Week in Review

[kate_nepveu]

Wednesday: file brief with the Supreme Court that I researched, helped draft, and helped recruit signatories for.

Thursday: file brief with the Second Circuit that I wrote and then re-wrote at the last minute (see Wednesday).

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: collapse and recover. Have sinus headache. Do laundry, watch anime, curse at web host.

So I've had it with my web host (Affordablehost.com) and I'm getting a new one. I understand that sometimes servers go down, even repeatedly—but when I submit a support ticket saying, "24 hours ago, you put up a bulletin saying, 'this problem should be fixed with 15-20 minutes.' It's still not fixed for me, and the bulletin hasn't been updated. What's the status?" Then I do not want to get a response saying "check the bulletin," especially when that bulletin still hasn't been updated from yesterday's 20-minute estimate!

After looking at several review sites, I've narrowed it down to BlueHost, Lunarpages, and HostGator. All offer the features I want and far more bandwidth, storage, etc., than I'll ever need; all appear to have very good reputations for service. HostGator is more expensive, but otherwise I don't seem much to choose between them. Anyone have any experiences with these three that they'd like to share?

(Tomorrow I will test their support by contacting them with a question about transferring over, but that's for tomorrow.)

Comments

[aor.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about those three, but I've been with pair.com for years, and have never had a problem. I get no traffic of any consequence, though. Mainly my email redirects through them. The appear to be more expensive than average.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, that's a lot more expensive--I need PHP and MySQL, as well as several e-mail addresses and FTP logins.

I'm really hoping to stick to those three, since they got good reviews across a range of sites.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I was going to be all, "They look like they're $18 -- how much cheaper can that sort of hosting be?" And then I looked at the ones you mentioned, and crikey! $7 a month for all sorts of elaborate features and limits? That seems preposterously inexpensive...

[kate_nepveu]

Doesn't it? And yet it seems to be the new standard. Hey, I'll take it . . .

[kate_nepveu]

(I mean, yes, overselling and all, but I'm not likely to push those limits so really, as long as I have a half-dozen e-mail and FTP accounts, PHP, and MySQL, I'm good . . . )

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I sort of suspect that anyone who gets even close to those putative limits would get dismissed from customerhood rather quickly. Even so, though, that's still frustratingly cheap.

("Frustratingly" because Panix's disk and bandwidth allocations are draconianly strict, for more money than those places charge; but Panix's services are (presumably!) so much better that I don't want to just switch to a discount hosting place.)

[kate_nepveu]

Good articles on overselling etc. here: http://whreviews.com/

Apparently it's more likely to be CPU/RAM usage that gets you kicked, which I may be asking HostGator about (e.g., "is a comment spam attack going to push me over the server resources allocation?").

If you like Panix, I doubt there's a reason to switch.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Interesting site!

As for Panix, when I say draconian, I mean it: 75MB of space, and 250MB of transfer. It works for me (as long as I empty out my spam traps at least every two days), but only barely -- and if I wanted to put up any pictures on the web, yeah, no. But I really really don't want to trust my email to anything less reliable, so. I toy with the idea of setting up a second domain just for hosting bandwidth-intensive stuff, but can't quite justify paying double hosting fees every month.

[kate_nepveu]

If you weren't pseudonymous you could get a paid LJ and use the Scrapbook. Or I think Flickr is free, isn't it?