Time to hit the highway

Ever since I’ve moved to this domain (www.nrahab.com), I’ve been enjoying the courtesy of being hosted on Bitter’s webspace, which has been 1) free, and 2) pretty nice.  However, with the amount of bandwidth I’m pulling, I’ve become her largest consumer of resources, and as such it’s time for me to hit the highway and find my own hosting like a big boy.  I want to say thank you to Bitter for letting me mooch off her host for about a year or so, during which time I’ve been able to grow the site and other projects considerably.

Right now, I’m considering two options: Hostmatters or GoDaddy for my hosting.  I have this domain registered through GoDaddy, so (according to their customer service) it would be a piece of cake for me to move my blagowebs over there.  However, Hostmatters has been recommended to me by a friend.  Personally, I’m in about as deep as I can get from a tech standpoint – I don’t know squat about switching hosts, so a big important thing for me would be good customer service to hand hold me through moving all of my blagowebs data from Server A to Server B.   If anyone has experience with either of the two, advice in emails or comments is greatly appreciated.

9 Comments

  1. My $0.02… I’ve been happy with GoDaddy’s customer service, although I have heard some complaints. I’ve gotten calls from them out of the blue asking if I was happy with everything. Everyone I’ve spoken to at GD spoke English and was very knowledgeable and friendly.

    I don’t actually host my blog there (i also get free hosting from a friend) but I do run other sites through them. I’m not particularly fond of how GoDaddy’s tools work, but once you are up and running, most of it doesn’t really matter.

  2. Don’t forget that Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, is a BIG TIME gun lover and shooter!

    He’s good friends with Hans Vang of Vang Comp and is an all-around nice guy…

  3. For what it is worth, I am a huge fan of 1&1(http://www.1and1.com). I have been a customer of theirs for about 3 years and have had 1 service outage that lasted a few minutes. I run my seldom updated blog and a few basic websites their but they really give you a lot for what you pay…

    –Doug

  4. How much resources do you use (disk, bandwidth, etc.)?

    Check out NearlyFreeSpeech.net — I host there, and they’re quite economical, reliable, and will host any content so long as it’s legal in the US.

    If your site requires more resources than NFS can economically provide, I highly recommend Hurricane Electric (he.net). I’ve toured their “medium-sized” datacenter (40,000 square feet) in Fremont, CA, and was highly impressed. They own the entire building (as well as a 5,000 square foot floor at the MAE-WEST building in San Jose, and a ~250,000 square foot datacenter in Fremont), all the equipment, and their own international fiber network. They have great peering policies, so they have short-hop transit to just about every other network on earth. Very reasonably priced for the resources you get. Top-notch hosting.

    /I have no relationship with any of these companies other than being a former HE customer and present NFS customer.

  5. However, with the amount of bandwidth I’m pulling, I’ve become her largest consumer of resources

    Because it’s relevant to recommendations people may make, it’s not bandwidth that’s the problem. (I’m still my own biggest consumer on that one.) However, it’s the disk space. The files you are currently storing on there (I don’t know what they are, I just see the data in numbers) are adding up to where they top my domain that’s used for publishing file transfers. In other words, it’s adding on to what I use, and I need to look at cutting down. Whatever the files are, they don’t seem to be used much, so it’s not a bandwidth concern at all.

  6. +1 for 1and1.com – I host through them. I think they offer great features at great price points.

    My domains are registered through GoDaddy, and I’ll also second the nod to their customer service (good to know their CEO’s a friend of the bang-bang industry, too).

    However, I’ve read in several accounts that its a bad idea to have your domain registered through the same company that acts as your host, as down the road it can be a nightmare to separate the two.

  7. I use GoDaddy for domain registrations and have used their hosting services for one or two clients in the past. The hosting is fine and customer service is good, but there were some frustrating problems with GD blocking gobs of valid mail as spam well *before* it got to the level that I had any control over it. They provide the ability to whitelist domains and IP’s in their control panels, but the mail was blocked well before it got that far, so those tools were practically useless to me and the client, and GD was either unable or unwilling to help (spent LOTS of time on the phone for that one).

    I use Network Solutions Pro Hosting Packages (3) for work and personal use and have been very happy with them so far over the past year. About 60 clients hosted there and six personal/business accounts. Customer service for hosting is excellent, but don’t get me started on their domain support. I do not manage any blogs at all, though, so I can’t help there.

    HTH,

    Dave

  8. Correction to the above: My personal/business hosting account is the Standard package. So two Pro, one Standard.

    Dave

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