Web Hosting

The first, and very critical, step in building a successful web site is selecting a good web host provider. Do a Google search for “web hosting” and you’ll see that there are no shortage of options out there. Price is important, but don’t let it drive you to make a bad decision. I have used several different hosting providers and learned a lot in the process. I’d like to share with you some of my lessons learned and give you some guidance to help you make a good decision.

I’ll be very up front — I currently use HostGator and have been very happy with them. Prior to settling in on HostGator I used DiscountASP.net, GoDaddy, and 1 & 1. I had different reasons for trying each one and sometimes made a decision without really thinking it through and understanding the details.

DiscountASP.net

I selected my first web hosting provider based on the fact that I wanted to create my web site using Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology. I’ve been using Microsoft technology for almost 15 years and that was my comfort zone. I did a lot of searching and finally decided on DiscountASP.NET. The price was decent and the set of features seemed good also. I got my first site up and running and was feeling pretty good. As time went on, however, I reached a point where I really wanted to have some more dynamic content and wanted to have a SQL database. With my account at DiscountASP.NET I only got a MySQL database included and would have to pay extra to get a SQL Server database. I wasn’t very familiar with MySQL so I opted to pay extra for the SQL Server. That seemed to be okay, but it got me to start looking around for other options that might be less expensive. What I found was that GoDaddy - which is where I have registered some of my domains - was expanding their web hosting options and were offering a Windows-based option.

GoDaddy

I looked into the details of what GoDaddy had to offer and found that I could get a web hosting package for the Windows platform that included SQL Server. The price was about $5/month less than what I was paying at DiscountASP.net. Since I only had a couple of small, low volume web sites I decided to incur the pain of switching hosting providers and get a new hosting account with GoDaddy. The move was actually quite painless and the tools from GoDaddy where pretty easy to use. I was able to create subdomains, SQL databases, and pretty much everything I wanted. In general, I was quite happy.

LAMP

No, I’m not talking about a piece of furniture. LAMP is an abbreviation for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, which has become a very powerful combination of open source products people use to create web sites. While I had heard of each component, I basically ignored them because, as I mentioned before, I have about 15 years of experience with Microsoft technologies. As I continued to work on my web sites and register additional domains, I realized that almost all of the products, tools, example, templates, discussions, etc. are all referring to LAMP. It was really quite amazing (and disappointing for a Microsoft guy like me), but it became quite apparent that if I wanted to continue using ASP.NET that I would be constantly having to translate PHP/MySQL code. As much fun as that sounded, I really didn’t think that was a very good use of my time. Therefore, I decided I better try to find a good hosting option for LAMP.

GoDaddy - Part 2

It came as no surprise that my current web host provider at the time (GoDaddy) offered a Linux-based option. Since I was pretty happy with my current Windows hosting package I decided to purchase a Linux package also. This would allow me to get my feet wet with LAMP while still maintaining my current ASP.NET sites. That was a good approach, but where I screwed up was when I decided to purchase a full year service instead of going month-to-month. Pre-paying for a year would save me money, but it also meant I had to keep the account for a year. At the time it seemed like a good idea, but in hindsight I would discourage you from doing it.

1 & 1

After about 1-2 months of working on my GoDaddy Linux account I discovered a variety of technical issues with the way GoDaddy has their servers configured. The use of proxies and a few other items were making it very difficult for to do what I wanted to. I became so frustrated that I decided to look elsewhere for a Linux web hosting option. I made a rather hasty decision to try 1 & 1. Once again I was an idiot and signed up for a 1 year package. I quickly ran into issues with how they “supported” creating subdomains. It was quirky and didn’t work how I needed it to. In the process of trying to work through some issues I had to contact their support people a few times. I quickly became disgusted with their lack of technical knowledge and ability to help me. I’m a very technical person and was basically telling them what to do. I can’t imagine what I non-technical person would have had to endure.

So at this point I have two hosting accounts at GoDaddy (one Windows, one Linux) and one at 1&1, and I’m not able to do what I want. I was pretty upset with myself at this point. Luckily a friend of my pointing me at HostGator and suggested I give it a chance. They had been a customer for the past few years and had nothing but good things to say.

HostGator

This time I decide to do some due diligence. I scoured the HostGator.com web site, I searched through various online forums, I did my fair share of Googling, and in the end decide it was worth taking a chance. I signed up for an account (paying monthly this time!) and immediately fell in love with it (okay, that’s a bit extreme, but I really do think its the best of the bunch). So I suppose the big question is “why do I like HostGator so much?”