Ryan McFarland

I mentioned my rotation through hosts in the past and probably sounded pretty happy right now.  I am.  But i was happy with my previous hosts until i shopped around and saw what others were offering.  Maybe it is time for me to start looking for feature-rich but cheap web hosting again.

Some seem to offer significant one-time perks like Yahoo or Google “credit.”  I really need the ability to host unlimited domains because of the number of sites, forwarded domains (ever go to zieak.net? or cenamartin.com?), and spur of the moment start-ups that will fail in the next day.

I definitely need an intuitive and fast web interface, easy setup for SSL certificates (for security enabled sites), and… well, that seems to ba about it.

In related news, Zoom Bikes now has changed the site format to a blog.  The site still needs to have a custom template fleshed out but there are some neat things posted (and quite a few things that are regurgitated from this site.

I’ve moved my web projects around to a few different hosts.  It isn’t just about finding cheap web hosting. You also need to worry about uptime, features you might use (my last shift was made because i wanted to do more with PHP) and convenience. You also might need to worry about bandwidth limitations, storage space, email, sql and other perks.

I love that my current host uploads things like Wordpress that make me able to update my installation with just a click.  I don’t have to download and upload and backup and all that.  It does make me a little lazy but that’s what computers do right?  They make things easier.  Computer use wouldn’t have exploded if we were all using DOS.  If web browsing was still just text based i would probably still need TV for entertainment.

I have come to not even read my writing most of the time - I just scan for some red squiggly underlines.  I digress.  I love that my current host has “green” servers.  They buy carbon credits to offset their CO2 contributions.  I think there is a whole world of profit to me made in that realm.

I have a few sites that i’ve been working on… I should unveil them shortly.