For the past couple years, this weblog (along with my father’s blog and my Jason Webley bootlegs) has been hosted through the kindness and generosity of Michael at Rain City Story. However, he’s decided it’s time for him to move on to other projects in his life, so it’s time for me to start investigating other hosting options.
At the moment, the two providers I’m looking most seriously at are Media Temple’s (gs) service and Dreamhost.
On the surface, Dreamhost looks like a better deal ($10/mo for 200 Gb of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth vs. $20/mo for 100Gb of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth), but (mt) was Michael’s recommendation. I don’t really know about either company, so I’m open to suggestions.
I thought about simply moving back to Typepad or some such thing, but I’d hate to have to lose the Webley bootlegs page, and between the bootlegs and dad’s site being pretty image heavy, we tend to chew up a good amount of disk space and bandwidth.
Any ideas, suggestions, experiences with either (mt) or Dreamhost, or other recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks much!
I use Dreamhost, and while it’s plenty of space and bandwidth, they have has issue with their data center, some well documented
Otherwise things have been great, but for $10 you get what you pay for…
Surpass Hosting has been great to me. I’m on their $15/mo reseller plan, and I have a ton of space and options. Take a look! :)
I’ve gotta admit, that was one of the things I was wondering about. If a deal looks too good to be true, it often is. Still, I don’t have a lot of cash to toss around right now, so if I can put up with the occasional downtime…(shrugs).
Dreamhost has had a crapload of problems the last few months, but supposedly they’ve gotten things more ironed out now.
The nice thing about them is that you can host unlimited domains, the space and xfer increase by a lot every month, and customer service has been generally very good.
They hhave this reseller plan where I can make a coupon code that gives me a crapload of money if you sign up using it, but the nice thing is that I can decide how much of that crapload to pass on to you. I’d be happy to pass it ALL on to you.
If you (or anyone) enters the coupon code ECLECTICISM, it’s god for $50 off a monthly plan, or $97 off any yearly plans.
I’m a longtime customer of DreamHost, and highly recommend them. The recent spate of hardware issues is anomalous.
Wow, do you really need that much disk space and bandwidth? If so, I’m envious. If not, you might check out HostPC. Uptime is as close to 100% as you can get, and service is absolutely wonderful, though you won’t get terabytes of disk or bandwidth from them.
I am feeling the need to move, too. I remember Scoble questioning how Dreamhost was treating a customer (he recommends doing a search for “Dreamhost sucks”) I want to go with WordPress and they recommend Blue Host for $6.95 a month. I would be interested in what you or your readers think about Blue host.
Just let me know, and, if there is a cost, I will pay or share or whatever. Love to you and Prairie. I’ll get the Corvallis pictures up as soon as possible.
I use hummingbirdhosting which is good for $12 a month but dreamhost looks like a great option, plus they give you shell acess, cvs repository and other features that give an edge to people who write code.
I use Yahoo and love it for its ease of use. I have nothing to compare to though. ;)
If you need total control of the server (root access, install everything you would like, etc.) I highly recommend tektonic (tektonic.net)
How much is your budget? I use their cheaper plan: $15/mo. It is a “Virtual Private Server”.
I use Webmasters for my hosting – very good customer service. Was sufficiently impressed that I upgraded from a basic plan to one that allows me to host 100 sites. Costs a bit, though.
Certainly Dreamhost seems to be where all the cool kids hang out, despite its recent run of bad luck, about which it was refreshingly honest here and here.
I am currently using http://www.textdrive.com. Thier basic hosting plan was $12/mo USD, and is now gone up to $15/mo USD. However they’ve also upgraded the bandwidth and disk space (which I feel is still on the low side).
I have only good things to say about them – except the price.
In fact, once I read this thread and saw the Dreamhost coupon I went out and signed up for a year of hosting. Thank you!
My site is just for fun, not critical, so even if Dreamhost isn’t the BEST hosting around – it was a great deal. Paying $15/mo for TextDrive was just on the high side.
In the end I think it depends how important your website is to you in terms of reliability and speed. If you mainly just case that the site is “up there”, then heck, go use GoDaddy.com for the ultra cheap hosting. Otherwise, something like TextDrive or the other fine hosting plans mentioned here.
I’m glad someone got some use out of the coupon :)
As for shell access: I use it all the time, and it was one of the main reasons I went with dreamhost. The downside is they have some silly little script that kills any processes you have running every few minutes. I’m forever having to re-launch the editor I was just using to modify a file server-side, and it drives me nuts.
That’s really my only complaint.
I was hoping to see some views on MediaTemple. I have heard some good things about them and was considering moving my blogs there when I move off TypePad. They host some pretty big blogs including the 9Rules network and TechCrunch. I listened to a podcast interview Michael Arrington conducted with the guys at MT and they seem pretty jacked.
For the time being I am going to move my blogs to my usual hosting guys, more out of loyalty, but if things don’t work out with them I am heading to MT. For $20 you can run up to 5 blogs (according to what I’ve been told). I don’t know what their response times are like to queries and support issues. That would be a bit issue for me.