Mar
18
The Webhosting Blues
Filed Under Opinion, Rants, Review, Technology, Webhosting
Well, for the last few months, I’ve been trying to find the perfect webosting provider. Sound easy, no? Well, just go do a Google search on “Webhosting review” to find a few reviews on some of the webhosting providers around, and you’ll be overwhelmed with an onslaught of webpages that just seem to have been created to hype one or more webhosting providers.
After digging through tons and tons of these pages and actually finding a few “real” pages, I managed to find a few providers that seemed to be worthwhile checking out.
So here is my journey so far:
I started out with HostGator on a $9.95 plan that provides 100GB of storage, 1000GB of Bandwidth, Unlimited Domains and Databases. They also provide the usual cPanel stuff and Fantastico app installs.
HostGator or HG for short, isn’t a bad provider, they offer a lot, and have good support options, but it just didnt “feel” good to me. I am not a fan of the cPanel and so I started looking for another provider…
Next I found Cartika and signed up for the $25 (Canadian) plan. 1GB of Diskspace, 10GB of Bandwitdh and 3 domains. (I know it doesnt sound like much, but I was evaluating the service for my place of work as well and their service is run on a Linux cluster).
Well, I was with them for a few days and then got my money back.. They seem pretty reliable and service seems to be good, but for my personal stuff I am not paying that amount of money for a plan with those restricted limits. 1 GB of diskspace? 10GB of transfer per month? come on…
So I started looking again.
I came accross a few posts talking about (mt) Media Temple and their new Grid Server which is supposed to elliminate all the pitfalls associated with shared webhosting. $20/month gets you 100GB of storage, 1TB of Bandwidth and host up to 100 domains.
I signed up and everything looked and felt professional. But I must have signed up at the wrong time, because I was having a heck of a time with uptime, speed and just overall reliabillity. So I got my money back and started looking around again (Geez, if this wasn’t so much work, you could almost host free, just by switching and getting your money back all the time)..
Next, I came accross Dreamhost $7.95 gave me the following: 206848 MB Disk (Grows 1024 MB / week) and 2080 GB BW per Cycle (Grows 16 GB / week) and unlimited domains.. Sounded pretty good. But it does have a few quirks. For example if you create extra users, they are locked into their own directory, so managing the same domain with multiple users requires that you share the user account 
I do like their support and sense of humor and the fact that they say it like it is.. If they screw up, they will let you know.. But I did experience quite a bit of outages and other problems, it just didnt seem to be that reliable…
Well, guess what.. I signed up with (mt) Media Temple again. (this site is now hosted on (mt) again) I believe they will work out their problems with the grid (it seems a lot better then before now) and the overall feel with (mt) just seems a lot more professional then with anybody else.
If you sign up for 1 year it’s $16.67 instead of $20 and if you use this coupon: kirupa05 you get another 15% of, so with the 1 year setup it’s now only $14.16 instead of $20. Btw, this is a coupon I found on the net and has nothing to do with me.. I don’t get anything is someone uses it unfortunatly..
Had similar experiences? Let me know…
