Web Server Hosting

Fri Aug 6 19:31:23 2004 Web Server Hosting
Posted by Tony Lawrence
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The aplawrence.com site is hosted by Interland and is what they call a "Virtual Private Server" - which means that it's really shared hosting, but I have root access to my part of it. I've been generally happy with their reliability and pricing, though for the past few weeks we've been crashing regularly. They tell me that they will be doing a rebuild this week that should make us stable again.

I'm not really looking to switch, but I do like to look around to see what's out there. I do see ads for much lower pricing than what I pay, but often it turns out that either there's stuff missing that I need, or the reliability and connectivity isn't up to par. On the other hand, there have been a few that looked really good - sometimes almost too good to be true.

To me, stability and security are the most important features. Presently, this is a BSD system, but I wouldn't be adverse to Linux. Disk space is of secondary importance to me, but I do think that (given the cost of storage today) many places charge way too much for far too little. So after stability and security comes connectivity - I don't want a web server located out on the fringes with many hops to the backbones.

Many hosting sites make a big deal about backup, but I don't see that as critical: I maintain my own backups. Nor do I care about libraries of software tools - I won't use 'em anyway.

Price is the least important element, though I do tend to be a little too cheap to pay co-lo rates.

And how about you? If you have a website, what are your hot buttons? What providers have you had good or bad luck with? Do some of those ads seem "too good to be true" to you, also?

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