Laughing Squid

A review of a website host, in bad haiku:
Laughing Squid Hosting.
Customer care? Sucks. And
to cancel? Takes two months.
Expensive «cloud hosting». But hey, at least the downtime was unplanned and lengthy, and the customer care non-​existent.
After a year of putting up with their crap, I canceled my hosting plan, but their «customer service» rep managed to extend the cancellation process for a good sixty days due to the fact that they had an expired credit card number on file. No worries, though, they’d keep charging to it until I figured out what it was.
I’ve had bacterial infections that took less time to eradicate, and that were more exciting to deal with. Being an online resource for art, culture and technology is fine and all, but I’d love it if they just stuck to doing one thing well. As someone who happily contributes to art in the community, I’ll be taking my $ 8 a month and giving it to someone else. Preferably actual artists who don’t dabble in web hosting as a hobby.

I picked them up as a host for a small project I am working on. The set up was really easy and the customer service was quick. It’s a pretty standard php kind of hosty thing. They do wordpress too if you are into that sort of thing. If you want a dead simple site for publishing content like pictures or blog rolls, this is your place.

great hosting and great art list. they are connected to their community and are active about giving back while having fun.
i hosted my site with them for years. now i have my own hosting service because i needed more options and wanted to resell web hosting to my web design clients.
now i see they offer cloud hosting so maybe i’ll try that sometime.

In addition to Web-​Hosting, Laughing Squid is an online resource for art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond. Laughing Squid also is home to the Squid List, a daily event announcements list and The Tentacle List, a place to post calls for artists and performers.
I am recovering today from the Laughing Squid UnHoliday Party II. It sure was the place to see and be seen.
I met the creators of a few Web 2.0 technologies. Finally met some of the Twitterati that are famous on Twitter.
My Everclear Jell-​o shots were a hit. Now you see them now you don’t.
Food and booze was abundant. Hiccup!
The DJ was kicking. I liked the musical, live musician interlude.
Thanks for the invite ya’ll Happy New Year!

I know that many Unilocalers are have only reviewed Laughing Squid as a fun events company. I came to them for a webhost solution after a horrible experience with
. And they were a godsend!
I’m running a PHP-​based personal website that will help showcase my skills as a web developer/​designer. In order to do that I needed some very basic PHP functionality and permissions enabled on my site for things like a search function and indexing. I have a search script I have used in the past and on several client sites. I installed and configured as normal and it wouldn’t work. Long story short: I installed 4 different searches on my GoDaddy host that didn’t work.
Several calls and emails into tech support gave me the wonderful help that, even though it may have worked elsewhere, there was something wrong with the script and they offered no script debugging. (GRRRR)
My guy told me about Laughing Squid, and mentioned that he didn’t know anything about their hosting. BUT… they are a local company and definitely give back to the community (he’s a «Burner» too). So I gave them a shot. I loved the pricing of the different plans, and the no-​nonsense all-​access to support on the site. I signed up, got my login info within a day, and had everything up and running beautifully within two days. Even the script that was so obviously in need of debugging according to the Go Daddy techs.
Laughing Squid saved the day! And it does make me feel good that I’m supporting a local company that likes to give back to others.
Thanks Laughing Squid.

Awesome mixer party!
Never used their services, but people attending this event were totally awesome!
One big minus: bar, it was only 1 bartender and 400+ people trying to get beer :(

Can you get five stars because you’re a great community oriented business which supports the arts? You bet you can, here are your stars. Thanks guys.
Note they scooped their own upstream provider, in openness, during a recent major power outage. Good people.

I love Laughing Squid for both their blog/​mailing list, and their webhosting.
As one of those sad, sad people who has moved away from SF, I find myself very often getting all nostalgic and stuff about all the cool and exciting things that happen in the city. (Nevermind the fact that when I lived in SF, my spirit was so broken by my job, that I wasn’t doing any of those cool things anyway) So Laughing Squid makes me very happy in that respect.
Their web hosting, however just makes me all warm and fuzzy. I used to have hosting through one of those cheapy discount web hosts. My email was worse than unreliable, my website was flaky as all get out, and my support tickets just disappeared into the ether. This past January, I finally had enough and switched to Laughing Squid. I got the «Basic Squid» package
First of all, my email hasn’t gone down once in that time. Secondly, their spam filtering has *never* eaten days worth of «real» emails. (unlike my old host that did that regularly.) My website is always in working order.
They use Plesk control panel, which I find is a little less immediately intuitive than CPanel, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a whole lot more secure. Installing Wordpress was very easy. The hosting package I have is more than adequate for a low-​traffic web site, some picture storage space, and e-​mail. (I could probably get away with the smaller package, but I do have this idea that someday I will do more with my website than an out-​of-​date bio and 4 recipes.)
They are very easy to work with, and really know their stuff, and I am still happy with my decision to pay a little extra per month if it means having everything actually working all the time.

my review is for their web hosting. being a fledgling web designer, i’d used at least 3 other hosting companies, before trying out laughing squid on the recommendation of an accomplished designer friend. and with LS i stayed.
i like the fact that it’s got a grassroots/​community based feel, but they’re also total professional. in the over 3 years i’ve been with them, i’ve always gotten prompt replies to questions/​requests for help, even during nights and weekends. they have a fully fledged backend/​admin interface, and i’ve set up both movable type and wordpress, and all sorts of weird atom, xml, cron job type things, all sorts of database weirdness, and everything’s always gone off without a hitch. i also like their discount options: because i host 2 sites with them, and also display their logo on each site (inobtrusively), i get a pretty cool pricing deal.
i would give 4.5 instead of 5 because of a tiny nitpick: their process of setting up a site requires an active domain name. what this means is, for example, you have a fully developed website, and you want to upload it to the numerical domain while you’re waiting for the domain you just bought to proliferate thru the nameservers/​become active… LS won’t let you. your account is completely dependent and tied to you having an active domain name. this can also be tricky when you decide to change a domain name: rather than just changing, you have to completely cancel your existing account, and then reapply, and completely rebuild, reinstall your entire website.
i am constantly tweaking, changing, moving websites, however, and i don’t think anyone else is as hyper as i am about such things. even with this tiny issue, the quality of their service, and the dependability of the hosting has been exceptional, and i see myself sticking with them for several more years, at least.

The Laughing Squid empire is many things to many, many people. There’s excellent events posting, documentation and current events blogging which inform and cohere an ever widening community of eXXtremely active and creative people. Scott Beale, who runs the joint, is a 5 star Super Hero. But that’s another story.

This is an artists’ web hosting company. The part I like is that they have an email list that gives extensive details about the myriad of art events happening in the City. There is something, usually 3 – 4 somethings, going on all the time.
You don’t have to be an artist or use their web hosting to get the email newsletter.