mtcodex

Another year, another host

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Another year, another host Friday morning, 6 January 2006

The quest continues into 2006 to find a satisfactory hosting arrangement. A couple of years back I started searching for a more reliable web host. I turned to flashlevel.net (I was into flash in a big way at the time). They had a slick in an early 2000 flash website kind of way site and pretty decent support. One day my website had disappeared, I looked to see what had happened and they had turned off my hosting with out telling me because my card details had changed and they weren't able to bill me for one month.

Needless to say they were no longer hosting for me. So I moved on to bigger and more expensive things. The mighty mediatemple became my host and I have to say, they have been a reliable host and had very good tech support. I think every support ticket i’ve ever made with them has been answered within 30 minutes. However, from here in the UK at least, there FTP has always been dog slow. The transfer speeds are okay for large files but the latency is bad, which makes managing sites really annoying.

Added to my needs is the requirement of Ruby on Rails support and shell access. So I headed over to TextDrive, the maternal host of RoR to test it out on a site. How does it rate? Support - not bad, responses have been short for me. Reliability - really bad. I should add a disclaimer here, it depends on what server you’re put on to some extent. TextDrive isn’t supposed to be a testing environment but never the less, hapless users (such as myself) as well other factors (at least on my server ‘gilford’) cause the uptime to be a joke. While i’m sure it will be improved i’ve decided to consolidate my sites and have a rails friendly place for future projects. My new host?

Planet Argon. My reasons?

1. They’re small and personal. I like dealing with small and personal hosts.
2. Their website is smart and does not feature early 2000 style slick design.
3. They support the things I need.
4. Their uptime, though not guaranteed, seems decent.

I can see a lot of people up in arms about point two. What does it matter how a site is designed, they’re just offering hosting. It matters a lot. It shows several things - that you are working with people who understand what you do (web design/development), it shows a concern for a good experience, it usually means your management tools will be easier to work. So far i’ve been impressed, the control panel is really nice and keeps up a design consistency that makes it enjoyable to use.

I'm also going to be consolidating my DNS and domain registration into some kind of system. I’ve been using DynDNS and really liking it. So, as an advanced warning, please bare with me during any downtime this month.

 

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