If you’ve read my blog before you know that I have gone through quite a few different web hosting providers over the years. It seems that as my web sites expand in sophistication I run up against some limitation with my hosting company. A few months ago I thought I had found a great host with ReliableSite.net, but I was having some issues with sessions being dropped and one of my scheduled jobs not working. That caused me to once again search for alternatives.

Lucky for me, I’m getting much better at searching for a hosting company! It didn’t take me long to find one that looked good and I decided to give it a shot (the 30-day money back guarantee made the decision quite easy). This past weekend I got a new account setup with DailyRazor. Yes, I know, that’s a rather odd name for a hosting company; but the feature set is good and so is the price. The are currently running a special promotion where they will quadruple the limits for any package. I went with the .NET Edge package and with the 4x I get 40GB of disk, 100GB bandwidth, 20 Websites hosted, 20 SQL Server DBS, 2GB SQL Disk, etc. All for only $9.95/month! That’s pretty sweet, but as I’ve learned (time and time again) you don’t want to get suckered into a provider based on low price.





While I’ve only been using DailyRazor for a few days, there are some things that I really like over other hosting I’ve had.

1. They use the Plesk control panel. It’s my first time using it, but it’s easy to navigate and provides a lot of functionality. If I want I can create multiple user accounts and control what each user can administer. I can set limits for each web site also.
2. Unlimited subdomains, which can be either physically hosted or just map to a subdirectory on your main web site. It’s nice to have the option. Sometimes you just want a subdomain to be an easy way to get to a directory on your site; but other times you want it to be completely separate from your main site.
3. Support for both ASP.NET and PHP. ReliableSite.net has this too, but I really like it and figured I’d mention it again
4. Scheduled Task using the Windows Task Scheduler. Okay, this is very nice and works great. This is basically just like cron on Linux. On ReliableSite.net they provided a “web scheduler” which had some real limitations. With DailyRazor I can specify if I want the output of the job (i.e., stdout/stderr) to automatically be emailed to me after the job runs. I can have it run any type of executable and specify command line args for it.

I’m sure there are more things I’ll find that I like over the next few weeks. Hopefully I won’t run into anything major that I don’t like!

I spent that past 4-5 days scouring the web in search of a decent web hosting provider for an ASP.NET site. I came up with about 15 options and then began to narrow down the list.  I had a few critical criteria.

1. Had to support multiple web sites under one account.  Ideally it would be an unlimited number of sites without having to pay extra for each site, but I did consider options with the finite number offered and even some that would charge extra for each site.
2. At least 2GB space and 20GB bandwidth.  While I don’t expect to need much space, I might want to do some things with videos and so need to make sure I have that ability.
3. ASP.NET 2.0 and PHP 5.  All of my sites will be either ASP.NET 2.0 or PHP 5.
4. SQL Server available.  While I could use MySql, I much prefer to use SQL Server.
5. Dedicated IP address(es) available.  I’ve done some research and it seems that domains that are hosted on dedicated IP addresses will rank better in Google search results.  Some hosting providers have packages that include 1 or more dedicated IPs and some offer them for extra $’s. 

So I looked at the details of the various hosting options.  I narrowed the list down to about 5 potential providers.  Then I did some searches to see what other people had to say about the provider.  That helped me eliminate more.

And the winner is…. ReliableSite.net.  It was a tough decision, but it was even tougher to actually discover ReliableSite.net exists! While I was searching through some webmaster forums to get feedback on other providers, one of the messages mentioned ReliableSite.net and said they were quite pleased with them.  So, I checked them out and decided to pull the trigger.  The price is good and they allow me to host an unlimited number of domains.  I can add a dedicated IP address for $2/month, which isn’t too bad when you consider the base monthly hosting cost is only $5/month.  So, for $7/month I get a dedicated IP address, can host an unlimited # of domains, get SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, PHP, and more.

The one thing to be aware of with ReliableSite.net is that it will take about 24 hours to get your account approved and setup.  The reason it takes so long is because they do their due diligence to protect themselves from fraud and deadbeats.  While it is hard to wait for your account to be setup, I think their approach is one reason they are a good provider — they don’t have a bunch of losers to deal with.