The Search for the Hosty Grail

As you may be aware, I have switched hosts on this blog twice now in the four months since it started. Its first host had a server crash, was down for most of two days, and to top it off, their backup was ten days old (yes, you should be doing your own daily backups, but ten days? Sheesh!). Two days up-n-downtime was enough to confuse the Yahoo bots into indexing some rather odd-looking pages, and obviously it lost me a lot of traffic. It was a new host, and I have hopes that they’ll improve, because the guy seemed keen on doing so, but I wanted a sure thing now.

So I found a slightly more expensive host that promised all sorts of cool servers and stuff. And they were slow as molasses most mornings for several hours - I know I would have just skipped a site loading that slowly, were I searching for it. Plus, they put a note in my cPanel urging me to sign up under them for that free laptop scam that’s all over the net, so they can get $1,000 US and buy some better equipment. Call me a prude, but I have a problem with that. Oh, and then they suspended my account the instant I canceled my PayPal subscription - even though I was paid up through April 27.

It’s just very hard to tell a good host from one that lets you down. There are some expensive ones that suck. I have a $12/year host that’s been astounding on several sites - so much so that I’m thinking about reselling for them. I’ll keep you posted.

Speaking of reselling, so many hosts are resellers for other hosts, that it’s hard to pin down just who and what equipment you’re dealing with sometimes. Take all the many, many resellers whose equipment sits in The Planet datacenter in Dallas, TX: some of them are nearly flawless, and others are practically scams.

That said, since this blog is all about letting you get the benefit of my mistakes so you can avoid them, there is some research you can do that might at least eliminate some of the really bad options.

(1) Check the host’s WhoIs record. From there, you can get the actual nameservers and IP address your site would be sitting on with this host. You can also see their type of server equipment. If you have any suspicions that that they may be someone you know online to be a scam artist, poke around in this file and you may just find something.

(2) Run the nameserver through a reverse IP checker. I’m partial to the Class C Checker at WebRankInfo because you can check several at once. From there, you now have the exact IP address of the server your site would be sitting on. Sometimes the host’s domain is on the same server, but sometimes it’s not.

(3) Take that nameserver IP and check the host’s speed at Alertra. You can run either a domain name or an IP number throught. Alertra is a great service, but you’ll get varying results depending when you run your check. Still, compare it to a few others you know at the same time, to get some idea of the speed.

(4) Now take the nameserver IP and go back to WhoIs. Run it through. Look at “Reverse IP” to see how many sites are on that IP. You can only cram so many onto one IP before you begin to have serious load problems - no matter the quality of the equipment. The host I just left had 211 sites on my IP. My new host has 94. So far, the load time seems far improved on the new host.

By the way, I’m definitely loving the speed of my new host so far: I will keep you updated on how well it does, and give you a recommendation if warranted.