| eodiv |
03-11-2014 07:43 PM |
Google/Blogger are sketching me out, compared the "Big 4" Value hosts and went w/Arvixe.
With Google still swooping in like fucking Rodan and indiscriminately wiping out adult-themed sites, I decided that it was time to suck it up, plunk down a few dollars and get real, paid hosting for my adult-oriented site(s).
I'm far from a hosting novice, I've had domains/shared hosting since the 90's, and as a result, I've become incredibly difficult to satisfy over time. The host I use now for my non-adult stuff gets $30 a month from me but they've truly delivered 99.9% uptime and if I need support for something, they are there in a matter of minutes and will do anything for me so it's money well spent. I realize you are less likely to get that with budget hosts so I'm going into this with toned down expectations.
I narrowed my search down to HostGator, Cirtex, Certified and Arvixe. HostGator was eliminated immediately as they continue to get worse under the control of EIG (seriously, if you know people hosted w/HG, get them out NOW). Cirtex left a bad taste in my mouth a couple of years back when they abruptly left Web Hosting Talk and left a bunch of their customers hanging. So it was down to Certified and Arvixe and I was leaning towards Certified until they opened the floodgates and let loose a sea of "Are you fucking kidding me?".
Certified has always been big on running promos/coupon codes. I'd say it's a fair statement that these promotions drive in the majority of their new business. I know from experience that it takes no more than 3 minutes to set up a promo code in WHMCS but, guess what? Certified seems to be unable to do that. They have various graphics and calls to action strewn across every corner of their site "Use this code, get 50% off!", etc. That'd be nice...if the fucking code worked. After that facepalm, I was left with Arvixe.
I'm skeptical of any/all "Unlimited" web hosting company so the first place I went on Arvixe's site was to check out their TOS and AUP. I was completely surprised to find out that both are extremely educational. They define unlimited and take it a step further by linking to a couple of well-written knowledge base articles concerning resource usage - CPU, Memory, Processes and MySQL and their limitations. They clearly explain everything in a way that even someone just starting out with hosting can understand which is not only strange for a budget host, it's strange for most web hosts in general.
After browsing their site a bit more and being at least OK with what I saw, I went ahead and signed up. I only signed up for a month so I can bail if shit goes to hell but based on my initial impression, I like Arvixe a lot. I got logged into my cPanel and was pleasantly surprised to see that they have integrated the super awesome suite of analytics/optimization tools known as SiteApps and even more surprised to see that they have an entire row of tools dedicated to monitoring and managing your resource usage. They have tools for HTTP and CRON CPU, Memory and I/O usage. I have to say, I don't think I've seen any other host go to that length.
So I'm off to a good start I guess. I've been raging through getting a WordPress install setup and haven't noticed any slowdown at all from the server which is more than I can say for past hosts I have used as when I setup a WP install, I fly - non-stop action. On top of that, I'm most impressed with how hard they seem to try and bee forthright about their policies and they give their clients the tools they need to monitor/manage their usage. That's definitely commendable.
An initial thumbs up for Arvixe. We'll see how it goes.
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