Fast hosts just don’t seem to know what they are doing these days. Seems like another day has gone by with their entire mail system down. Pretty unacceptable if you ask me, especially when up when you consider that alot of their customers are resellers who are selling the service on to people. What do they say when their customers ring up complaining?
Apparently the problem comes from “file system underlying the email platform” who know what this means, however i can translate that it means they don’t have enough redundant servers?
Is anyone else as much in love with Fantastico as me? If your not familiar with this hosting application then you really are missing out. How many times have you spent hours or days trying to install some script that everyone else has but you can get it to work on your host? Well you don’t have to worry anymore as this application will do all of the hard work for you. Simply login to Fantastico and pick the application you want and this software will install the script and make sure it works for you. There are lots of open source and free applications to choose from:
Blogs
b2evolution
Nucleus
WordPress
Classifieds
Noahs Classifieds
Content Management
Drupal
Geeklog
Joomla 1.5
Joomla
Mambo
PHP-Nuke
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Siteframe
TYPO3
Xoops
Zikula
As you can see there are more than enough programs there to keep you busy and i don’t even have all of them on that list. Check it out on your host when you have a chance!
One of the weirdest things that i have noticed over the last few is how the whole web hosting market has moved into the mainstream of the popular conscious. This is mostly evident when you watch the super bowl and see an advert for Godaddy. One question i have always had though is what percentage of people who see these promotions even know what web hosting is let alone ever want to buy it? I mean its a pretty specialised thing, unless you are a real net nerd like myself and are thinking about building websites all the time. Still i keep seeing billboard signs for Godaddy on the highways too, what do you guys think of all this?
So again ive been surfing around on youtube for some interesting videos on web hosting and i saw this pretty interesting discussion by Steve Pirillo about cheap hosting VS paid. Its an interesting topic and one that has come up time and time again. To summarize the main points as i see them are:
Always get a domain name so you can take it with you if you have bad experiences with your host.
Buy your domain name somewhere other than your web-host so they can hold you to ransom.
Realise free hosting companies go bust all the time.
So .Net magazine released there best web hosts of 2009. Quite an interesting list i think as there are a few surprising names on there. They say in the magazine that they are using lots of different criteria from customer service to uptime percentages to judge the list. Hard to know how accurate/impartial it is but still worth a look.
One of the most interesting things ive learnt over the past few days is that google is going to be using speed as a factor to help decide on how to rank websites. This has made it more important than ever to get a web host that is both fast and stable. I know from my own searches for web hosting that it can be very hard to determine who is actually fast as after all they all say that they are the fastest.
I suppose the best method as always is to rely on user reviews from respected forums and blogs as people who have experience with the host will always have better insight than anyone else. It may also be worth checking out if they offer a free trail so you can test the host yourself. Only problem with this is moving your whole site to a server can be quite time consuming and not something you are going to want to do again if the host does not meet your expectations.
