My Web Hosting Experience

I know most of you are scratching your head going “huh”, but I wanted to put this out there for folks since I know there are a number of bloggers that read this blog, and there is a mass exodus from blogger to wordpress self-hosted after the “spamming” shut-downs by blogger the last six months or so.

What has happened is blogger has just suddenly decided to shut-down a deal blog as spam, even though it is clearly not. They lock the blog down (basically take it down) not allowing the blogger access to any information or their blog. There isn’t a telephone number to call, the blogger needs to contact them through email and restoration can take two days to a week.

Now when you’ve put your heart and soul into your blog you can get a wee bit distressed when it suddenly goes *poof*! They’d probably have to medicate me.

So in the last few months many deal bloggers have left the blogger platform and gone to self-hosted wordpress. WordPress has a .wordpress option too, but there is not as much freedom to do what you will with the .wordpress since you do not own it to place ads or other content on the blog. WordPress also has a free wordpress software download that can be self-hosted. This is called the “5-minute install” because that is how long it takes. You can modify the wordpress design with different themes (and then further modify by programing) and with plug-ins.

Getting to my original point, I’ve never been on blogger or typepad. I have always been self-hosted wordpress, but my theme has changed several times along the way. My first host was godaddy. They are one of the bigger webhosts. Some people love them, some people hate them. The biggest knock on godaddy has always been their customer service; decent speeds, poor cs. For me, godaddy has always had fantastic customer service… but lousy speed. I had to leave them many months ago because the blog would be slow (I have a FIOS connection, I could not imagine how painful it was for those on dial-up), time out or not load. Because of their great customer service it was a shame they were so slow but the upgrade available to me was just too costly. I apparently had enough readers to cause slowdowns, but not the revenue to cover the upgrade.

So, I looked into my options.

I could go the dedicated server route but the blog was not really big enough to warrant the cost, and a dedicated server is not without possible downtime pitfalls . There was the VPS (virtual private server) option, which with some hosts was nearly as much as dedicated, and still had the possible downtime pitfalls.

I ended up with a company called imountain using their cluster server option. What sold me on the cluster server was the way the allocate space: I’m not smushed onto a server willy-nilly with a bunch of other sites with little regard for how large everyone is. A cluster server makes use of a buncha servers to bounce sites around so no one site is hogging too much impeding the speed of another site. A cluster server, since it bounces sites around, avoids downtime too. Instead of one server that can go down and a website is sol, it is a bunch of servers banded together so if one goes down, you are moved to another server instantly (or something like that… love the “technical” talk? )

If you blog as a hobby, blogger or wordpress-hosted may very well meet all your needs. If you blog as a hobby and want more control over your blog, word-press self-hosted may be your best choice even if it ends up costing you some cash each month. And if you blog as a professional, you probably laughed your way through my hosting explanations.

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