It took me a while to decide on which ASP.NET hosting company to go with to host this (and future) sites. It was often difficult to make fair comparisons between company's plans being especially careful of all those hidden costs lurking in the small print! In the end, after lots of deliberation, I chose CrystalTech based in Arizona, US. CrystalTech simply provided an ASP.NET 2.0 plan and service that couldn't be matched here in NZ (a 25Mb Sql2005 database will almost double your plan cost!).

The inspiration for writing this 'recommendation' however, is that I had a problem with one of my email accounts not functioning and so I emailed support. Two minutes later I received an email response with my tracking number and a message saying that "… Our average response time for the last eight hours is 15 minutes". Sure enough, 5 minutes later I had an explanation and resolution.

Now that's service! I wouldn't have minded if it took 2, 4 or 8 hours to fix … it's the fact that I got an answer from a human being that made sense! Compare that to talking to Telecom NZ when Jetstream (broadband) goes down (which is often!), whereby after 20 minutes on hold you get some guy trying to tell you that "… maybe the wiring in your house is faulty!?!".