Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8047705@N02/5560539738/
Speed kills, but I’m not talking about high velocity
My site has been up and down since last week; this is because I changed hosts last Sunday and decided to do a little cleaning up at the same time. I’ve been using Bluehost for almost a year now. The live support was helpful, and downtime rarely happened thanks to their 99.9% uptime promise. However, the speed was quite slow. At first, I thought it was just the fact that I had a lot of WordPress installs, but that was not the case. If anything, I was in buyer’s denial – after spending precious money on hosting and domain transfers, I couldn’t allow my site to devalue even further by changing hosts again; but that was then, and this is now.
(mt) ≠ Empty
So, this past weekend, my friend and Unspeakable Media partner-in-crime, Ian, suggested that we should move to Media Temple, after citing his own similar experiences with HostGator. So, I bit the bullet last Sunday and bought a month’s hosting as a trial. Moving is always stressful, but (mt) made it as easy as possible. At first, it was a little disorienting working with something that wasn’t CPanel, but you know what? I like the new interface. I miss only a couple things from CPanel such as the web-based file manager (which allows all sorts of file operations without all FTP protocol handshaking overhead) and SimpleScripts (with its large amount of applications). Aside from that, I have no other complaints. Now, for the good stuff of (mt).
Make it go faster
I’ve known speed before. I used to host with Ace of Space back in the day, but they were Canadian, so localized hosting always responded fast. However, many of my peers and colleagues in different areas of the world would say otherwise. So, I moved to US hosting to get wider reception. Unfortunately, it meant that the tables were turned and my link to the site was slow. After a string of hosts that culminated in going with Bluehost, (mt) proved to me that it was time to abandon inexpensively priced hosting. However, (mt) isn’t that much more expensive. Instead of paying $180 a year, I’m only paying roughly $30 more (if I decide to go with an annual subscription, and I most likely will). I’m only using their (gs) Grid-Service plan right now, but the (dv) Dedicated-Virtual may be the next step if the business takes off and I acquire enough clients. Only time will tell.
Frugality isn’t necessarily a bad thing
I’m not saying that Bluehost and HostGator are bad hosts because they are slow. Far from it. The problem was that I had outgrown them much faster than I originally thought I would. In fact, I was already leaps and bounds ahead of where I was when I moved to Bluehost, and I should have just went straight to (mt) in the first place. What I’ve taken away from my experiences with different hosts is this: there’s a time and place to be cheap, and that is when you are just starting out with freelancing or hosting. If you only host one site or you’re a casual enthusiast with limited funds, then either Bluehost or HostGator is the way to go. However, if you are a power user that needs that critical response time or has the extra cash in hand, then definitely go to (mt). In other words, don’t bite off more than you can chew, but make sure you meet your needs.
Or, you know, just do what I did and wing it.
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