I've been hosted on
webhost4life for about 2 years now, and I was starting to see the pain with shared hosting. It starts out with a tempting $5/month, but then you want SQL Server 2005, and you want to point many domains to non-root folders and in the end it just isn't that cheap.
It's also really slow and I don't have full control of the box. Doing a reverse ip check at
http://yougetsignal.com (awesome site, hilarious name) i could see hundreds of sites that are on my same server. I'd rather not be sharing bandwidth and hardware resources with so many.
So I've made the switch to a VPS plan at
VPSLand. VPS is Virtual Private Server, so basically they take a beefy server (8-core cpu, gobs of ram) and then run Virtual Server on it. They sell a limited amount of virtual machines per actual server, so you are sharing with far less people. VPS plans are a bit more expensive, but they are worth it. Why you ask?
- Remote Desktop into your box (no more crappy cpanel interfaces)
- Install whatever-the-hell-you-want software (provided it's legal)
- Run your sites in .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 6.0, whatever (ASP.NET MVC sites here I come)
- Run ASP.NET, Rails, PHP all on the same server (if you want)
- No more Medium Trust nonsense
- control your own DNS (if you want)
- run your own mail server (I use GAFYD however)
- point as many domains to whatever folders you want
The downside:
- I have to track my bandwidth now. I have 200gb/month, which is good enough for now, but it could get expensive if I go over.
- I only have 5gb of storage space. The base install takes 2gb. Yikes! I plan on making this 10gb sometime soon.
- a little more expensive.
Ultimately, I'm paying about $10/month more than shared hosting, and I think it's totally worth it. VPSLand's support is stellar so far.
Oh, and I have a question for you all: I plan on tinkering with rails, and I've read the long steps to get rails to work in IIS but should I? Or should I just install apache or Lighttpd and run it on port 81?