Breaking Free
Experiments in tech entrepreneurship
For the last year or two I’ve been hosting this blog (and others) on 1and1 Hosting with a shared hosting plan. While it was very inexpensive (about $10 per mont) the performance has been seriously lacking lately.
On a regular basis I would come to the homepage, or try to log into the backend, only to find the entire site was down or unresponsive. So I haven’t been very happy with 1and1.
It would usually come back up fairly quickly as 1and1 would reboot the server quite often, but it was frustrating and very slow to use. If I was getting frustrated using my own site, then I imagine many users as well.
So I finally bit the bullet and moved several blogs over to my hosting account on SliceHost. My hosting plan with SliceHost is a virtual private server (VPS) which should offer better performance. I already had this account because I was using it to host UniversityTutor.com (Ruby On Rails apps require more than what a shared plan can offer), and the extra capacity should be enough to run StartBreakingFree.com and HomeworkHelpBlog.com along side it.
In case you didn’t know, there are basically 3 tiers of web hosting you can get:
- Shared – this is the cheapest and lowest performance, basically it means perhaps dozens (or more) websites are all running off the same web server
- VPS – this the mid range both in price and performance and mimics a private server by running less than a dozen “virtual|” operating systems on one server. You get a private IP address, root access, and freedom to change whatever you want so there is more control.
- Private Server – this is the most expensive and most performance. Also the most freedom – it’s an entire webserver to yourself. It’s just that someone else manages it to make sure it has electricity and reliable internet at all times.
So basically, I moved from a shared plan with 1and1 for about $10/month to a VPS with SliceHost for about $48/month. Except I was already paying the $48/month to host UniversityTutor.com so I will actually save a little bit by canceling 1and1.
SliceHost’s 512MB plan is enough to host all my sites right now and I can’t recommend these guys enough. I’ll probably be doing all my hosting with them in the future. If you are a bit tech savvy their hosting is awesome, and they have really knowledgeable folks sitting in a chat room at all hours in case anything goes down.
With 1and1 you’d wait 48 hours to get an email back from their support team who obviously didn’t speak English, and would just send you a template email response that wasn’t helpful at all. SliceHost has people who actually know what they are doing sitting in the chat room at all hours.
Moving everything over was a big process with a lot of steps, so if you see anything broken or not working anymore, drop me a comment below. Thanks!
Brian Armstrong
- Tags: slicehost
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Breaking Free is a collection of articles on tech entrepreneurship, business, and life written by Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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Joey G.
May 24th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Brian,
Double thumbs up on the article/post, and on your change! I was getting my hosting from 1and1 (I had tried GoDaddy, BlueHost and HostGator prior), and ran into a couple of minor problems. There was nothing worse than the ‘there’s a problem with your site’ call/email, which was happening way too often.
I became friendly with my programmer, who warned me about being on a shared hosting plan, yet I insisted on staying on. When I eventually had another problem, I called customer service with him on the line. They tried to feed me some BS, but they were tongue tied after 30 seconds of knowledgeable responses from my friend.
I had the luxury of using his server for a while, then moved to SliceHost, and I haven’t had a complaint since! I’d rather buy my own server then go back to those services again!!
Regards,
Joey G.
By the way, Erica Douglas, who I found out about through your posts, has some great articles on the topic.
Brian Armstrong
May 24th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for stopping by Joey. Yep Erica knows her stuff having sold a hosting biz for over $1M! Shes the bomb.
Calling support on shared hosting plans is a waste of time. If the server is down there is nothing they can do, so their entire support staff is basically dedicated to emailing people back and saying “it’s online now, sorry”.
Joey G.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
“it’s online now, sorry” – I’ve been on the phone with GoDaddy’s and BlueHost’s customer support staff at least 5 times in the past month, trying to work out issues for my friend’s and family, and this is what I was told every single time!
Perfectly said and heard way too often!
On a side note, your site was the first one that I ever subscribed to via email, and it’s the only smaller site (said with all respect intended) that I still follow. You don’t send out updates too often, you don’t try to sell something every other week have, and you have content that’s worth coming back for. Great stuff!
Brian Armstrong
May 24th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Thanks Joey! Much appreciated :)
Brian Armstrong
May 24th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
In the move I lost the “threads” of the comments. In other words you couldn’t tell what was a reply to what, it was just a big long list of comments, not a discussion.
It is fixed now. To migrate the wordpress threaded comments I had to hack together this little script. It’s technical mumbo jumbo but I’ll post it on the off chance it helps someone:
http://www.pastie.org/488499
College Town Menus (CTM)
May 27th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
I have been using 1and1 for a long time for registering 20+ domains and hosting 3 sites, and have loved them. They consistently rank high in hosting reviews, to me they have good performance, great tools, and when I did have any questoins (never any major problems) I got to very knowledgable techs right away. Sure they might be in India, but they spoke good English and were able to point me in the right direction with nice email follow-ups. I dont care if they use a template, if it’s the same question asked multiple times, whatever is easier for them that gets me the ultimate answer, fine by me. Good job though with your switch, I know thats a painful process, but once finished it’s nice. Good explanation on the price vs performance, always nice for others starting off.
Joey
May 27th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
CTM, you hit on a very valid point. If they work for you, that’s all that counts!
What package do you have with 1and1?
Brian Armstrong
May 31st, 2009 at 10:58 pm
It was their basic shared one…so to be fair, I haven’t tried a more expensive plan with 1and1. Part of it was me outgrowing a shared plan in general, part of it was poor service by 1and1.
Chuck Cohn
May 27th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Good post Brian. I had similar difficulty with 1 and 1. Poor customer service. We had a terrible time getting their SSL certificate to work. Also had a bad time with HostingRails.com – although we should have had plenty of space on a shared server, the site was incredibly incredibly slow. I’ll check out Slice Host.