Last year I launched a new website, Pro Email Leads.   I have been working with websites for about 10 years now, and have probably worked with about 25 different webhosts.  A couple have been excellent.  A few more are acceptable.  And most are either below average or worse.

I received a recommendation to use Kiosk web hosting.  There's a small business opportunity with choosing them for hosting, and so I chose to go with them.

Mistake. Headache.

When you have a headache, you take some Advil.  When you have a consistently bad webhost, you fire them.  Why live with the headache when you don't have to.  I have had more problems with down time than almost any other webhost I have worked with.  And, it seemed like every time I would send out a newsletter to my email list, begin to run a sale, or whatever, they would be down.

When your site is not up, or functioning very slowly, you lose credibility, sales, visitors, subscribers, and it is extremely unprofessional.

I will never know how many sales I lost and credibility that was questionable because of the down time I have had with Kiosk hosting the last 4 months.  It is inexcusable!  Furthermore, their customer service is very slow for web hosting.  It can take 24-48 hours, or more, to get a response from them.  When your site is down, you can't wait 2 days!  Their live chat is very archaic and don't expect much from the live chat help either.  I tried using them about 6 different times.  No help.

People like Mike Filsaime claim to use Kiosk esclusively.  I'm not sure I buy that, or Mike is in so deep with Joel Therin that he would be a fool to leave because it would take away from his bottom line.  Either way, it is expensive hosting that is unreliable.

I am running about 80% of my websites on Host Gator.  I have been using them since December 2005.  I think I have only had one downtime with them, but I may be wrong.  If I need to rely on a webhost to keep my sites up, make it easy to add and configure new sites with their reseller hosting, or whatever I need, I trust Host Gator.

So, my personal opinion… it doesn't get much better than HG for all levels of hosting.  I have two main accounts with them.  One regular hosting account and one large reseller account that hosts about 20-25 of my sites.  There are other hosts that are good, but I think HG is the kind of host that you can set things up and forget about it.

There's enough stress as it is with internet marketing that you don't need one more headache like Kiosk, or other unreliable host, who can't reliably keep your site and email accounts up 24/7/365.