Shrinking Pains

I could say growing pains in reference to, say, the life of this website, but really the most recent change is that I have, essentially, downgraded my web hosting, so “growing” doesn’t really seem appropriate. Moving pains would also work, but then you would lose the irony.

Hosting with DreamHostfor the past some-odd years has been fine. They have decent starting prices for the first year, competitive prices after, and they offer ridiculous amounts of both storage and bandwidth. More, in fact, than anyone should ever need on a shared host. They’re inconsistent though, when it comes to uptime, though I hear rumors that this is pretty much on a server- by server-basis, so maybe I just got unlucky.

I’ve been investigating DreamHost alternatives for a long time now, with some good leads now and again. I used Precision Effect when I created the lissat.org website (one that, sadly, I’ve never developed), and was happy with their speed and support, though at $6 a month for their smallest package, they still weren’t inexpensive.

After more recent browsing, I finally moved this site over to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, which is a hosting service with a neat idea. It’s essentially a pay-for-what-you-use service: you charge your account with moneys, and then pay as you go, starting at $1 for the first GB of bandwidth and then getting cheaper per GB as/if your site becomes more popular. They don’t have any one-click installs, no user-friendly services. They have a knowledgeable user base and a well-used forum for when you run into trouble (as I did quite a few times getting WordPress installed). Pricewise, I expect $10 will get me through a few months, at least. Speedwise, so far, I find it much improved over DreamHost. And no, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net does not have an affiliate program, so I’m not trying to sell you anything. Fact is, the all-manual approach to site management is probably more than most people want to deal with, so NFS isn’t for everyone.

I’m in the process of moving La Casa Comics over to A Small Orange. That was also a swinging deal, $20 for 14 months of hosting in their “Tiny” package, which will most likely be enough for us, obscure as we are. I’m still waiting for the DNS to propagate (after a freak accident where it propagated immediately, and much sooner than I thought it would, and I have to switch it BACK over to DreamHost to ftp some files out before the switch). Once I get things set up, I’ll report back. But so far so good.

I moved all of the domains over to name.com, which has been nice and easy so far, and cheaper than anywhere else (currently under cost, actually, for new domains). I always heard that domain registrars should be separate from hosting services, but I’d always been too lazy to change it until now. It’s nice to know, though, that is for some reason the hosting company really decides to suck, there’s no chance of losing my domains on top of everything else.

Alternative hosting sites that I looked at (of note) include: Laughing Squid and Bluehost. Laughing Squid is neat because it’s based out of San Francisco and claims to serve the artist community particularly. Still, even if you use their “starving artist” discount, it’s $8 per month, so I thought I’d hold off and try some cheaper plans first. Also, you can see their sticker in the photo above. Bluehost seems like a big, but good, solid web hosting company, with lots of space and bandwidth and a free domain for $7 per month, but still a little too pricey for me, who is trying to save ALL his pennies for the time being. What can I say, I’m cheap yo!

If you’re interested in hosting and you have no idea what you’re doing, find someone like DreamHost who has nice one-click installs on a variety of applications (they really are easy for first-time host users). Bluehost evidently has a WordPress one-click install, though I’m not sure what else. If, however, you want cheap and complicated, so far I’m pretty happy with both NFS and ASO. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything changes. In the meantime, things should be much more stable around here (and eventually over at la casa); that is, if you even noticed anything going on in the first place.

So that’s my story. What about you? Do you have a great host? Who with and why are they awesome? I’m always on the lookout for the best deal. On the other side of the coin, who is completely worth avoiding?