When I deal with clients who have existing web hosting services through other companies throughout, it’s often quite ridiculous how they operate. I’m a web designer/developer, and I have a strong emphasis on what should be a standard part of a good web hosting and domain hosting service, and here’s a few to list :

• A proper control panel for account management.
• In case of a web hosting company, cPanel is a MUST.
• phpMyAdmin for MySQL should be a given. I’m not setting that up.
• Web folder protection methods should be in there. I shouldn’t have to generate my own .htaccess and .htpassword files.
• Regular backup on the hosting server’s end. It’s for their own good. What if the place burns down, or, though highly unlikely, one of their servers blows up a hard drive? This also helps me because I had to request emergency restores on some files when my FTP or Dreamweaver syncrhonization messed up.

Just so you all know clearly, I use BlueFur Web Hosting for ALL of my hosting services (including my own site) and NetFirms.Ca for domain registration. The two companies I choose have all the features and support I require to make my job easier, and my clients’ lives easier.

However. The sad part is, there are so many companies out there that completely lack it. Here are a few examples :

• Does not have a centralized backend - things are sort of tacked on top of each other. To get to the controlpanel, you do one thing, but the control panel is not a cPanel. So to get to the phpMyAdmin, you need to go to another login URL.
• Does not have phpMyAdmin installed by default. It outrages me when they say “here’s where you can download phpMyAdmin to install it.”
• Does not have a control panel whatsoever (I’ve seen 1 company like this).

The companies that did not have the above requirements are listed here, as far as I can remember (I did not put links on it - dont’ want to give them backlinks at all) :

• www.radiant.net
• www.canadawebhosting.com
• www.netnations.com
• www.smartt.com

The highlight of the day is www.smartt.com.

Here’s the reply email when I - completely perplexed after attempting to log on through their website - asked them where I can log in to the control panel so I can set up the database and access the phpMyAdmin :

Hi Jeff

There is no control panel available to create the database. If you provide us with the following information we will create the database for you.

Database name:
Database user name:
Database password:

Once the database set up is completed you can manage it by using phpMyAdmin which can be downloaded from:

http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php

Thank You

So here was my very polite response back to them :

That’s a ridiculous hosting service.

I just emailed my client, and as per my working contracts, unless they are willing to pay me a surcharge to do the extra labour of installing phpMyAdmin, they need to switch to bluefur hosting, which, in my opinion, is a proper hosting company with a proper backend all automated.

The 2nd option to divert the above scenario is that you install everything (database/username:pearlite, password:f1xtures) including the the phpMyAdmin and let me know.

I’ll await for the first one to make a decision.

Thank you for your help.

The biggest joke? www.smartt.com has, on their top banner, “We Offer Complete Internet Services”.  Pfffffffft!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Cool Websites, Rants, Stupid People, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.