Dedicated Virtual Host Comparison

I began this post a few weeks again as Man­a­Na­tion was grow­ing, and it was about to out­grow the Godaddy shared host­ing. In the process of writ­ing it I hit a money crunch and GoDaddy revamped their shared host­ings, upping lim­its and so I did a small ser­vice upgrade which has since allowed us to con­tinue sit­ting on their server. How­ever, I’m again con­sid­er­ing the move, so this post came out of the dust closet and here it is.

TrickJarrett.com is hosted on a box with a friend, Smil­ing Peanut host­ing. He does great and if I have issues I just text him or call him, how­ever his box has lim­its unfor­tu­nately. I’ve been host­ing the files for Man­a­Na­tion on the Godaddy shared account for months now and we hit my band­width lim­its before the upgrade in shared hosting.

Now the sad truth is, if you search for “web host” you’ll get a slew of sites “review­ing” hosts and giv­ing their insights, some good, some bad. The facts are though that a lot of those reviews are bogus — either by the host them­selves, or their mud sling­ing com­peti­tors and we, the con­sumers, have no way to know which is which. So I choose the best option — ignore them and talk to peo­ple! And so I sent out emails to friends, ask­ing input.

So armed with this infor­ma­tion I set out yes­ter­day to find the next home. All infor­ma­tion is pulled from their site, and is based on their month-to-month pric­ing if available.

To be clear: I receive ZERO com­pen­sa­tion from any of these hosts in any way, there is no income for me from this post, this is purely for my own research and to help others.

GoDaddy
Pack­age Name: Econ­omy Plan
Price: $29.99
Space: 10 GB
Band­width: 500 GB
Other sites on host: Thou­sands. They’re the Wal-Mart of hosts.
Notes: They’re my cur­rent host, I’m includ­ing them for the sake of com­plete­ness. Their sys­tem though is too big and I want to move on. Plus the sto­ries about them yank­ing host­ing on ques­tion­able sites both­ers me.

Blue­host
Pack­age Name: It’s their only one
Price: $6.95
Space: 1.5 TB
Band­width: 15 TB
Other sites on host: Coverville.com
Notes: Hav­ing only one plan, and hav­ing it set so high for space and band­width is a red flag. Sure they will prob­a­bly work as a host, and for the band­width it’s prob­a­bly a good deal. But I’m want­ing an account for mul­ti­ple domains and extensibility.

Dreamhost
Pack­age Name: Again, only one plan
Price: $10.95 going month to month
Space: 500 GB
Band­width: 5 TB
Other sites on host: WhatThe­Cast (an audio pod­cast I’m on)
Notes: Again, one plan, makes me ner­vous. They are well known but reports are that they’re ques­tion­able in uptime, ser­vice, band­width speeds etc…

Mosso
Pack­age Name: Only one here too, “The Host­ing Cloud“
Price: $100
Space: 50 GB
Band­width: 500 GB
Other sites on host: kottke.org
Notes: I’ve heard great things about them, and their one plan isn’t the Wal-mart brand in pric­ing, so I would be okay going with them except for the price. I’m ask­ing for cook­ies and to eat them too, I know.

aSmal­lO­r­ange
Pack­age Name: Per­sonal
Price: $50
Space: 10 GB
Band­width: 150 GB
Other sites on host: ???
Notes: Another one I’ve heard of, they spe­cial­ized in non-profits and such for a while before open­ing up to others.

Net­work­So­lu­tions
Pack­age Name: VPS Stan­dard
Price: $50.00
Space: 10 GB
Band­width: 500 GB
Other sites on host: ???
Notes: Net­work­So­lu­tions is an old name in web host­ing and domain reg­is­tra­tion, they’re cer­tainly not going any­where. How­ever, they are also doing some shady things with domain reg­is­tra­tions, so I’ll likely avoid them.

Medi­aTem­ple
Pack­age Name: dv Base
Price: $50
Space: 20 GB
Band­width: 1 TB
Other sites on host: PaulStamatiou.com, and numer­ous oth­ers
Notes: You see their ban­ners every­where. Mostly on glitzy tech sites and you just go oooooh and ahhhh. I like their ser­vice, reviews are good, but I have one issue — any sort of backup on the dv plan is their “Snap­shot Back­ups” for $20/month. Which may be a deal breaker, we’ll see.

Slice­Host
Pack­age Name: 256Slice
Price: $20
Space: 10 GB
Band­width: 100 GB
Other sites on host: ???
Notes: I found this host on rec­om­men­da­tion from a dis­cus­sion on news.ycombinator.com, they were rec­om­mended mul­ti­ple times in that thread.

Over­all the land­scape is rough and uneven for ded­i­cated vir­tual hosts, there seem to be two sets of pric­ing, either the super cheap or the pricier bou­tique ser­vices. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But I fig­ured I would share my infor­ma­tion with the rest of you.