Web Hosting Saga

Author: Jimmy

4 Aug

Finding a web hosting service was an easy job when I started blogging - just picked up a cheap shared hosting with typical CPanel to begin. But after a few months problems loomed like slow response and “99% uptime” means your sites can be off a few days without prior notice. Worse after a major upgrade I could never get my sites work properly due to DNS panic with old web hosting (I had to temporarily host all my sites to Amazon EC2 then). I told myself: “It’s enough! I want a reliable web hosting with a dedicated IP or better a VPS so that I can totally control my sites” and my web hosting saga began.

Cheap Web Hosting

After going though some web hosting directories, I found that there are a lot of shared hosting providers out there. Though most of them look similar with advertisements of many advantages, nothing can persuade me they are all trustful (I don’t blame all of them; some may have really good services but, as you may know, over-selling is so popular in web hosting). More over, they seem not like month-to-month subscription which I want to make sure that I can relocate my sites to another provider once the current host sucks like what I experienced. So, a VPS should be a better choice for it normally provides dedicated IP and allows monthly subscription as well as I can SSH to its root like a true server.

Searching, comparing, finding user comments over the net, I finally put down a short list of VPS providers I think I can trust.

While both SliceHost and MediaTemple have good reputation they appear a bit redundant for my humble need. I also tried GoGrid and was quite impressive with the simplicity of scaling functionality but it looks more suitable to big web application rather than to blog hosting.

I like RapidVPS because it provides affordable shared hosting plan which includes a dedicated IP (if you ask for) but unfortunately I could not manage to activate the plan — I logged me out whenever I stepped onto payment process (I think it was due to too strict fraud protection applied there?)

In the end, I stopped at eApps and registered for a starter plan. Affordable price, good performance and support are all what I can say about my new web hosting for the last month. However, it limits storage to just 2 GB and if you want more space for backup you’ll have to buy from them. Well, nothing is perfect, yet I can live with it!

But the saga didn’t end yet for just after registering to eApps, I won 3-month free VPS from VPSMedia (via a contest held by StylizedWeb).

3-month free VPS from VPSMedia

Comparing with other VPS plans I recognized that Xen-based VPS offered by VPSMedia gives more dedicated RAM than others with the same price that, plus a double swap space, I can run LAMP servers on seamlessly.

Web hosting is a very competitive business; just don’t let them get you wrong — you can always find a plan that fit your need best while still affordable — just the experience I want to share.