Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

Disclaimer: Before I begin, I’d like to point out that I am a midPhase affiliate. midPhase is the parent company of ANhosting. This is not the reason I am giving a positive review. Rather, I became an affiliate because I believe in their company and I believe they provide quality service.

I’ve had a few hosted web sites in my career. My first domain purchase was about 2 years ago from GoDaddy. I didn’t end up using the domain too much, so I never really tested it beyond a couple of page loads. I bought the domain and hosting package for this site from GoDaddy as well, but as I actually started using it, I noticed a few limitations that irritated me (like Wordpress is not able to make outbound connections to Akismet and Ping-o-matic). Meanwhile, when I first started working with RMstudents, who run a student website for Rush Med students, I became acquainted with Powweb. Now I had a few quibbles with GoDaddy over features, but their prices and services were overall adequate for my needs. Then again, I don’t get a heavy amount of traffic yet, and I never relied on their servers for an extended period of time.

When I came to RMstudents, the website was basically a set of HTML files with a couple of php includes to create pages, and a database for a simple login/password bank. In other words, it was highly php-driven with little MySQL use. They had installed phpBB2,, but no one used it. When I suggested installing Drupal or a similar CMS to “modernize” the website and make it a ton more usable, the rest of the group was all for it. We quickly discovered, however, that Powweb was unable to handle even a single page load efficiently with Drupal installed. Plus we couldn’t install any Drupal modules because they only gave us 8MB of php memory to work with. For a website that is supposed to be the home for hundreds of students, this obviously wasn’t going to work. We needed a host that was going to be able to handle a little bit of traffic and leave us room to add features.

Plus, getting an answer from someone about my service from Powweb was impossible. I tried their 24/7 online chat many times. Each time it took 3-30 minutes to be connected with someone (obviously they have support issues or no one is answering their chat service). Then after being connected, I felt like I was talking to a poorly written computer program. They gave canned, pre-written responses to almost everything. The least they could do after making me wait 15 minutes to talk to someone is to let it be an actual person. Even with the canned responses, they treated me like I was an idiot. At one point, I turned on Drupal’s page caching feature, which creates saved versions of pages for users who aren’t logged in, in order to deal with Powweb’s poor performance (which I thought might be temporary). When I asked them about the performance, they claimed they could access my site easily. I remembered about the caching, explained what I had done and asked them to wait while I attempted (futilely) to turn it off so they could experience my problem. It was like talking to a brick wall. They responded like they hadn’t even heard me. In fact, they acted as if they didn’t believe me and as if I was having a problem with my internet connection, which I was not. Anyways, enough ranting. Long story short: Powweb sucks!

I knew we needed to move, but I couldn’t decide between ANhosting and Bluehost. I ended up going with ANhosting for a few reasons. First, the price was better with the same features. Second, I couldn’t find as many complaints online. And third, they’re located right here in Chicago. We made the switch on RMstudents, and I couldn’t be happier.

So far, I’ve been amazed with their service. Their customer support, whom I’ve contacted about 25 times in the past month, have been great. The longest they’ve taken to respond to their chat has been about 1.5 minutes. Usually it’s under 30 seconds. They talk to you like a real person and help you work out any issues you’re having. The best thing they do is listen and try to understand the problem you’re having before trying to diagnose the problem. If they don’t know how to resolve the problem, they have no problem creating a support ticket and letting upper-level support handle the situation, as I have had them do on two occasions for me. Also, a few times they’ve contacted upper-level support while talking to me so that my problem can be resolved right away! I also really like that they have a status blog that tells you any known problems that they’re working to resolve and any scheduled downtime on all their servers. Any web host is going to have problems occasionally, but the important thing is that they’re open about them and they keep you up to date to let you know what’s wrong, what they’re doing to fix it, and how long it should take. With my 2 websites, I think I’ve had downtime of less than 2 hours in the past month.

There hasn’t been anything that I have been disappointed with. I moved this site over to ANhosting from GoDaddy about 2 weeks after moving RMstudents.

They offer a lot of awesome features and a 30-day money back guarantee. Plus if you use the coupon code SAVINGCENTER-93818, you can get your first 3 months free. Been wanting to start your own website, custom blog, or company? What are you waiting for? Sign up!