I've gotten downright tired of moving my site again and again. It seems there are no competent hosting companies anywhere on
planet. I don't ask for much. In addition to usual features for a paid web host, I just want my site to be up and relatively quick. Downtime should be measured in hours per year, and at it's slowest site should respond in less than half a second.So far I haven't found a single hosting company that even comes close. I've tried about a dozen different firms, and they've all come up short. In fact, most important rule of any web host is violated on a regular basis time and again. The sites are down and very slow. Virtually anything else can be tolerated, except for downtime.
Finally I sat back one day and thought long and hard about my options. I was getting very frustrated with my current hosting company because server was timing out on occasion, causing my sites to become unavailable for a few minutes here and a few minutes there.
I started looking for hosts and saw a word that caught my eye. The word was "dedicated". Now that was a thought - a whole machine all to myself. There was some appeal to that thought, but price was too high, or at least I thought so at time.
Looking closer into concept, I found a dedicated hosting service that was actually reasonably priced. For a couple of hundred dollars a month I had a web and mail server all to myself. Yes, I know that sounds high when compared to a shared hosting service, but remember this included an incredible amount of bandwidth, lots of disk space and plenty of power.
I paid for first month and soon discovered server had it's own name server software. This meant I no longer had to deal with an ISP for name server services.
What's so good about that? Well, as an example, some time ago I wanted to install Bigmailbox on a site. This would have allowed my visitors to have a mailbox named "theirname@renaissancefaire.org". I thought this would be a pretty cool service to offer my visitors.
The ISP would not make change necessary to install this feature. The change requires about 1 minute, yet they would not do it. Not even for a charge. With access to my own name server I could have made this change myself. It's very simple really. Just a one line modification.
Another thing I wanted to do on occasion is create subdomains. For example, wallpaper.renaissancefaire.org. This would allow me to create sites within sites in a logical, easy to remember format.
Most of my previous ISPs would not allow me to make these changes. One of them wanted to charge $10 per change. Ten dollars for a one minute modification. Now I can do this kind of thing myself, as often as I want.
