finding a new webhost, an impossible dream?


It is nearly impossible to pick a web hosting company these days

So, I've been an interland customer for about 6 years now. unitcircle.com was originally hosted on various sites run by friends of mine. Each of these servers had somewhat dubious connections to the internet, but they were free when it was really expensive to host a website. Finally, after unitcircle.com went down for over a week when my friend's DSL connection was down while he was on vacation, I moved the site over to interland who I found through an ad in the back of wired or something. At that time there were only a handful of hosting companies on the net. Now there are a zillion of them and they are all offering similar plans and similar claims. If you look at 10 host-review sites you will find 10 different recommendations. I'm now paying an insane amount on interland for a ridiculously small amount of disk space (but unlimited bandwidth). The host review sites are obviously not to be trusted. I'm pretty sure that hosting companies set these up just to make themselves #1. I know I would if I was in their shoes. The cool thing is that the hosting plans are cheap enough that I can probably just try out one or two to see how they are before I sign up for a year or so. The other cool thing is that most of these sites seem to make that simple (any site that requires a 6 month sign up isn't to be trusted). I'll leave unitcircle on interland for now and move one of my other domains to a new site and see how that works... As I go, I'll post here what I think.

A bigger question to me is around if I should switch from a windows host to a linux (or even a mac) one. The only server-side scripting of any kind I've learned to do is ASP in visual basic, but I've done a LOT of C# development so asp.net doesn't scare me. The problem is that, at home, I've gotten rid of all my PCs and am just using macs now. I do know Java, but I haven't done any JSP stuff and I'm not sure if I want to bother. I haven't done any PHP, so I'd have to learn that from scratch. Currently I use asp only in on the http://www.unitcircle.com/catalog/ pages, but I'll need something like that for the on-line store.

Posted: Fri - January 20, 2006 at 09:58 AM           |

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