I've admittedly been bad about posting up here lately. But, I have a pretty good excuse -- I've been super-duper busy lately. A big part of that was the fact that I moved all my sites to a new host not just once, but twice, in the last couple months. To hopefully save you a similar agony, I'd like to offer a little advice on choosing the right host for you.

Don't go too cheap. When I first signed up with 1&1 hosting, I was a sophomore in high school and was on a very limited budget. As such 1&1's shared hosting package was a great solution. But, as I became more and more serious about my web presence and eventually came to have a full blown web development business, the slow servers, constant downtime, and limited database storage space were issues that I could no longer deal with. I had been researching different hosts for a long while and finally bought the bullet, so to speak, and moved almost everything from 1&1 over to Mosso in January. Which brings me to my second point...

Don't go too expensive either. The $100/month base price for Mosso's cloud hosting was a big jump from what I was paying before, but I figured that it would be money well spent if it gave me the type of dependability and scalability that I was looking for. But, after I moved, I found that my compute cycles (their way of calculating server usage) was adding up very quickly and that, by the time I achieved the traffic I was looking for, I would be paying well over the $100/month. With a little handy math, I came to realize that I would need roughly 125,000 monthly unique page views to break even (figuring with a $0.80 eCPM, which is typical to the sites I run), but by the time I hit that I would have well exceeded the compute cycle allotment. So, there was really no way of me ever making a profit while running on the cloud computing environment. And so, even though I was in love with the idea of cloud computing, I realized that it was unfeasible for me to remain there.

Like Goldilocks, you have to find the host that is just right. For me, that was Dreamhost. I went with one of their virtual server packages which gives me a ton of flexibility and all the cool goodies that I'm looking for. Plus, they have managed servers there so when I do grow to the type of traffic I want someday, I'll be able to switch over easily (they actually copy all the files for you). Sure, it's not as cool of a solution as the instant scalability of the cloud, but it makes a lot mores sense for a small business like my own.

I'm almost done with moving everything now and will hopefully be able to get back to all the projects that have been left on the back burner very soon. Check back soon for news on those.

Tags: 1&1, cloud hosting, Dreamhost, managed server, Mosso, shared hosting, virtual server, web host, web hosting

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 7:11 pm by Robert James Reese and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.