HostPC is an organization I started working with about three years ago, when the Nirman website's hosting company started to spiral. It's always rough on clients when a website hosting company dies...this one was no exception, with many of us left with no warning as the company went under, left with nonfunctional sites while the dishonest crooks did a runner with our money.
I did some research on Anandtech Forums, and based on the recommendation of a user called RossMan I decided to give HostPC a try.
In the field of budget website hosting, it's common to encounter rude or nonexistant tech support, total lack of reliability, random outtages, and incompetent techs working on your account. These are things I pretty much took for granted at this point.
HostPC shocked me. This was a company that actually seemed to know what it was doing (always a welcome surprise), took the time to work with me whenever I had a problem (even if it was in the middle of the night), and provided simply stellar service. I've never hesitated to recommend them to anyone since I became a customer, and have several happy clients who've switched to HostPC and loved it. I've only had a couple of major problems with the organization, and both involved highly specialized site setups requiring very technically-advanced support.
I'll expand on my experiences below:
The Website Hosting Package
HostPC offers a truly great package...so great that I thought it was too good to be true, and was expecting a miserable experience before I was convinced to give it a try. Their current rate is $35 per year for their entry-level budget plan, which gives you a gig of disk space, 10G transfer every month, 50 email accounts, and up to seven sites hosted in the same space. All of their plans comes with unlimited subdomains and databases. If you're going to be doing some heavy Drupal work, this is invaluable. They have Drupal, Mambo, and several other popular applications ready to go via Installatron...just a few clicks, and the installations are automatic, if you're new to such things. Email spam filtering, unlimited forwards, Ruby on Rails support...the list really goes on. And that's just their entry-level package. And best of all, they frequently (as in several times a year) have double quota sales. There's one going on as I write this, which would effectively give you twice the bandwidth and twice the disk space quotas for the same price. It doesn't get any better than that.
Website Support Services
HostPC goes a very long way to help their customers out. This is probably the main reason they have so many customers (did I mention they were all from referrals, from happy customers...they don't spend anything on advertising?). Every time I've posted a question to their helpdesk, I've received a response within a few hours; usually within minutes. I've never had to escalate an issue, since their techs automatically sent it on to higher-level techs and even to the owner of the company as necessary. I never had to worry about it. My problems were always, without exception, taken care of.
Recently, as many of you are aware, a hurricane hit Florida (November, 2005). As a result, the supposedly hurricane-proof data center Verio runs there (which incidentally houses HostPC's sites) was taken offline due to a generator failure. Joe, HostPC's owner, got on a plane and personally flew in to the disaster area and then rented a car and drove it in to the actual data center. He had a backup site put up with hour-by-hour comments on progress made and updates on the situation in Florida, and eventually our sites were all restored, when Verio finally got off their butts and fixed the generator.
What more can I say? For a hosting company's owner to put himself through that much (not to mention the risks he took personally in flying / driving in to a disaster zone) when the blame wasn't even his was spectacular. Joe offered everyone refunds of their hosting costs as a result of that incident, which many of his clients refused to accept. That was the last time (and the only time) my site or email have ever had a significant outtage with HostPC. How could I move to another provider when mine has that kind of dedication to their customers?
Webhosting: The Technical Stuff
Do you know how DirectAdmin works? Do you know how to administer a database server? Can you recompile PHP for Apache? These are things that someone's gotta do if your Drupal sites (or any sites) are going to stay healthy. For many of us, paying a hosting company isn't just about space...it's about covering all this technical stuff in the background so we can happily go on with our business or nonprofit work. I had just about decided that budget hosting companies were never going to be technically competent when I signed up HostPC, and they made me eat my words.
HostPC's technical knowledge is truly remarkable. Whenever I've had a question, even a technical, involved question about a product that isn't even theirs (like Gossamer Threads, or Drupal, or PHP programming in general) I've always gotten knowledgeable answers from their helpdesk and their user forums. Joe and his gang not only have a lot of the answers, they're not afraid to go out and find people who do if there's something they need to learn. They frequently take on new staff, hire contractors, and expand their operation to accomodate new client requirements and shifts in technology. I couldn't ask for more friendly and competent expertise to run my sites.
Advanced Support: My One Gripe
If there's one gripe I have with HostPC, it's in advanced support. As I mentioned before, I have had a couple of support issues with HostPC that took a very long time to resolve, and some where I had to research and implement the solutions myself. HostPC, for example, doesn't enable PHP IMAP on their servers, and apparently can't under the latest version of Direct Admin. I was told this wasn't possible, until I pointed out another site of mine hosted with HostPC that was running both the latest version of Direct Admin and PHP IMAP. I still don't know how this worked, but I just switched my sites over to that server and haven't had problems since. I've also had trouble with my email more than once.
In the realm of more advanced hosting support, HostPC has let me down. I'll say to their credit that this kind of stuff is more suited for dedicated hosting environments (which are significantly more expensive) because most people with this level of need are running their own servers. HostPC's attitude has usually been to treat me like a constant critic, and ask me to take my business elsewhere rather than try to address my issues. This makes me extremely skeptical of their ability to offer dedicated server solutions. On the other hand, their support always goes above and beyond what is normally provided for a "shared" hosting account, so I can't complain. I've always received top-notch support on any "normal" problem I've encountered with any of my accounts.
Conclusion
In the three years I've been with HostPC, I've never been tempted to switch to another company for shared hosting. I can't recommend a better host if you or your organization need budget website hosting. With a budget plan, you won't get multiple 100% redundancy, dedicated servers, or root access...these things are a step up, and require a greater investment. But for a budget hosting plan adequate for 99% of the nonprofit organizations I've worked with so far, HostPC's the perfect solution.
If you do sign up for website hosting for your nonprofit, business, or for personal use with HostPC, please consider listing this site's URL (www.digitalraindrop.com) as the referrer, so I can get some referral credit. Thanks!
Click here to visit HostPC's site: Budget Nonprofit Website Hosting.
