Jolt Country

Any specific reason you use POE hosting to support this website? I happened to do a whois lookup and found out the hosting company is POE hosting.

Compared with other companies, they seem kind of expensive. I mean, hosting is a commodity product and unless some company does something outstanding the general criterion is price.

I use KVC hosting, after having used them for several months, I decided to pay for a long-term hosting plan, basically I can run up to 50 domain names, 50 Mysql databases, essentially unlimited bandwidth and disk space, and the cost for a three year contract was $71, which comes out to less than $2 a month. I decided to move to a three year contract after trying a 3 month contract, which I think was something like $15 or so.

This is in addition to the one-time fee of $20 I paid for the hosting I have for paul-robinson.us.

But I don't use KVC for my registrar, for that I use GoDaddy, they're almost always the cheapest for the domain registration. For example, POE charges $9.95 for a .info domain registration. GoDaddy will give the first year for $1.99. (Both will add about 25c for ICANN's fee).

Sometimes you can get a renewal or a transfer registration from a different company than GoDaddy and when that happens I'll take it. As it turns out, the registration for viridian-development.com ended up being slightly cheaper from the registrar associated with my locality hosting service NearlyFreeSpeech.net, it was like $7.99 vs. $9.00 from GoDaddy.

In fact, that's the reason I use NearlyFreeSpeech, I have them host my old site (and provide mail forwarding) at paul.washington.dc.us, because GoDaddy can't handle geographic-based domain names, and NearlyFreeSpeech can.

In fact, .info is so cheap, I started a policy when I did work on someone's website to register a .info domain name for the testing site, because at less than $2.50 including fees I could afford to just register it for their project. (Actually, .info used to be only $1.04 including fees.)

POE Hosting was originally run by one of the authors of my favorite website, Old Man Murray. Since that site was free, I thought the least I could would be to use them.

I am not sure if the guy is still closely involved or what. Other people may run it now. I do know that the service is fantastic, there are never any big problems, they are always available for the little things, and there's no bullshit. I also know that the guy won't shut us down if we call each other rude names. I also like the web panel interface.

They've never given me any reason to switch providers. I haven't checked prices, but even if they are more expensive than some others, the peace of mind and features I get makes up for it, to me.

Additionally, they send out crack cocaine a severed tongue and throat every time I renew.

I was always under the impression ICJ thought he was giving money to POE Toasting, to help pay for all those annual red roses and cognac.

I have had a couple of bad hosting experiences, so I understand paying a couple extra bucks a month for good service and reliability.

The predecessor to Review-o-Matic.com was a site I put up called ReviewToAKill.com (a site which was the fallout from another site ... a story that I'll have to tell ICJ in person some time, or maybe include it in one of my books). Anyway, ReviewToAKill (RTAK) predated Wordpress, so I kind of wrote my own (poor) CMS, which was a fancy term for "a bunch of PHP scripts that made things easier to post, except when it broke, at which point it made things more difficult." So one day someone uploaded a trojan to my hosting provider via my webpage (oops) and the next day I found myself kicked off. They wouldn't send me a copy of the site, allow me to download anything, or ultimately, return my calls. I was really devastated at the time.

Then I had another hosting company for a while, back when I first launched robohara.com. They were a local start up and they were charging $25/year for hosting, so I couldn't resist that. That's where I started hosting review-o-matic.com and a couple other sites, too, each one at $25/month. And that was unlimited everything -- MySql storage, bandwidth, drive space ... everything. So one month I get an e-mail from them and it says that they are having hard times and so prices were going up to $35/year. I think at the time I had 4 sites hosted so this was only $40/year increase and I was glad to stick with them. Then like 2 months later they came back and said they were going from $35/year to $35/month and I was like OKAY WELL SEE YA.

That's when I decided to host my own stuff, an approach that's not for everybody and I don't recommend to most people. There are some advantages like being able to do on demand backups and having unlimited drive storage, but there are disadvantages too, mostly that there's no one to call or blame when shit breaks.

I find a happy medium between web hosting and building your own damn server is Linode. They sell me a virtual machine with guaranteed resources for around $200/yr. It sits in a datacenter and has everything below the OS managed for you, while you have full access to break everything else. If I knock it offline I have the ability to remote into the console to fix it, which is great.

The Happiness Engine wrote:I find a happy medium between web hosting and building your own damn server is Linode. They sell me a virtual machine with guaranteed resources for around $200/yr. It sits in a datacenter and has everything below the OS managed for you, while you have full access to break everything else. If I knock it offline I have the ability to remote into the console to fix it, which is great.

+1 for Linode.

I'm happy with it as, basically, the gateway from stuff I host at home to the external world.

Bruce