So, I took the plunge and moved my hosting from my computer behind a cable modem to a Dreamhost account. At US$8/mo (if you pay for 2 years) it’s pretty damned cheap for a full-featured hosting account.
If any of you notice any problems with this blog or the gallery, let me know. Everything should be faster (unless you’re in my house, then it will be slower) too.
By the way, if you want a Dreamhost account and follow this link to Dreamhost (or enter the promo code GREGBAKER01), you’ll use my promo code and get $40 off any hosting package. (I get stuff too, so I’m not being totally altruistic here.)
December 23rd, 2007 at 7:32 pm
A lot of people seem to be using Dreamhost but it’s not the best choice by several measures.
1) Uptime. I’ve been monitoring uptime of several hosts for about 600 days each. And the cumulative uptime statistics of Dreamhost has been the worst at 99.91% versus 99.94% (BlueHost), 99.95% (AN Hosting), and 99.97% (Lunar Pages).
2) Control Panel. Personal preferences I guess, but every other host is using cPanel 11 right now, and Dreamhost still uses their own control panel that I personally find less useful.
3) Jurisdiction. Dreamhost is based in the US, and as such is subject to the USA PATRIOT Act. Granted, all of the other hosts already mentioned suffer from the same problem, but there’s a Canadian startup called HostPapa (started in 2006) which has the same price and offering as the aforementioned hosts, which is not subject to the Patriot Act. I’ve recently started monitoring HostPapa’s uptime and it’s been 99.97% so far.
addendum: it keeps telling me I didn’t pass math despite having entered the correct answer. I’m guessing it relies on some sort of client side scripting? In which case it’s not very user-friendly. Anyways, I’ve enabled scripting this time to see what happens….
addendum addendum: still nop. Does it use cookies too? I’ll enable that and try again.
addendum addendum addendum: so far nothing works. please check your verification script. This is my last try.
December 23rd, 2007 at 7:33 pm
ah that worked. there’s absolutely no reason you need to set a cookie for that. just doing a regular post and server side verification is enough.