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On the way to Site5

Tue, 2007-02-13 05:39 — Jaharmi

I’ve decided to follow Sthomas’ referral to Site5, taking them up on their $5 hosting deal. It simply came down to a price I was willing to pay.

I figure that I’ll probably save around that much electricity per month by not having to run my server at home. I’ll regain some upstream bandwidth on my Internet connection, which can be put to other uses. And, my son will not have so many whirring fans running in his room, since we haven’t finished remodeling the room all the technology is moving to.

I had been hoping to get:

  • a several GB storage allotment
  • a high bandwidth allotment
  • High or unlimited hosted sites
  • Full DNS control (for potential use with DNS-SD, perhaps)
  • Dedicated IP address
  • SSL
  • Greater than 5 hosted databases (well, just because)
  • SSH/SFTP
  • Shell access
  • Python 2.3 or later, preferably with mod_python (using FastCGI seems to be a big workaround)
  • WebDAV
  • QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server
  • Reliable, consistent server performance
  • Good customer service (even if you never need it, it should be there)

I had to compromise on several points, but ultimately the price point was important to me. I had to balance some items that I wanted versus what I felt was needed, and consider some items which could be added onto an account locally rather than by the hosting provider.

It’ll take a little time for me to sort it out, but I’ll be moving this site to my new hosting account shortly. Hopefully, I can make it happen without an outage.

I had also considered the following hosting companies, and each had compelling offerings that were just not outweighed by $5 per month. I’ll list some of the benefits and drawbacks for each of these well-reviewed major hosting firms.

  • Dreamhost: WebDAV, QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server, more quota space
  • WebFaction: considered very good for Python (including mod_python, which seems to be a rarity) and open source hosting, but had some of the most limited stats (like only three hosted dynamic sites for $7/month with a two year commitment)
  • Bluehost: considered good for Python, good stats.

In the future, I'm still considering some arrangement with Rsync.net or another off-site backup/storage provider. I think it’s an interesting time to be on the Internet, when you can really start to take advantage of some truly useful hosted services.