1/5/2005 Update: Final WebHost4Life Review
As promised, I wanted to complete my final review of WebHost4Life for anyone interested in a web host for a blog or just hosting in general.
You can read my full reviews of week 1 and week 2, but I re-cap them below.
Weeks 1 and 2 Re-Cap
As mentioned in previous reviews, I had problems during my first week with the database server. Everyday I would receive a “Sql Server does not exist or access denied” error, “General Network Error”, or “System Timeout” error for my .Text blog. Technical support responded quickly and had it working again in 5 minutes, but never really solved the problem as it would go down within hours. After a week of this, they said they had a technician monitoring the problem.
Week 2 was great! The service did a complete 180 degree change. Both my blog and personal website appeared to be up most of the time. Occassionally, the database server would go down, but it looked like it was intentionally being shut down by the host as the errors were now “SHUTDOWN is in progress. Login failed for user '...'. Only administrators may connect at this time.” Again, technical support responded quickly (within 5 minutes) and confirmed the database server was being worked on at those times. The down-time was brief - about 5 minutes. The support team also confirmed they found a hardware problem with my database server and fixed it over the weekend, which explained the problems I was having during the first week and the great success I was having the second week.
Weeks 3 and 4 Review
This is brief as I have had nothing but really good results the past 2 weeks. I haven't noticed any problems with my web server or database server. Both the website and .Text Blog are responsive and have been up and running everytime I checked them, which is at least a handful of times each day. Enough said.
Recommendation
I easily recommend WebHost4Life at $10/month for your blog, personal website, hobby website, and even business website that isn't mission critical. If you don't need 99% uptime, I think WebHost4Life is great. I expect my first week is not the typical first week and I just happened to get a database server that was having hardware problems. This stuff happens. However, it was corrected and I have had great service the past 3 weeks. I have a few more domains I have already pointed to my account, because I am fairly confident I won't have any problems.
If you truly need 99% uptime and your application is database intensive, WebHost4Life is probably not for you. You will probably want to go with a host provider that puts a maximum of 50 or so websites per server or similar. You will pay for it, however, possibly 10 to 15 times more per month.
You can visit WebHost4Life here. If you have found these reviews helpful, please use my referral id of sarasotadev. These reviews aren't based on getting a referral. They are honest and objective. I am more curious to see if anyone actually uses my referral Id :) Thanks.