Comments on: Which web hosting company is best

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:55:09 +0000

@Silvia
Host Jaguar is currently offering 50 GB storage and 5000 GB of transfer for $1.99/month. Clearly they are overselling. There’s no way they could have dedicated resources for that cost.

The average user is going to use only a tiny fraction of that, which is the whole basis of overselling. The difference might be that you could utilise those resources without having your account suspended. I couldn’t comment on whether they are better or worse than other hosts in this respect.

By: Silvia

Silvia — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:43:15 +0000

Overselling is one of the reason why I dont sign up with hostgator, bluehost, etc… If they can’t deliver, they shouldn’t advertise it, its misleading. If I upload 500gb worth of images/videos, they probably close your account for overusing their server resources. I use Host Jaguar they dont oversell and I am happy with them.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:28:14 +0000

Another interesting web hosting company I’ve been reading about is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.

Although one of its strengths is hosting “controversial” sites, the main thing than piqued by interest is the way NearlyFreeSpeech.NET charges for its services. The company offers shared hosting, but rather than overselling resources for a fixed monthly amount, you are charged only for the resources you actually use.

By: Tom Asaro

Tom Asaro — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:38:39 +0000

Hey Scott -

Thought you should check out Linode Virtual Servers: http://www.linode.com/

We’re one of the pioneers of the industry and believe our Linode Manager is heads above the rest.

-Tom

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:15:02 +0000

Thanks, Kayla.

You’re quite right: the better hosts do have ways of dealing with customers who take up more than their share of resources. I hear that DreamHost places soft limits on the amount of CPU each account gets.

With a Xen VPS, CPU can be allocated to each virtual machine, usually in proportion to the amount of memory. Your VPS has a guaranteed amount of CPU, regardless of what other VPSes are doing on that server.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:08:40 +0000

I’ve tried quite a few (DreamHost, WebFaction, ASO and BlueHost) and I’m a big WebFaction fan: from what I’ve seen their servers seemed the fastest of the bunch. Their system let’s you install pretty much anything so it’s almost like having your own VPS without having to maintain it yourself.

By: Kayla

Kayla — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:36:04 +0000

This blog was really well written and interesting. =)

“Your account is lumped in with hundreds of others and the performance you get depends what these neighbours are doing.”

The best hosts know how to sort those resulting struggles out fast and efficiently because they definitely will happen, even if the server is blazing fast and has only fifty accounts. Shared hosting = unpredictable. Yet, it will be efficient in the right hands.