Which sort of host do you prefer? Large hosts such as 1and1, Fasthosts and Webfusion or smaller web hosts? From experience, is support better with larger hosts or smaller ones?

I've dealt with many hosts over the years, and generally I've found that the bigger they get the poorer the support. Probably the biggest cause is having helpdesks run by non-technical staff who use problem solving desktop software, or simply escalate issues to front line technicians.

Support at "smaller" hosts tends to be run by people who actually know what things are and how things work, and are in a better position to solve issues straight away.

Smaller Hosts. I usually base my decision on what cms/sofware I am running. It seems like everytime I deal with a large host, I run into some configuration issues with their servers.

I've been using a certain host from back when they were quite small. The service has been good from the very beginning, with great uptime and server performance, but with time and growth also came improvements, especially in the support department. So, in some cases at least, bigger does mean better.

I don't know if this would hold true for most hosts though. Handling growth alone is usually enough of a challenge.

The size of the host has nothing to do with it. It depends what they are serving for dinner...

As for me I like not very large company. I don't care the size of the web hosting company, the quality is the priority for me. Once I used a large company but their services were poor, later when I have started to use little and middle-sized companies (ahosting.biz, webhostingbuzz.com), their level of providing services is much better.

Smaller companies if they are businesses not just a guy who runs a colocated machine are more flexible and are willing to work with the customers. Once a company goes corporate it cares more about money.

Whym,

The question you should be asking is: how fast technicians fix the problem
and how long it takes for them to get back to you with good news?

I don’t think size of the company define the quality of service it provide.
We have clients who switched their providers because we’re guarantee 1 hour
or less tech support response and we have clients who don’t care about
support at all and leave us because they’ll pay a dollar per month less to
overblown company with bad service and reputation.

From my experience, before I start working for AMRAY, small basement type
providers proved to be better. I tried at least 6 of them between 91 and 2K
and 1 BIG one, which I left after 3 month (technician couldn’t solve cgi wrapper issue)


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