New home at Hostmonster

Last year I pre-paid a hosting account from Godaddy and had my sites hosted there. The price for a shared hosting account is great. It’s been okay at first but then my needs grew and my sites started to lag a little. I thought it was my WordPress at first so I started disabling themes and plugins. That didn’t fix it. Then I went through the database to see if I can optimize it further, no go. I guess it’s a common thing to happen when you have a shared server that your sites may lag a little. There were times I get a timeout error though and that isn’t really normal.

Aside from the lag, I didn’t like how to access MySQL’s interface (phpMyAdmin). Every link I click on opens a new window/tab until I have like 3 different ones opened. There is also the possibility that your databases are in different servers. Also, creating a database can take up to hours before it is complete.

GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection is just horrible. Many of the add-ons are free but some aren’t. The selections aren’t that appealing nor many. After seeing that, I started to miss cPanel.

Finally, my year was up and I started to look for another host. After doing some research, I chose Hostmonster. The price is slightly higher than GoDaddy but I get unlimited storage and bandwidth. I also get my cPanel (hooray!) – amongst other goodies.

I’ve had them for almost 2 weeks now. There have been some problems. Last week my sites were inaccessible a couple of times on Monday but it was due to system updates. Kind of odd that they were running it during work hours. I’m used to seeing those done usually late at night or in the weekend. Now today same thing. This time they told me that someone else on the server was taking up most of the computer’s resources. It’s been a weird experience so far but for the most part my sites are loading up normal (faster than GoDaddy). I hope they can provide a more reliable service, consistently. I will see in the next week or two. If not, I’ll be switching to another company. What’s great with Hostmonster is you pay in advance, but if you leave early, they will prorate what you have already used and refund the rest.

I don’t think I’ll be using GoDaddy as a host again but I will continue to buy domains from them until some other company starts to charge less than they do. GoDaddy provides good packages for hosting needs. But as a developer, my needs can’t be met unless I get a more expensive package from them.