Which web hosts to AVOID?

This input is useful. As stated in the above, knowing which ones to avoid has more credibility than review sites- random people pushing their own affiliate-tagged hosts, or them selling the listings, or the owners themselves. Review sites are mostly crap and rigged.

I have a 1and1 account and I agree, it sucks. Mainly because they don't use cpanel and they don't let me add any domains to it, unless I completely transfer the domain registration to them, then pay them $. So, I hate it. And they don't allow crons either. Basically not worth messing with them.

Here's my list to avoid, from my direct experience in the last 15 years of using numerous hosts:

AVOID:
1and1
dreamhost
infinology
ipowerweb - major billing hassles
GreenGeeks - untrustworthy practices
webhostingpad - slow server, bad support
hostnine - bad support
3ix - cheapest, but only use them if you want viruses and want to be hacked all the time. Plus they sometimes shut down your server for random reasons and forget to restart it.
LiquidWeb - they scammed me out of about $10,000 over a 5 year period, by saying I was buying a 'managed server'. I paid $200/mo for a pentium 4 box with a corrupted backup drive, which never changed and after 5 years of paying ($200/mo = $2,400/yr *5 years = $12,000), I learned the server wasn't managed at all! They said it was software 'managed' because of a stupid monitoring web app they made, but it was very different than a real human being managing and installing updates, fixing errors, maintaining, etc., which is what I was led to believe they were doing the whole time (but they weren't). So, the service they provided for about $10,000 should have costed about $300 or less- similar to a cheap shared hosting account. My $2/mo shared host was actually faster than this server.

Also beware of 'free domain for life' scams.

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