I really don’t want to jinks my luck with web servers. In short, I can recall the first hosting company I went with (io.com), and then, the last three.
Any of the three, I’d recommend for light-duty sites.
Pretty much a draw between Fatcow.com and HostGator.com for shared hosting deals. Both are good. Lately, I’ve been setting up more on HostGator.com, but it is a local company, with headquarters in Houston, tech in Austin, and the server farm in Dallas.
The ad reads:
FatCow’s ad, usually a little more clever:
I’ve had very good luck with FatCow, but I started with them when it was a local web host situated in Albuquerque, NM. On top of the old defense net pipeline, fast and good. In the last dozen years, FatCow’s basic price hasn’t changed while the amount of service has tripled.
I toyed with an outfit called iPage.com, and I was sorely disappointed. Funny to me, that company had the exact same backend as FatCow, but iPage was too slow for me. I tried it, though. I suspect it was a FatCow reseller.
For light to medium duty sites, not running too much in the way of traffic demands, I can easily recommend either FatCow.com or HostGator.com.
I’ve set up an equal number of sites on HostGator.com and had excellent results with the shared hosting services. They seem faster, work better, and have a real roulette wheel for tech support. Bet one, red or black, and you’ll either get a really good tech or someone who makes me want to threw the phone against the wall. Sort of a guessing game.
I moved to HostGator.com because I need more resources than a shared environment like FatCow offered. I was on a VPS — Virtual Dedicated Server — fast, efficient, and not able to dish out resources fast enough.
The upside is that HostGator helped with transitions, scripting and some coding issues. The problems arose from the limits of the CPU time. WordPress, any content management system, but WordPress for sure, is a resource hog. Oink. Running one site with volume, and a half dozen other sites, chewed up the limits of the Virtual Server. Which, back to the start, is what bumped me off FatCow. These are lots of traffic, high-demands.
Doesn’t take much digging to find lovers and haters for any service. What steered me away from Media Temple dot net was the large number of vocal haters. Gradually, that shifted, for whatever reason.
I was also desperate. I could spend more each month for CPU time, or find a better solution. MediaTemple.net has saved me so far.
Monitoring the bandwidth, CPU time, and I/O patterns, disk reads, the combined elements, so far, I’m well below the set limits for the account.
I’ve got two heavy photo-blogs, especially the ubiquitous side project, the weekly column, and any number of revolving and evolving projects (and devolving) in various stages of development.
What’s satisfying, thus far, about the (mt) set up, it’s got enough horsepower to pull everything I’ve got going, and there is enough room, bandwidth and CPU time, to take sustained bursts of traffic.
Cool.