I am not satisfied. As a result, I quited. It is a good decision though, as I found out that there is no problem of hacking with the another host.

Internet-webhosting

This was so far the best web hosting service I ever had from the three hosting I ever used. Few months ago, I built a simple facebook application and tested it with internet-webhosting and hive. Hive gives some error and I have to disabled CURL for facebook apps to function properly. No problem on internet-webhosting though, and it gives better speed too.

The customer service Internet-webhosting is fast. Normally they will reply you in less than 30 minutes, even it is night time, around 8pm ~ 11pm (from my experience, not sure about mid-night as I haven’t done that). The hosting has fewer problem too. Even if I had the problem, the fast response often answered me.

Cons: The only disappointment is that, they didn’t offer better hosting conditions if compared to other web hosting services, with the same price. But this can be virtually ignored if we did not plan for heavy traffic site.

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