I’m about to launch my latest and greatest project and I need to find a reliable web hosting company that will cater to my every need. I use GoDaddy for :skyecade online and I am quite happy using them, for the most part. There are, however, some features that GoDaddy just doesn’t offer.
Here is a list of what I’m looking for:
- Reasonable amount of disk space (5GB to 20GB)
- Reasonable amount of bandwidth (15GB to 50GB)
- POP3/POP3 Secure Email Support
- IMAP/Secure IMAP Email Support
- Aliased Domains
- Subdomains
- MySQL Databases
- CGI-BIN
- Server Side Includes
- FTP Access
- Shell Access (SSH)
- Cron Jobs
- PHP Version 4 or 5
- Perl 5
- Python
- Ruby / Ruby On Rails
- MySQL 4.1
- SSL Secure Server (maybe)
- Half way decent support
- And it must be on a Linux box
Price isn’t too much of a factor and I really don’t need everything on that list, but I would like room to grow if I need it. GoDaddy doesn’t offer cron jobs on their shared hosting accounts. I really could have used that feature a couple of months back. Oh well, you live, you learn
I’ve narrowed it down to 7 companies. They all come pretty close to what I’m looking for and they all have a pretty good reputation. Some better than others.
And the final contestants are:
Here’s where it gets tricky. Some companies have every feature that I’m looking for, but receive mediocre reviews from its users (Bluehost), whilst other companies receive stellar reviews, but lack certain features I would really prefer to have (Hostgator & asmallorange). When will this madness end!
After months of reading reviews and talking to admins, I’m going to buckle down and pick a hosting company tonight. Or maybe tomorrow night. Let me just read one more review. Just kidding, I’ll let you know who I choose and why.
Tags: cyberculture, development, hosting, projects, website
