Best. Web. Hosting. Ever.

My web hosting company provides the best user experience ever. Everytime I have had to work with them on something, they've been extremely helpful to the point of it amazing me. Btw, I host with 3SHost, and my friend Mike was the one who pointed them out to me.

Those of you who know me know that I don't laud software companies hardly ever because I just expect good service. If they don't provide it, I just don't use their service. If they do provide it, then whoopie. I don't get excited when my car starts in the morning and takes me to work; why would I get excited when a software (or hosting) solution works?

However, I feel the need to give some praise to my hosting company today. Last night, I purchased two new domain names. Obviously I needed some hosting for them. So I went to 3SHost and I bought two domain pointers for $15/year. Well, they accidentally messed up the order. At this point, I wasn't annoyed since I just figured they'd fix it up. Well, they "fixed" it, but it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. They actually made it so that I had two separate web spaces (one being my main account, and the other being the new account + parked domain). This was closer to what I wanted, but still not right. I wanted one chunk of web space (so I can share resources between my main account and the new ones). After about 2 hours of email discussions, I begin to get the impression that this isn't something they usually do. But they did it anyway for me.

Now, you may be thinking "well, they should do that. They messed up in the first place", and you're right. They should try to make the customer happy. But! Let me tell you another story.

One Sunday evening I determined that I needed a non-standard Perl module to be installed. I had this awesome thing working (it was actually the original Ramblings site) on my development box at home, but I just couldn't get it to work on their servers because I was missing this Perl module. So at about 9pm CST on a Sunday night, I emailed their support and asked if they would pretty please install this module. This move was a last resort on my part since I couldn't get any other solution to work... I figured there was no way in hell they would install this for me. Well, about a half hour later I got an email back from them letting me know that they installed the module for me. Let me say that again....After a half hour, on a Sunday night, they installed a non-standard Perl module for me. I was shocked, amazed and elated all at once.

What makes this story better is -- they've done that for me twice.

So, you're probably thinking "man, this must cost you a fortune!", and you couldn't be more wrong. At the time they installed my Perl module for me, I had a basic Linux account and was paying $2/month for hosting. TWO. DOLLARS. And they emailed me on a Sunday night to do something out of the ordinary! You can't ask for anything more in a hosting service. I recently upgraded to Pro ($8/month) because I needed a single database for this blog. You're supposed to get 10 MySQL 4.0 databases for the Pro plan. I was given 50. Basically, every time I've ever asked them for anything (whether I thought I should get it or not), I've been pleasantly shocked. And they're nice while helping me!

I simply cannot say enough about this hosting service. The only downtime they've had has been minimal (and at like 3am CST) and was when they changed data centers (so it only happened once like two years ago). They've never let me down as a customer. They make sure that my needs are met (even when it's out of the ordinary requests) and they have a very professional attitude that has never come across as snobbish or "big business so we don't care about the little guy".

So again, if you (or anyone you know) ever want web hosting, get it from 3SHost, and tell em Aaron at aaronballman.com sent you there; I'm sure they'd get a kick out of that! ;-)