Our Web Host
Posted on May 27, 2007
Filed Under Web Hosting |
I have only used three hosting companies for our websites. Not many, I know, but why fix something that doesn’t need fixing?
If you count the free space we got from our ISP, you could say we have used four, but that isn’t relevant to this article (although I will be talking about it elsewhere). We are actually still using this space for our original site, Digital Wallpapers.
The first company we used was ipowerweb back in 2003 for Digital Car Wallpapers. They offered an excellent package at the time with 30GB of webspace and the same in bandwidth if I remember correctly. They also threw in a free domain name for about $95.00 for the year. This converted to roughly £50.00 so it was definitely money well spent.
We were up and running in no time and initially found the service very good with hardly any downtime and fast delivery of pages. The real plus with ipowerweb is that you can have an online conversation with someone if problems occur with your website, emails or any other aspect of your account. This is much more convenient than having to wait for a reply to an email. Initially this service was also excellent, but I soon found myself having to wait longer than the last time every time I tried contacting them.
At the end of 2006 I noticed Digital Car Wallpapers was starting to experience much more downtime than usual. Hardly a week would go by without the site experiencing some degree of downtime. I don’t run any software that tracks the uptime, but my stats showed days when I would only get 24 visitors instead of the usual 4,000 plus. Obviously something was not right. I contacted ipowerweb and they suggested I upgrade to a better, faster server. This time with silly amounts (2000GB) of bandwidth and equally ludicrous amounts of storage space (loadsamegabytes).
Transferring meant a little bit of downtime whilst everything was moved over and the DNS settings were realigned. I dreaded the thought of this, but the amount of downtime I was having left me with no option but to go ahead. Just before the final move, I started to experience two days a week of downtime, which made the situation completely unacceptable. I believe this downtime contributed to a slight drop in Google rankings shortly afterwards. It can’t be a good thing for a website to be down when the search engine spiders are visiting! Since the move, the site has performed well with virtually no downtime.
The site reports supplied with the ipowerweb hosting accounts are excellent. They are powered by awstats and are very easy to read and understand. These reports where actually the deciding factor when it came to looking for a host for other projects. For this site, however, we have had to look for a different host because ipowerweb cannot handle our .co.uk domain extension.
The decision to use Lunarpages for this site was very easy to make as we have used them before for Digital Desktop Wallpaper. They provide an excellent hosting package with enough bandwidth and storage space to manage the site very easily. The only downside of the Lunarpages package is the reporting software (generated by Webalizer). This is a little difficult to understand and when it refers to ‘hits’, it is referring to the amount of items, such as images, requested per page. So, if you have ten images on a page and it is requested once, it will have ten hits rather than the one ‘hit’ is has actually had. With a bit of study you could get your head around the meaning of all the figures, but I decided to use Google Analytics to track performance instead!
The other hosting company we have used is Fasthosts. They are a UK based company who we have used for a couple of personal websites and for the original flowercarole site (flowercarole.co.uk). This site was listed well with Yahoo but did not perform very well with Google. I put this down to two things - 1) Googles sandbox and or 2) A .co.uk extension hosted in the UK. I decided to use ipowerweb again to set up flowercarole.com with a US host to enable global listings.
This strategy took a few months to work but in the end flowercarole.com started to rank with the search engines instead of flowercarole.co.uk (which was pointed to the .com site). I would have liked to set up a 301 redirect with Fasthosts, as this is the best way to tell a search engine a website has moved whilst keeping its search engine rankings, but their hosting account wouldn’t allow me to do it. The only people I would recommend Fasthosts to would be those residing in the UK who are looking for listings within UK search engines. The service is not disappointing and will provide the first time webmaster with everything needed to get going, but I much prefer the services provided by ipowerweb and Lunarpages and will continue to use them for future projects. For .com sites I will be using ipowerweb, and for anything ipowerweb cannot handle, I will be using Lunarpages.
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