During the course of the past decade I’ve developed 100’s of websites, ranging from simple blogs to advanced web applications. Gathering requirements for these projects is often difficult. Migrating the project from a development or local server to the final server is generally the last step. Continue reading to learn from my experiences, I’ll limit each category to 2 hosts for simplicity.
The Best Blog Host
WebFaction: WebFaction is by far the simplest hosting I’ve used to date, their user interface is clean and self-explanatory. One of our accounts is hosting almost a dozen websites with zero issues or downtime. In comparison shopping, they offer the best price for what you get in terms of bandwidth, RAM, their incredibly fast support, plus access to everything including SSH and DNS. Overall, the best hosting and highly recommended is WebFaction. If you need assistance setting this up, let me know at info@www.resourcefuldads.com!
GoDaddy: For the most part I’ve had good luck with GoDaddy, unless you need IIS for some reason. GoDaddy offers hosting on IIS servers should you require it, however some of the past websites I’ve worked on are limited as they don’t play well with IIS.
The Worst Blog Host
Globat: Gauging by the volume of websites on Globat, they likely offered a good deal to affiliates and resellers to push their product. The hosting is okay, however the cPanel is horribly outdated and difficult to navigate as a user. I am not sure how new users could navigate this and get anything accomplished.
Yahoo: Users should avoid Yahoo hosting at all costs. 6 months ago I had a simple task of moving a blog to the root directory so it was no longer /blog/website. In the end we switched hosts. In talking to support they not only refused to provide access to anything DNS, they also wouldn’t create (or allow me to create) a simple .htaccess file to finish the task.
The Misconceptions
There are an incredible number of hosting providers out there. I have not tried them all, nor do I have the desire to. I have used BlueHost in the past, but it didn’t stand out to me in any particular way.
Local cooperative hosting: While I encourage users to shop local, I often have issues with websites hosted locally. The issues are most often directory permissions, or they restrict services you should have access to.
*disclaimer – I will only recommend products tried and true over a long duration, my goal is not to sell you product or services
