Our recommended webhost: Doreo

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Web hosting industry is one of the most competitive sectors, with several large companies and hundreds of smaller companies competing on price, offers (disk space, bandwidth et al) and uptime.

You can find cheap web hosts which offer hosting at $3 per month, and promise terabytes of bandwidth and storage. I have been taken from pillar to post on such hosts, and have looked at various options in the past. When I say that I have moved my blog three times in the past 11 months, you would know how poor those cheap web hosts are. I have tried Site5, Dreamhost, A Small Orange and finally settled upon Doreo.

Doroe’s tariffs might seem pricy when compared to other hosts ($7 per month, $14 per month or $20 per month), but there are important reasons why I prefer Doreo:

  • Impressive Uptime: 100% uptime is very impressive for a shared host. Better uptime means that your site will be offline less, thereby reducing chances of losing traffic, returning readers and revenue.
  • Performance during intense loads: The Digg effect is a benchmark for web hosts now, and most shared hosts cannot handle a Digg effect on WordPress without caching plugins. However, I sustained a large digg (2200 diggs, over 80,000 pageviews in a day and ~100 comments) on a post “10 beautiful iMac setups” on my other blog, TechZilo. For most parts of the Digg effect, I had no caching plugins. I installed Super Cache plugin only during the later stages of that Digg effect (when I had to be away from home and couldn’t monitor my blog).
  • Blazing-fast servers: Their servers are very fast and responsive, and for shared hosting, they are right up there with the best in terms of server speeds. When I moved from Dreamhost to Doreo, the loading times (as reported by Pingdom) dropped from 2.1 seconds to 1.2 seconds. That was without changing any configuration, tweaking any files or optimizing anything.
  • Live chat support: Doreo has live chat support for any problem that you have. You simply fill out a form mentioning your name and problems, and a representative will come for text chat within a minute. And I have never had to wait more than a minute. When I see Doreo’s chat support, I wonder why other web hosts do not provide it. Even customers of the highly expensive MediaTemple.net have had huge complaints of MediaTemple not responding promptly, whereas I see Doreo being quick and friendly.

Note that I haven’t mentioned features like cPanel control panel, Fantastico installer for easy installation of web scripts (like WordPress install) etc. which are usually found on every good host.

They have an ‘Uptime’ category on their official blog, to which they post monthly uptime percentage figures. Most of their servers have 100% uptime, and the odd snag causes downtime on some of their servers (which causes uptime of 99.8%, which is still very acceptable even if it occurs every month).

For example, in March, five of their six servers had 100% uptime, while one server had an uptime of 99.962%. Their claims are not false – I set up server monitoring tool Mon.itor.us and set up email alerts for when the site goes offline.

When I was on Dreamhost (my previous host), I used to receive at least two mails per day (indicating two separate periods of downtime daily). Now, I am on Doreo and I have received only two mails (since March 21, when I signed up for Doreo).

The limitations that you could argue about is bandwidth, storage space and databases. Doreo doesn’t oversell, whereas other hosts which offer several terabytes of bandwidth and storage space.

However, Doreo is one of those very rare hosts which do not oversell (overselling means promising resources which cannot practically be provided, like near-unlimited bandwidth). When they offer 40 GB bandwidth, it will be provided without any questions asked. However, some other hosts have fineprints in their agreements through which they can suspend your account for excess usage (even if you stay within the limits according to their offers).

Also, consuming all the bandwidth and storage space provided is an unlikely event – I sustained that massive Digg and still consumed only 32 GB of bandwidth in a month.

A reliable, Digg-proof, fast hosting package is what you should get, and as a current customer, I fully recommend Doreo to you.