Saturday, 4th June 2005
Hard time finding good PHP5 Webhosting
Today i was hunting for good PHP5 webhosting to host my site. My current webhosting ends at the end of the month and to me it seems like it wasnt early enough.
The package i used was good only for a starter website. It had limited web-space (only 20MB) and this proved to be a huge constraint. The software packages installed on the linux server were fairly decent and for the price i was paying, not a bad setup.
But now i have additional requirements, PHP5 was the most important of them. PHP support on linux servers is as expected as ASP is on Windows. To my suprise most of them are running PHP4 rather that PHP5. This made my hunt for a reasonably priced hosting with PHP5 support harder than i imagined.
Webspace is something you can never have enough of, especially if your looking to publish picture galleries. With newer, better digital cameras with higher resolution, image file sizes are much larger and fill up disk space fairly quickly. One thing i saw about web hosting and disk space is that you get what you pay for. I was looking for something the the range of 500 MB. And my budget was not to stretch more than $10 per month.
Some of the hosts i considered were
http://www.iniquinet.comhttp://www.nexcess.nethttp://www.quadrahosting.com
inquinet offers both PHP4 and PHP5 support (Files with the .php extension are processed by PHP4 while .php5 files are processed by PHP5).For $10 they offered 300MB Storage and 10 GB Transfer. This package seemed decent except that i would have liked 500MB for the price i was paying. Read more about their package.
nexcess.net offered a PHP5 package for $6.95, 500MB and 15GB transfer. Compared to inquinet, this seemed a better package.Their domain registration was a bit pricey at $15/year.
Quadra is a hosting company in Australia. Their hosting package seemed competitive but for some reason, the fact that they weren't US based deterred me from choosing them.
As my search continued, i stumbled upon dotgeek. They offer free PHP5 hosting. The Dotgeek Hosting package includes 15 MB of space, yourname.dotgeek.org, 1 email address, MySQL Database PostgreSQL database, SQLite database and ftp access in the dotgeek server. To quote from their site.
You should apply and use our free hosting package only if you intend to use it for development purpose or to host your resume, blog etc. You should not use the space for music, images to be used in other sites (e.g. Ebay). If at any stage you wish to close your account, please let us know.Dotgeek is providing this service free with no "catch". We do not offer other paid hosting plans therefore we are not providing you with a service with a financially driven mindset. That said, you are free to contribute with a link, telling your friends, or helping out in the forums.Each Application is carefully reviewed by a human. Therefore, please be as specific as you can in the About Me field, like why you think you need this free hosting, how old are you etc. If you write just few lines like "I want one" your application will be rejected. If you can avoid free email addresses like hotmail.com or yahoo.com.
Perfect i thought. Ideal for me to test my PHP5 site and also ride out the time before my hosting package expires in less than a month time. However the catch comes in when you try and obtain an account. They require you to provide an Authorisation Key (which according to them is required when monthly slots are exhausted). Now the only way to get an authorization key is if an existing member sends me an invite or i need to wait till start of a new month. WTF!!!. There goes any FREE hosting option (even though this was only a stop gap solution).
There was a brief point of time when i toyed with the idea of hosting my site with 4D WebHosting. Their package seemed a steal compared to others. Although i've heard about "Something that sounds too good to be real is probably not", the temptation to go for a package of following details seemed hard to resist.
2,000 MB Storage50 GB TransferCGI, PHP5, MySqlAdditional 1000 MB of Disk Space at $2.95 per monthAdditional 1000 MB Monthly Transfer $0.50 per month
I had very nearly signed up for this package. A query i asked was promptly replied to. All seemed well till i read this.The non flattering reviews on this page would make anyone shy away from the web hosting service. It is easier to believe bad reviews than good review which are often bloated and misleading. I even mailed them about my concerns about these review. Quite expectedly they didnt reply.
I finally decided to go for the hosting package of nexcess.net. Although it isnt cheap as peanuts, their package seems moderate and the review i have read didnt seem too bad. A plus for me is that the hosting package has a 30 day money back guarantee. Although it is unlikely that i will more to another package company. If for whatever reason i am not satisfied with the service or hosting, or find a new package, it is comforting to note that there is a possibility to recover my money.
My domain however still is registered with the old company (webcomindia.net) since their domain registration (after converting to US $) is well priced since it works out to less that $10 while most hosting companies charge between $15-$20 for domain registration.
Posted by Nikhil on Saturday, 4th June 2005 in TechnoBabble
Comments
Nikhil, I wanted to thank you for the mention here and we're glad to have you! We are committed to making your stay a good one! Chris
Posted by: Chris Wells on Tuesday 19th of July 2005 10:38:13 AM
Thanks Chris, for the comments. But the pleasure is all mine. So far i have had a good experience with nexcess.net, except for minor glitches with the SMTP server and file permission issue (which i still havent completely resolved) but this is to be expected i guess. But all in all, i am a happy customer and i hope to stay with nexcess.net for quite a while. -nikhil
Posted by: Nikhil on Tuesday 19th of July 2005 02:07:38 PM