Thanks to HDFC's Netsafe Mess, I was forced to look for options. Either I get a new bank account or find a webhosting which accepts my debit card. I chose the later scenario. So after a lot of search among the Indian Webhosting companies (didn't have to do much considering the limited options) I went with HostDime India. Reasons? They give an option of hosting your site at either the US or Indian servers. I went with the US server. You can also escalate any unresolved issue to their US counterpart and get it sorted. From Reviews/Threads on WHT, HostDime is pretty active at resolving issues.
Now the signup was pretty smooth and prices are resonable. Infact I found them much cheaper. Got my account information within 15 minutes of signup and CPanel looks okay. There are few small things missing like Advanced DNS Zone Editor but then this is a small tradeoff I thought. Now I haven't checked but I think they offer free account transfer. But I wanted to do it on my own so I tried looking through their support docs for SSH Access. They do offer it but you will need to contact support to get it enabled. Fair enough. When I did that, I was shocked to learn that its a paid addon which costs Rs 200+ 12.36 Tax(one time)! That's Rs 224.72. This is not mentioned anywhere on their site. Even their FAQ just says that you need to contact their support team to get it but nothing about paying for it.
I asked them if there are any more paid suprises(addons) that I should be aware of, this is the answer I got:
Now they have a single control panel for managing the billing, support requests, account information and everything which is pretty good. Their support has been wonderful so far. They were replying to my tickets even at 4 am which is great. 😀
Now yesterday when I fired Putty to use SVN command, I got 'invalid command' error. 😱 Later I found that they don't offer SVN access on Shared/reseller accounts. Bummer. This is again not clear from their site. Here are the services supported on a shared account:
Now the signup was pretty smooth and prices are resonable. Infact I found them much cheaper. Got my account information within 15 minutes of signup and CPanel looks okay. There are few small things missing like Advanced DNS Zone Editor but then this is a small tradeoff I thought. Now I haven't checked but I think they offer free account transfer. But I wanted to do it on my own so I tried looking through their support docs for SSH Access. They do offer it but you will need to contact support to get it enabled. Fair enough. When I did that, I was shocked to learn that its a paid addon which costs Rs 200+ 12.36 Tax(one time)! That's Rs 224.72. This is not mentioned anywhere on their site. Even their FAQ just says that you need to contact their support team to get it but nothing about paying for it.
I asked them if there are any more paid suprises(addons) that I should be aware of, this is the answer I got:
I had no other option so I paid for it against the invoice they had sent.
Now they have a single control panel for managing the billing, support requests, account information and everything which is pretty good. Their support has been wonderful so far. They were replying to my tickets even at 4 am which is great. 😀
Now yesterday when I fired Putty to use SVN command, I got 'invalid command' error. 😱 Later I found that they don't offer SVN access on Shared/reseller accounts. Bummer. This is again not clear from their site. Here are the services supported on a shared account:
So apart from paying for SSH and lack of SVN support, HostDime has been smooth so far. Site transfer was not an issue. Support is good. Prices are reasonable. I would say if you are looking for an Indian webhost, do give them a try.
