Not long ago, a combination of too much coffee, persistant stress, and my uppity temperment led me to write a fiesty post about my frustrations with Site5.com's suite of account and website management tools. In retrospect, I was not warrented to have made the critiques that I did; especially considering that the problems I had resulted from the account's owner forgetting to send me all of the necessary passwords, and account info I needed.

Regardless, Adam Greenfield, Site5.com's Chief Technology Officer ,took what I wrote to heart, and posted a very comprehensive reply on site5's engineering blog. He addresses every concern I raised; but much more importantly, he describes a number of new features, and components that are designed to prevent future users from having the troubles I describe. Back in a former lifetime, I used to train teenyboppers and potheads on the art of good customer service in the service industry. In otherwords, I have an eye for stellar service.

The sort of responsiveness that the existance of Adam's post suggests is amazing considering that the issue that sparked my complaint had been a human error that technically had nothing to do with multiadmin, netadmin, or my.site5.com. Too many hosting companies, and companies that provide online services ignore complaints when the technical support staff realizes that the problem is due to stupidity on the customer end. Site5.com, on the otherhand, has taken a more enlightened approach. For anyone looking for good hosting,  this subtle philosophical difference should not be overlooked. In worst case scenarios (e.g. accidently deleting months and months of work that was in a database[happened to me]), its means the difference between the support staff saying, "we've restored the database. Cheers!" and "Mr Lewis. We are very sorry about your lost work. Unfortunately, we cannot restore your database. In the future you should consider backing up everything to prevent this from happening again".

There is no doubt in my mind that stupidity is the single most significant force in all of human history. I'm dead serious about that ;atter claim, btw. Site5.com's engineering and development team, I suspect, understands that the path to success is in finding ways to minimize the number of opprotunities for the customer's stupidity  to interfere with their end goals while using their service. This is a far cry from the many hosting companies that insist that its okay to have a bad interface, because they cater to "serious people" who perfer bad interfaces (the sorts that resemble those crusty 1980's era IBM uber-geeks who spouted catchphrases like "mouses are for amatures"). Such attitudes are humbug, and site5.com's refusual to subscribe to such attitudes is undoubtably quite intertwined with their businesses' explosive growth.

If you're looking for a hosting provider, look no farther. Site5.com in terms of customer service, value, server speeds, and technical specs crushes the competition. Though there is cheaper hosting that claims to offer comparable value, understand that you'll pay a high price for that small monatary savings.

Bargain Barn Hosting Horror Stories 

For example, smartcampaigns.com's host, prior to moving to site5.com, was the same price, offered more bandwidth, ect. The price we paid for those savings was having our account suspended without warning on a weekly basis. They'd never let us know why, so when I wrote them to ask "why did you suspend us? How can we get our sites back online?", they would send us one sentence explanations that run like "You have a php script on your account that is taking up too much of the server's resource." I'd write them back with, "Our account has over 10,000 different files that end with '.php', we'd be happy to disable the offending script but you're going to have to help me out. What process is causing the specific problem?" Then, without warning, explanation, or even a follow up, they'd unsuspend us. I never did find out what file caused the problem...  the marginal savings that led us to go with the host really don't look that good in retrospect, considering the hours upon hours that we spent pulling our hair out trying to figure out why we were suspended.

Anyways, the point is that value is important when looking for a host, but that signing up with some Nigerian based "bargin-barn Bob's hosting Co." has hidden costs that will make you eventually want to set buildings on fire.  So, trust me when I say stop looking, sign up with these guys, and start building your website (which is the hard part, remember?). Site5.com is the best hosting on the net for folks who don't like to burn their money.

Note:

Site5.com is no way compensanting me with services, or cash for saying nice things about them. This blog is now, and has always been an ad free zone. I say nice things because they rock, and I always try to offer some small reward companies who do business like site5.com. Someday, cynics are going to have to accept that people occassionaly say nice things about companies not because they are payed, but because they want to share their great finds with others.