After searching for nearly a week to try to find a hosting plan that made sense for me, I realized that I don’t really need a full-blown dedicated server. Even though I run one very high-bandwidth podcast, and one fairly active blog, most of my traffic is static (the blog is cached, so the PHP stuff isn’t sweating too hard). What I really need is something in-between shared hosting, which had started to drain the life out of my soul, and dedicated hosting, which seemed likely to drain the life out of my wallet.
Enter the brand new hotness, VPS. Basically, you buy a slice of a server, and it runs under a virtualization host (Xen seems to be everybody’s girlfriend these days). You have a chunk of harddrive, you install your own operating system and build it out in whatever way you want. You get a guaranteed minimum amount of RAM at your disposal, with the ability to spike over that amount if no one else on the server is using it.
Perfect. It’s not shared hosting with 3000 porn sites, it’s shared hosting with 4, 8, or 16 people, depending on the size of the slice you buy. Nothing they do can jack up your mojo, and you get to setup the server in whatever way seems good to you.
There are a lot of new hosting companies offering this kind of setup - I went with slicehost because their website just screams, “screw fancy designs, we’re too busy chrooting your awesome up onto our technologies, yo!”
And that’s what I want in a hosting company.
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CLIdiot is not a professional geek. He's just a slightly geeky guy who thought it would be neat to setup his own server. These are the rants, tirades, and occasional insights of an normal person trying to figure out linux.
Prior to commencing on the design of my website, I had absolutely no idea what to look for in a web hosting company let alone how I was going to design the website. Yep, it was intimidating and I had no one there to hold my hand. After a month of browsing hosts and writing them all annoying emails which basically asked really stupid questions about their services I finally opted to go with BlueHost, a shared server with the php/sql database I was leaning toward. Although I predicted chewing up massive amounts of bandwidth due to the upload/downloading of large music files, BlueHost offered 3tb per month which sounded pretty reasonable for my brand new site which didn’t expect massive amounts of traffic at the get go.
I spoke with one company at great length (ThinkHost) and their support was absolutely awesome but unfortunately, their fees were slightly higher and I’m on a really tight budget. I highly recommend them based on their support alone.
Anyway, after two months with BlueHost I have no complaints and I have indeed put their support team to the test and they’ve passed with flying colors. Now . . . if I could only design the damn site. :-)