Hosting Lessons: Better doesn’t mean better

by Sapphire (October 30, 2007)

This is the first post in a series about lessons I’ve learned in choosing and dealing with hosts. Expect it to be fairly random, but possibly useful.

Today’s lesson, “Better doesn’t mean better” came from the time I set up Project B-2 Bomber on an expensive, well-reputed host. I was tired of the downtime with cheaper hosts, and I wanted a fast, reliable site for all the new traffic I was getting.

Reliable, I got. Fast? Not so much. It never loaded quickly, and sometimes it was painfully slow. The host said the problems were with certain Wordpress plugins I was using, but disabling them didn’t seem to help. The host was on Plesk, so I began to wonder if maybe Wordpress just works better with Cpanel. To this day, I really don’t know what the problem was. I don’t think the host sucked. I just think that what’s awesome for 99% of all sites is not necessarily going to be so impressive for the other 1%.

So what’s the lesson here? Hosting is always trial and error. Don’t think if you spend enough or go with the best reputation, your site will run perfectly. Don’t think switching to a VPS or similar, or a clustered environment, will solve everything, either. There is a solution out there for you, but you have to keep looking, don’t make long term commitments until you’ve been there at least 3 months (I’d suggest more like 6), and be patient.

Currently, B-2 Bomber is on DownTownHost, one of the best-reputed Cpanel hosts around, and it’s performing quite well. We’ll see how it goes. I think this means Wordpress works better with Cpanel, so Wordpress bloggers should look for Cpanel hosts… but things change. And that’s another thing no amount of spending or reputation can guarantee you won’t have to deal with.

Posted in Hosting
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