Making Choices—Cell Phones & Site Hosts
April 7, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 12 comments
Last week I mentioned my cell phone provider (Cingular) was axing the cut-rate basic plan I had and is moving me to a more expensive plan without my prior consent. As a result, I’ll be dropping them.
Many of you sent replacement suggestions in my call for info (”Cell Phone Hell“) and I’d like to say thanks. In response, I plotted my need for a prepaid service that guaranteed coverage in my rural area, offered low-cost (and low SAR) phones, and several other data points against the suggestions. All the services I checked into could’ve worked, but most offered low-price phones with a SAR rating higher than I’m comfortable with. After Swedish researchers recently correlated cell phone use with brain tumors, SAR is still important.
T-Mobile offers a good prepaid plan, covers my state well, is ubiquitous (so recharging the prepay is simple), and has decent phones. That’s the plan I’ll be getting. Sadly, they’re offering a new Nokia phone that is perfect, but is not yet available. So I’ll have to wait. (Ironically, the salesguy at the T-Mobile store didn’t even know what SAR was. When I was in sales, I studied to know everything there was to know about the products I sold. I guess salespeople today think they don’t make enough money to warrant knowing anything about the products they sell outside of how much it costs. Oh well.)
But onto another issue…
I recently purchased several domain names to expand my little “empire” on the Web. Got them from Namecheap for an exceptionally low price—highly recommended.
Last year I asked about hosting, but I’m going to ask again since the field changes so quickly.
What hosts do you use for your site(s)? How would you rate their effectiveness, speed, service, controls, and so on?
There are so many providers today offering ridiculously low hosting packages. Plus, most of the sites that rate hosts are actually bogus advertising sites mimicking a real review site; they’re just shilling for hosts that buys ad space from them. So making a choice is tough.
This is what I’m looking for:
- The ability to host five domains (or more) in one account. Not subdomains, real domains.
- More than 400MB of storage space and 40GB of bandwidth/month.
- MySQL support (for Wordpress)
- A cost under $20 a month.
- Good control panel that is intuitive and doesn’t lag in making changes.
- Phone tech support, not just by e-mail or chat.
- Up-to-date servers that are load balanced.
- Daily backup.
- No “here today, gone tomorrow.”
- No pressure on clients to upgrade their services.
Right now, I’m leaning toward a host called IX WebHosting. One of the prime reasons is that this company purposefully located in a small town in Kentucky in order to provide jobs to the area. Kudos to them—that fits a lot of what I talk about here concerning righteous business practices. My major concern about this company is their control panel is pretty lame.
I noticed some talk over at The Boar’s Head Tavern about hosting and everyone thought BlueHost was great. I’ve done research on them and have serious concerns about the viability of their business practices and whether or not they’ll be one of those companies that is constantly pressuring me to upgrade to more expensive services. Already been there with Cingular and I don’t want that with my Web host. Customer horror stories give me the willies!
Thanks in advance!
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