Making Choices—Cell Phones & Site Hosts
April 7, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Functions : Trackback,
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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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DiscountASP.net is a great hosting service - good on-line utilities for managing your sites, good pricing, lots of power. Simple plan choices. I use it for a number of my own domains.
I’m on 1and1 now and can tell you to avoid them like the plague. Real slow and inept tech support. It takes days to respond, and they usually answer the wrong question and I have to ask again. So I’m changing too.
I’m looking at Total Choice Hosting. Pretty cheap with a very good reputation in the Movable Type community, which is my blog software. That’s very important to me because my current host as no clue about MT and I’ve got repeated errors now because of server limitations that preclude the use of MT. TCH offers Cpanel as a control panel, I’m not sure how that compares but it seems pretty common.
IX seems pretty good, that’s a lot for under $7. I’ll have to look into IX as far as Moveable Type support.
If you are going to host no more than the 5 you mentioned than most
I’ve been having pretty good luck with DreamHost. Currently, their basic plan is only $8/month for 1TB of bandwidth and unlimited domains. They have a pretty sweet control panel, and they can auto-install Wordpress for you. (I use it for my own blog)
Just asked IX about MT. I got a standard “You can use whatever software you want, but if it doesn’t work it’s not our problem.” response. And the help ticket system was painful, although they responded reasonably quick. Why I need to go through registration and filing a help ticket to ask a simple pre-sales question is beyond me. I suppose I could have called.
TCH has been quite helpful and quick on their support forums in answering my questions and they are familiar with MT so I’m going to stick with them.
Anyhow, I thought you might want to know.
I’ve used http://www.christianwebhost.com since 1999. I’m not very savvy but still managed to put together a web site. They’re about 8.95 per month. They’ve never sent me anything suggesting I upgrade, and the help desk is prompt and helpful.
i just use blogger. in some ways, it is woefully inadequate, but i’m not that competent to venture out on my own so i put up with it. the calculated break every now and then helps diffuse the frayed nerves.
i’d like to introduce myself, really. i’m misha, and i’m trying to meet more christian bloggers. lol. have no idea how that comes off, but it’s really late at night here in canada. take care.
I host many sites on Hostgator.
*Lot’s* of space, only $9.95 per month, and unlimited domain names.
Hope that helps.
Terry Rayburn
You should also look at LivingDot (http://www.livingdot.com/). MT is inlcuded in the package.
I have been using Bluehost for almost a year and I have been very pleased with them. They have never pressured me to upgrade. $6.95/month (when you pay for 2 years)gets you 10 gigs of space, 250 gigs transfers, support for up to 6 domains (1 free domain), and 50 MySQL databases. They have 24/7 toll free tech support.
I have been with Site5 for 4 and a half years and they have been fantastic. There has only been significant downtime once, and it was resolved within the hour. Though they don’t have phone support, they have always responded to my emails within minutes, even on a Sunday. They have even given me additional space and bandwidth at no charge just to say thanks for being a long-term customer!
The best way that I know of to compare hosts is to do a search on WebHosting Talk. See what people have experienced with the companies in question. Look for negative reviews. This is what I did in narrowing it down to Site5.
Wnet with an Australian company called Dotable.com.
Very happy so far. Highly responsive.