Alqloop’s chat arab

One of the most difficult things that bloggers have to deal with is hosting and for me, that issue is coming up more and more as I build up bigger sites, and I now want to bring everything under one hosting account with one hosting company.

Currently, over half of my projects are hosted on Host Gator, and while I have nothing but happy words for the service that they have provided me (see my recent post on Host Gator’s support), I am starting to hit a wall due to the popularity of this and other sites that I run on their hosting. Basically, I have had too many open connections more than once, and they haven’t been able to tell me the exact cause, thus leading me to think I need bigger, better hosting.

The rest of my projects are hosted on Mosso, except for my personal blog. Mosso is great, except I am not a fan of their control panel. I find it fairly limiting, and I hate learning curves when dealing with hosting. I try to stick to hosts that allow me either a cPanel control panel, or root-like access through SSH. Anything else, and I get frustrated. Who wants to spend a day learning how to manage hosting, especially when you have enough work in just needing to run a dozen sites?

My personal blog is being hosted on VortexHost. This is a smaller hosting company, but the service, and support has been bar-none the best I have ever had. Pricing might not be the most competitive, but it was one of the first web hosts I had ever used, and I have never been disappointed by the decision. Justin, the owner, has always been very helpful and adds his personal touch to making sure I am happy, whenever he can. Most other hosts I have used have been compared against my experiences at VortexHost.

I just feel like it is time to pick one company to manage all my hosting needs. This would hopefully help cut down costs, as I am paying what I consider a pretty penny for all my hosting.

On average, I would say that around $60 each and every month is spent to host my various blogs. This one has the highest traffic with nearly twenty-thousand page views a day.

I was thinking about looking at other “cloud space” hosts that work in a similar vein to Mosso, or maybe going with a company like Slice Host, as they keep coming up on my radar.

Some hosts I will not consider, due to personal experiences:

• Dreamhost
• A Small Orange
• eMaxHosting

If you have any thoughts or recommendations for me, please let me know. Who should I be hosting with? I would like to keep it under $40 per month, and I would like to have cPanel and/or high level SSH privileges. I would like to have a high level of stability, and great support. I am fairly tech savvy, but I am not going to sit around messing with ipchains on the server.

So, I have been using HostGator for this blog for a while now, and they are just one of a few different hosting accounts I own, and by far one of the better ones. I am lucky currently that all my hosts are amazing, from the small Vortexhost I use to display my personal blog DavidCubed, to HostGator for this and other blogs to a shared account I have with friends on Mosso.

Here and there, this site goes down due to too many connections. I am not exactly sure why yet, but I jumped on the live support, and within half a minute, my site was back up and running again. They even gave me some indications on what could be causing the problem.

I am very happy, and very impressed, and I think far too many people only write about their hosts when they are unhappy. HostGator, you are doing great for me, so please keep up the great work.

One of the biggest mistakes I see many bloggers making is jumping on one of the free blog hosting sites expecting to make thousands of dollars a year and becoming an Internet celebrity.

Limitations

There are limitations with using free tools. WordPress.com doesn’t allow advertising, nor does it allow you to add plugins. For some, this isn’t an issue, but it can become a real concern later on as your site grows and changes.

Search Engine

Do you want to be considered your own blog, or another of the millions of Blogger blogs? You like having Typepad as part of your domain and thus your branding? These are the things search engines will notice as they index your blog. If you are using your own hosting, and your own domain, you wouldn’t have to deal with what I consider to be search placement killers.

Outages

Today a friend of mine, David Krug, messaged me and said “Typepad is down”. I went to check it out and sure enough I couldn’t access any of their hosted blogs. Even their actual company website was down for me. While not all web hosting companies have great uptime. at least you can easily leave if they are constantly down. By joining a free blog service, most of the time you are locking yourself into that service, through its good times and bad.

Control

Blogs are a constantly evolving and changing beast of your own creation, and while some free services can be great early on, they lack the control that independent solutions provide. If Blogger decided to close your blog, would you have a backup of your posts? These are just some of the reasons that I implore you to avoid free services just to save a few dollars.

You can get great web hosting for cheap, and if they have a script called Fantastico, you can install WordPress, the same software used here, in one click.