Sometimes the decision to host your own domain is not as easy as just going to blogger or wordpress.com and using a hosted blog. My post count is down due to a break I have taken over recent weeks and a constant battle just to keep my blog operating.
Currently I am using byohosting.com as my hosting provider at $1 US per month. As I make no income from my blogging this is an appropriate investment giving my limited finances. My current experiences with this hosting company are that you get what you pay for. I get email that does not work reliably (hence the move to google), technical support issues (like when my site is down for 2 days) and no response, excuses that there are hosting problems as their ISP has banned their IP’s and other annoying issues.
I can forgive them these issues, however I have discovered the keys to a good hosting solution, namely No Interference and good communication. As a programmer, I expect my programs to keep on working unless there is an unpredictable third party that comes along and ruins things.
With my blog, I have had it setup with the correct permissions, function calls, access records and databases. I expected it to work in my absence from checking and updating it daily. I was very wrong there. Obviously my provider is making changes on their servers, this is only obvious because of the problems that have arisen and the way they were effected. I have had the site down because they changed apache’s security logs, I have had disruptions because scripts that previously had access to my files and folders were suddenly locked out. Some PHP functions ceased working because php had been upgraded and those functions had been depreciated, finally my database had other issues.
If I had my way then these changes would not have been made, as they were not necessary for my site to continually operate. If I had been told about what upgrades were going to go through and when I could have tested my site. Hence, if they did not change things or told me about changes then I would not have such a negative opinion of this host.
if possible this is what i would do; I would engage one of the new VPS service providers. For those who don’t know a VPS or virtual private server is a setup where you have access to a virtual machine that you have control over. A virtual machine is where a server runs multiple instances of operating systems, each of which acts like an individual machine. Basically this is unimportant to you, it means that the environment where you are hosting your files / applications is under your control. You should be able to setup your own web server, databases, configuration files, libraries and routing. This means that you will not get people fiddling with things and breaking them (when you leave your site it will be as you left it) and if there are changes; you make them and they will only be in your best interest.
Currently the problem with VPS is that for the amateur blogger / web site owner they are still too expensive, but I note they are coming down all the time.
Some of the other benefits, apart from stability is that they are centrally managed, centrally backed up and if necessary you can poach some of the memory that is being used by other virtual machines on the same box. As you are not worried about hardware, you will not need to upgrade yourself and be stuck with co-lo fees or other negatives of servers.
At the end of the day, if your site is important to you, and you can afford the fees then I would recommend a VPS over any shared hosted solution, as control, backups, lack of hardware support is something that all but the dedicated should need.
