Considering new hosting providers

2007-06-18 16:40:00

Four company logos

Round and round the bottle goes ...

I've been toying with an idea for a while now. And this morning I had a visit from my field manager Raimond, who helped me on my way.

While TransIP is a great hosting company with great tech support I've always felt that I could be getting more bang for my buck. I'd see glimpses of other providers' offers on the web, but I chose to ignore them. Recently though, I've been running into the limits of my site's storage space. This leaves me with three choices:
* Make my site smaller by removing video and/or audio.
* Upgrade my hosting plan with TransIP.
* Move to a new hosting company.

I'd originally chosen the second option because I felt some form of loyalty towards TransIP. They're a great company after all. But after talking to Raimond about Servage I'm not so sure anymore.



Over lunch I decided for myself to go with the third option: moving my site and domain to a new provider. This would involve some work and preparations, but would save me money while giving me much more storage space and other nice features. Right now I'm split between three different companies.

Servage
A few of my colleagues seem enthousiastic about these guys. They offer huge storage space (>300GB) and bandwidth that I'll never use up anyway. The neat thing about their hosting is that they provide you with various software installations at the click of a button. Need a CMS? Pick one out of six and install with one click. Need a forum? Need a blog? The same thing. Unfortunately their connectivity options seem a bit limited though, with FTP and FTPS.

Besides, since I roll my own code and CMS I don't need all the software they offer.

Joyent
These guys are really cool, with a beautiful house style and good web applications for groups of people working together. They also provide a lot of help to the (Open) Solaris community, which counts for me. The downside to Joyent is that their plans are quite expensive for my needs. I have no need for collaboration tools as I'll only be hosting my website there. At $15 a month this is targeted at companies, not private individuals.

Dreamhost
I've heard good things from a few of my friends and fellow bloggers about Dreamhost. Their plans are a bit more expensive than what Servage has on offer, but I also like a few of their additional features. SSH shell access, SCP connectivity and such are great options in my book. Besides, their pricing isn't that bad either.

I'll be mulling over all of my options for a few days before making my choice. I'll get back to you guys by then.

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