Comments on: My experience with web hosting

By: Michel Billard

Michel Billard — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:14:06 +0000

Thanks Brian for your comment, it’s always good to hear from other people’s experience.

NearlyFreeSpeech is excellent, but it lacks support for some popular frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails. It’s perfect for my low-traffic blogs though, I put maybe 20 bucks in it since the beginning of the year, a lot less what I would’ve paid anywhere else.

Thanks again for your comment, it’s really appreciated.

By: Brian Dusablon

Brian Dusablon — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:52:57 +0000

I’ve gone through several hosts myself. I’ve used Bluehost, Dreamhost, A Small Orange, GoDaddy and Eleven2. I used to use Hurricane Electric way back. They were super reliable and simple.

I’ve been with Bluehost and Dreamhost for several years. I’m in the process of consolidating to one, and it’s Dreamhost for now. They’ve had some downtime issues (like all hosts) and I had a few issues with my databases, but their support was excellent – 90% of the time they have almost instant live chat support that solved my problems.

Bluehost support is marginal at best, and their admin panel is so-so. Dreamhost’s custom panel is pretty simple and works very well for most uses.

I never used my Eleven2 or ASO accounts. I have no positive or negative comments for them. I’m canceling them due to non-use. GoDaddy I just have for one of my clients who’s running ASP.

Not to hijack the thread, but if you want to mess around with Dreamhost, you can get $87 off a year’s hosting (if you prepay) if you use the coupon code, or other discounts on different plans. Consider it a cheap trial.

ASO’s tiny plan is very nice as well – $25 per year is a pretty cheap and you get plenty of bandwidth/space for multiple sites. ASO also has a $5 per month option to add reseller functionality.

Thanks for the review – I’ll be checking out NFS for some personal sites – one of these days I’ll get my own up!

By: Michel Billard

Michel Billard — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:40:47 +0000

I did take a look at iWeb, but no one has ever recommended it to me so I didn’t check it out in details. It seems like a decent host with decent prices (comparable to GoDaddy or Dreamhost).

As with GoDaddy, it offers more than what I need and I would end up paying for things that I don’t need. They seem to be in the same league as GoDaddy and Dreamhost, I’d definitely give it a try if I ever need more.

By: Marco

Marco — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:15:35 +0000

Did you have a look at iWeb? It’s supposedly a world class hosting company and is Montreal-based.

By: Michel Billard

Michel Billard — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:10:50 +0000

Not to mention that those “unlimited” features come with a price, you always get shoved into a server shared by thousands of other websites and the performance is not guaranteed (and speed is really what you want, what’s the point of always being up if people can’t stand waiting for your site to open).

So far I’ve been extremely satisfied with NFS and it costs me a fraction of what I used to pay.

By: Cue

Cue — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 08:58:23 +0000

IMHO, I’ve always struggled to hunt a “reasonable” host. But what is a reasonable host these days? Resellers and generally reselling to resellers that are reselling to resellers, so on, you get the picture.

I remember the good old days where a web host offering 500MB disk space for $25 a year was like winning the lottery. Now we get shoved tonnes of space, tonnes of bandwidth, and the evolution of “unlimited” seamlessly taking toll on every “feature” a web host has to offer.

But what most web hosts lack is reliability. My local development server has a better uptime than the 6,902,123 web hosts I have endured over the past 10 years.