CI Host

CI Host is a large web hosting company with offices in Texas, California, and Illinois. They hosted vbz.net on a shared server for about 5 years until the 2005-07-11 Server Outage, and we have been renting a shared server from them since mid-2002.

Review

Positive points:

• CIH is probably the first company vbz.net left for reasons other than the company abruptly going out of business. This happened at least twice -- first with the single-owner ISP AthensNet in Athens, GA, and then with a larger web host whose name escapes me at the moment.
• Their tech support has generally been pretty steady, with only occasional annoyances (see below)

Negative points:

• Refused to enable referer logs without a phone call and a surcharge (minor, but annoying; most web hosts enable referer logs by default, too)
• 2005-07-11 Server Outage
• A lot of weird minor things -- like the way your contact information has to be re-entered in several different places at various intervals, and the way they required a special "digital signature" which was just my name with some extra random characters (not really a digital signature in the strictest sense), and a faxed copy of my server order before they would activate the server... (some of this may have changed since 2002)
• annoying popup ads on their web site
• There have been rumors that they conduct themselves poorly in public relations, threatening lawsuits against anyone who criticizes them publicly

Overall: I wouldn't recommend against them, but I would check for alternatives before using them as a hosting solution. If they still look like the best deal, then I'd go into the deal being prepared to act quickly (with backups of everything you put online, and ready to make phone calls) when problems arise.

Reference

• C I Host official web site