Various questions

Hi

I posted on someone else's post a short while ago and decided to ask the rest of my questions in the meantime.

I am currently hosting roughly 200 websites spread across 3 different reseller accounts with another host. They used to be excellent but suddenly things are going a bit awry and I am getting a little tired of feeling fobbed off and having to wait up to 24 hours for an issue to be resolved - generally with no explanation or an extremely scant one.

I am now looking for a new host, but this will be for new business coming in at this stage. - It is a huge issue to move my existing sites accross because these domains are country TLD's in a country where the (single) registrar does everything backwards.

Questions:
1. On reseller hosting, do the anonymous nameservers come with dedicated IP's or is this additional?
2. Is it possible to seamlessly upgrade later from reseller to dedicated?
3. Do you accept Paypal payments?
4. On the dedicated hosting, how managed is managed? - in other words, will I need to be more involved technically than on a reseller account?
5. I have seen mention on the forum of semi-dedicated, but cannot find a semi-dedicated package. What exactly is this and how does it differ from dedicated?
6. Is there anti-virus scanning on emails on the reseller hosting?

Thanks for the assistance. I'm sure I'll have more questions later!

[quietFinn]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Hi

I posted on someone else's post a short while ago and decided to ask the rest of my questions in the meantime.

I am currently hosting roughly 200 websites spread across 3 different reseller accounts with another host. They used to be excellent but suddenly things are going a bit awry and I am getting a little tired of feeling fobbed off and having to wait up to 24 hours for an issue to be resolved - generally with no explanation or an extremely scant one.

I am now looking for a new host, but this will be for new business coming in at this stage. - It is a huge issue to move my existing sites accross because these domains are country TLD's in a country where the (single) registrar does everything backwards.

Questions:
1. On reseller hosting, do the anonymous nameservers come with dedicated IP's or is this additional?

No, if you want dedicated IPs you must purchase them.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

2. Is it possible to seamlessly upgrade later from reseller to dedicated?

Yes... although it's recommended that you get a dedicated and keep the reseller account at least 2 weeks, that you can check that everything works ok, and then you ask HG to transfer the accounts and cancel the reseller account.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

3. Do you accept Paypal payments?

Yes.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

4. On the dedicated hosting, how managed is managed? - in other words, will I need to be more involved technically than on a reseller account?

Actually the only thing you must do is to check that it's up&running, if something happens you just contact HG support and they will fix it.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

5. I have seen mention on the forum of semi-dedicated, but cannot find a semi-dedicated package. What exactly is this and how does it differ from dedicated?

http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml

It's just a big shared account.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

6. Is there anti-virus scanning on emails on the reseller hosting?

They run SpamAssassin I think (I'm in dedicated now so I'm not absolutely sure).

Hi

Thank you very much for the quick response. Why, oh why do I get panic attacks with trying to find a new hosting company!

The question I asked elsewhere, which I should actually have asked here, relates to a post made on this forum where it was stated that reseller hosting is less reliable than dedicated and that there are more email problems with a reseller account. Why?

Forgive the ignorance, but that comment made me sit up.

One more question: I am not an IT person and am slowly learning about servers and hosting as I go along. This means I do sometimes ask stupid questions and ask for clear explanations, mainly so that I can learn and hopefully need less support going forward. - Is HG fairly patient with this?

Thanks again.

[kmaw]

Originally Posted by slapshotw

He means that when you're on a reseller plan, you're sharing a server with a bunch of others and you have no control over what they do. With a dedicated server, you have many more resources at your disposal along with the knowledge that anything happening in the server is under your control/supervision.

Serra, is that interpretation correct?

This was the answer from the other forum.. I would tend to agree as well.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Hi

One more question: I am not an IT person and am slowly learning about servers and hosting as I go along. This means I do sometimes ask stupid questions and ask for clear explanations, mainly so that I can learn and hopefully need less support going forward. - Is HG fairly patient with this?

HG is very patient... I knew nothing when I started two years ago... now I'm on a dedicated. There are others like that around here too, I've learned alot on the forums here.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by kmaw

HG is very patient... I knew nothing when I started two years ago... now I'm on a dedicated. There are others like that around here too, I've learned alot on the forums here.

This was one of the factors that drew me to HG in the first place. While I isn't in my top 5 reasons to pick a hosting company, it was important for me when I was first starting with reselling to be with a company where I could grow from one little reseller account with my own website and one customer to where I am now, with many accounts and two resellers of my own. I'm getting ready to move to the biggest server HG offers soon and HG has been there holding my hand the whole way.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

One more question: I am not an IT person and am slowly learning about servers and hosting as I go along. This means I do sometimes ask stupid questions and ask for clear explanations, mainly so that I can learn and hopefully need less support going forward. - Is HG fairly patient with this?

That depends on what you mean. Will they give you plenty of help when you need it? I'd say yes. When something breaks will they tell you why and how they fixed it? I'd say no.

They will answer basic stupid questions and the forum will answer really basic and really stupid questions most of the time too, so that is fairly useful. Also, the parts of the forum you can't see yet have a ton of stuff that is really helpful. I find answers to most of my questions here, even the really hard ones. Most of the stupid questions have already been answer enough different ways that it is easy to find the answer without even asking. Personally, I've posted several guides on how to do things that I didn't understand early on.

Overall, HG is a good hosting company, but I stongly suggest you read the customer reviews so you know what you are getting. HG does not delete/edit reviews, so all of the positive and negative reviews are there to be seen by the world. (Some non-reviews and general *****ing has been moved to different forums, but of the things that have been moved, none are worth reading).

It was another reason I came here in the first place. I read all of the negative reviews (I didn't actually read the positive ones until much later). Based on the reviews I read, I got the feeling that those who posted negative reviews had an IQ of about 10, combined, so I was sure that I'd be happy here. (of course this was a few years ago, so I'm not saying anyone who posted in the last two years specifically has a low IQ.)

[gwyneth]

This forum is one of HG's real strengths, and if you look through the posts you'll see that complaints about HG service tend to fall into two broad groups. 'Globals' are those from surly idiots who apparently expect HG service to include turning on users' computers each morning. 'Spot complaints' are occasional frustrations expressed by long-standing clients.

You could also call them the 'rants' and the 'vents', and there seems to be an inverse relationship between their rudeness and validity. There is certainly an inverse relationship between the number of posts somebody has made and the validity of their complaints about HG service.

I'm getting ready to move to the biggest server HG offers soon and HG has been there holding my hand the whole way.

In addition to useful, Serra, now your posts are getting inspirational...seriously, it's very reassuring to hear that users of all skill levels sometimes need hand-holding.

an IQ of about 10, combined

As the great comedian David Steinberg has observed, "clients are five guys who share a brain," though he was talking about advertising, not computers.

so I'm not saying anyone who posted in the last two years specifically has a low IQ

You're not saying they don't, either...