Looking for a new host

3 minute read

I been with a bunch of different hosts over the past few years

  • Hostgator (Good)- Reseller account, only positive things to say about them so far. Good phone/Chat/Email support. Great response time for there servers. ect...
  • Dreamhost (OKish) - 1800+ domains on shard hosting?! decent email support, lots of features, funny newsletter, downtime every month, and ping time is getting slower each and every month.
  • Media temple (Never again)- Complete and utter garbage, slow, lots of down time. Only used there servers for 2 months before moving.
  • Hasweb (Bad) - Good for years and they botched a server move horribly. Lost everything; files, EMail, databases. ect... Luckily I had regulate backups, weeks of downtime and bugs afterwards. It was so bad that I didn't want anything to do with them ever again.
  • Hostdime (Bad my association)- After my issues with Hasweb (sister company to Hostdime) I moved my domains away from there servers as well.
  • GoDaddy (Annoying)- Never had a problem with there servers although I was only with them for a short period of time. The reason that I left was every month they would send me 10+ add on services emails, they would out right spammed me. In a single month I got +30 emails from GoDaddy on extra products that they wanted to sell me.

Currently Hostgator is at the top of my list and i have never had any problems with them so far. But I like to spread my websites across many different host just in case one of them goes down for any reason, diversity ect…

So I am in search of a new cheap shared webhost.

Things that I need

  • Unlimited MySQL databases - A must have for settings up sandboxes and testing things.
  • Unlimited e-mail aliases and Catch-All - Spam tracking
  • Unlimited domains, sub-domains - Great for settings up sandboxes and testing things.
  • Email, Chat support - I want instant gratification when something is wrong.
  • POP3 (SSL), IMAP, - As much as I "like" your custom build web mail I would much rather download my mail to my own PC.
  • SVN repositories - At lest one, it just makes my life easier.
  • SFTP, CRON, MyPHPAdmin,
  • LAMP style setup (Apache, MySQL, PHP5, ect) - It works and I don't care about anything else.

Things that I would like

  • Phone support - Not a requirement as I prefer chat support.  But it is nice to have someone to talk to when things are not working.
  • Ruby/Python support - I am thinking about trying these languages out but my current host does not support it.
  • The ability to see the current load on the server with history - Is it time to move to a new server yet?
  • Opt-in emails about planned downtime - If I can't access my server I freak out, if I get an email telling me that I probably won't be able to access my server for a few mins at such and such time i'm much more calm.

Things I don’t care about

  • Unlimited space - At most all my websites together are going to be less then 60gb
  • Unlimited bandwidth - At most I would be using less then 100gb of transferrer a month across all my domains.
  • On click installs - I don't care how many apps that I am not going to use that you support one click installs.
  • CPanel - I don't care what frontend you have as long as you have one.

Things that I don’t want

  • VPS (Virtual private servers) - I am not a server admin, I'm a programmer. I don't want to have to deal with upgrading the server software or dealing with any server issues. I don't care what Linux distro is install as long as it can serve my files to my users.  I don't want to have to deal with server issues thats what I pay you for.
  • Constant Add-on services emails - I'm looking at you GoDaddy, If I don't ask for it, I don't want to hear about it. Stop trying to up sale me.

Since I manly host very low traffic wordpress blogs and hobby projects I kind of don’t want to pay more than $20 or so a month, but then again I’d also love to never have to move again, so I’m flexible.

How about it? Any suggestions? :)

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