SUNSITE

The eternal question: where to host your site! For many years now I have regularly had to deal with this question for my self and people I know. Usually the sites I am evaluating a hosting service for are Icelandic or Australian. My initial thoughts are all on response time and reliability, constrained by the factor of cost. The needs are usually very basic, nothing fancy just a web and some control over the domain name. The problem with Australian and Icelandic hosts is their pricetag. Providers in these two countries are at least 10 times more expensive than their American counterparts. Hosting low traffic minimum revenue generating sites, such as personal blogs, news sites etc. is really just too expensive in these countries and quite fankly the service is usually not that great. Therefore I have now started venturing abroad. Now I am signing up with American providers to see how that goes.

The first host I signed up with is GoDaddy.com, whitch is where I have been registering my domain names for many years without problems. Their basic package is quite cheap and offers all that a basic site needs with scalability for almost limitless growth. I have now signed three of my customers up with a GoDaddy hosting account. The response time of the websites I am installing there is reasonable for a user located in Iceland and the reliability of their services has been pretty good. However, every now and then the response time seems to drop significantly and today I had problems both accessing my personal site and even more trouble logging into my ftp account to do some work. Further more there was very little information on the GoDaddy website on what was going on and the only way to contact support was by calling them. As I was dealing with these problems the words of the Netcraft.com sales department rang true: “Poor performance and especially, outages are a more immediate call to action for a company to replace in house solutions or switch hosting providers than cost comparisons; outages mean that customers may move with much more urgency.” [1]

The problems as GoDaddy have been causing problems all day and even this post was at one stage lost as I wrote it on the website of this blog. This experience makes me wonder about how wise it is to point my customers in their direction when I am not that satisfied my self. So now I am facing the age old question once more: “where to host?” This time I am starting with a reliability indicator, a Hosting Reliability survey from Netcraft.com [2]. As can be expected the most reliable service providers are significantly more expensive in the low end market. The service I pay $4 p.mo. for at GoDaddy is usually sold for twice to three times that price with the most reliable providers. $10 p.mo. is just too much to just maintain my blog that noone reads anyway, $4 is ok though. My new preferential list of hosting providers to try out is thus as follows:

1. Kattare, $9 p.mo.
2. The New York Internet Company, $13 p.mo.
3. Hostway, $9 p.mo
4. WestHost, $4 p.mo.
5. IXwebHosting, $10 p.mo.

[1] http://news.netcraft.com/hosting-prospect-monitoring-uptime-alerts
[2] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/performance.html