Hi @susanrosie,

You can also find more info in this page: http://b2evolution.net/web-hosting/top-quality-best-webhosting.php. There are reviews of each provider and some comments of users as well.

That web hosting page should really be updated. Bluehost, iPage, JustHost, Hostgator, and Fatcow are all the same host. They are all owned by EIG.

For anyone who doesn't know, EIG is a conglomerate which purchases web hosting companies and then destroys them by over-committing servers and bandwidth. For over a decade, Hostgator was one of the best web hosts in the world. They were bought by EIG 2 years ago and almost overnight became one of the worst web hosts.

Here is a list of web hosts owned by EIG: http://www.supportivehands.net/eig-owned-hosting-companies-list-all-brands

Here are 2 articles about EIG and its poor service:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/editorials/websites-blogs/hostgator-alternatives-eig-pt1.htm
http://www.linux-depot.com/non-endurance-international-group-eig-hosting/

Readers should of course make up their own minds and you should ask anyone you know who is, or was, hosting on EIG-owned hosts what their experience was like. I speak from personal experience. We had 12 sites hosted on hostgator servers and we experienced a *dramatic* decline in quality of service since the EIG buyout. Complaints directed to hostgator about the decline in service are *always* blamed on the customer.. They will *always* claim that *you* have made changes to your site which affected your hosting speed. It is *never* their fault, even if you have made no changes to your site.

We right now have a security ticket we opened for one of our sites which has gone ignored for 2 weeks, and calls to support often go to support people who sound like they're on bad cell-phone connections and can't be bothered to spend time helping you.

Just do a few google searches and you'll find thousands of stories of how bad EIG hosting is.

We've since moved 7 of our sites off of hostgator, and are shopping for new hosting for the remaining 5.

Hi @jibberjab,

Thanks for all the information, even when EIG owns several hosting companies, they operate as separated brands with their own prices and promotions. So, it's accurate to keep different entries in the list (which are updated in a daily basis).

Surfing the web you may find a lot of information, reviews, opinion articles, etc, regarding the most known hosting companies, for example, this is a comparison made by a tech magazine: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2424725,00.asp. As everything else, there are excellent opinions (the most part of them, that's the true) mixed with people that have had the worst experiences ever. For example, I worked with a couple of Hostgator sites for a while and their customer service was pretty effective (by tickets and phone call support), and the performance was also acceptable, so if you ask me, I'm ok with them.

I encourage you to write a review about your experience here: http://b2evolution.net/web-hosting/blog/review/hostgator-review. Btw, to which provider are you moving your sites?

Regards!

Yes, it's true that they do operate them as separate companies, so you're correct in that regard, but promotions and packages aren't what make a host. What makes a host is quality of service and support with that package. EIG has a very specific business tactic which they use with all their acquisitions, so any EIG owned host is run in the same way behind the scenes and will very quickly suffer the same degradation of service because they're all the same parent company and operated in the same way.

I agree, there are always good and bad reviews, but personally I would trust the opinions I find on sites like webhostingtalk.com, which is a forum frequented by people who live and breathe VPS and reseller hosting, more so than the (many would say) paid-for reviews of sites like pcmag and cnet, where products that are proven to be faulty or lacking in features or services somehow always seem to get "Editor's Choice" awards.

For shared hosting, we've moved several sites to crocweb.com and several to inmotionhosting.com, as a test of both. Crocweb has unlimited domains and subdomains, but limited to 10GB storage (which is fine for the small static sites we moved there) while inmotionhosting.com has unlimited storage but restricted to 6 sites per account, on the particular plan we're testing. Results have been very good so far, with an immediately noticeable increase in speed and initial "wake-up" response over what we had with hostgator. We plan to move our remaining personal sites / blogs / static pages from hostgator to inmotionhosting.com by this weekend, or possibly to crocweb, pending our tests with b2evo on mariaDB, since crocweb uses mariaDB instead of mySQL. We already tested wordpress and it works just fine.

Don't get me wrong, we were with hostgator for approx 15 years, so I know very well how good their service "was", but as soon as EIG took them over, their service went downhill. It was a shocking contrast to our previous experience with them. And if you're lucky enough to still be in their Texas (I think) datacenter, then you likely didn't notice any change, but the large majority of their hosted accounts were crammed into their Provo, Utah datacenter and overcommitted, which resulted in an overnight drop in quality as well as repeated and extended downtime.

For VPS we're currently looking at inmotionhosting.com, stableweb.com, and knownhost.com. Stableweb VPS is unmanaged unless you add a separate management package for an added fee. Knownhost.com has very competitive prices on VPS and is managed as long as you add a control panel for $5.

@jibberjab Thank you for sharing.

I would definitely agree that InMotion (NOT EIG ;) is an excellent choice.

Regarding EIG brands I was under the impression that a few brands like BlueHost were getting better treatment that others but it's increasingly hard to tell as BlueHost has multiple service levels (starter / plus / business pro) and people never accurately report which level they have subscribed to in their reviews...

Most of are EIG, Better to chose small hosting company instead of looking for a big company.

I tried various big company and still I regret because of I received newsletter from them even after 4 to 6 year.

b2evolution does not require to much resource and any normal hosting plan can support it.