My thoughts on hosting

I’ve been hosting websites since 2003, and I’ve had my share of ups and downs. This is where I catalog them.

Last update: October 4th, 2006

Dreamhost

http://dreamhost.com

Dreamhost is my current love affair. I’ve only been with them since February, but I’m loving it so far. A few reasons stand out in the crowd:

• Superb uptime, by far the most reliable host I’ve been with. Even barring some pretty ugly mishaps
• Accounts are limited by CPU usage, not bandwidth or disk space. I like this model, and I think it works well. DreamHost has since removed this limit.
• That said, you now have 200GB storage space, and 2TB (that’s terabytes) transfer on the cheapest plan — only $7.95/mo.
• Unlimited domains and subdomains.
• Unlimited databases.
• Shell Access.
• The most feature-rich control panel I’ve ever used. Sure, it may be ugly as sin - but you can do almost anything inside it.
• (Free) SVN Support with a GUI interface. This has made my life so much easier for project development.
• Per-domain PHP5 support. No more compatibility problems!
• Amazing honesty and openess about their business through their blog.
• The most entertaining newsletter you’ll ever read.

TextDrive

http://textdrive.com

Of all my hosts, this is the one I wanted to love the most. Great company, great people, great ideas. Shitty service. They were the first (or one of the first) that offered Ruby on Rails to shared hosting customers. In my opinion, they still don’t know their capacity. Servers went down more than I could count. Dozens of hours of downtime a month.

If you’re looking for business hosting, or perhaps a dedicated server - I’d go with these guys hands down. They know their stuff, and they’ve got great customer service. They’re upfront with their business, and always let you know what’s going on - whether it be good or bad. Unfortunately, their shared hosting could be described as “terrible.”

ServerSeed

http://serverseed.com

I’ve had Warpspire on ServerSeed for several months. I really like these guys, and as a whole the uptime has been stellar. Unfortunately in the past few months it’s started to flake out now and then, with my site going down for a few minutes almost every day. Things have changed a bit since I first wrote this. I originally chose these guys because of the PHP5 support - which is great. Great for just hosting, but no ssh or subversion.

Planet Argon

http://planetargon.com

I won a free hosting account with these guys through the Typo theme competition. I’m still not too sure. Their control panel really doesn’t do much, and their uptime isn’t excellent or terrible. The best I can say is the guys behind the operation are really smart. I just don’t think that hosting is their primary concern right now.

UPDATE: So, while I still want to like these guys I have to give you full disclosure. Around June, my server (Neon) had some serious issues and resulted in a couple days of downtime. Yes. Days. In any case, it was finally determined that the server needed new hardware. It was put on a new machine and everything was going alright…

Until August 22, when Neon took a crash completely. There was utter silence from the PA team until August 24 when I had to email them to ask what was going on. Although PA had claimed to have all their servers in a backup rotation, it seems that there were no backups of Neon at all. This meant everyone on Neon lost everything.

All I can say is that I’m severly dissapointed in this. In this day and age, it’s hard enough to try and trust hosts, but when stuff like this happens — it just makes it harder. I’m still with them (for now), but quite honestly, this was dissapointing on all fronts.

UZIPP

http://uzipp.com

Oh the lovely days of being a poor high school kid. UZIPP was good for what it was, I suppose. Dirt cheap hosting. Not great uptime, terrible support. But at $15/year, who could complain?