Blog Hosting Services
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James Joyner | Monday, August 6, 2007 |
Dale Franks can’t fathom why so many bloggers host their sites with HostingMatters, despite constant service outages, when there are more robust services out there for less money.
Inertia, methinks, is the answer.
InstaPundit and several of the other bigs use HostingMatters (albeit not the crappy shared servers that most newbies use), so it seems a no brainer to start there. Once people sign up for a service, shifting to another one is a major pain in the butt. Further, the folks at HostingMatters are nice and do a good job of persuading people that the outages aren’t really their fault. (And, indeed, they generally aren’t. There’s apparently precious little companies can do to stave off denial of service attacks and the like.)
That “all the big guys are with them” rationale got me to start with HostingMatters and stay with them for more than two years through several problems. I finally got fed up and changed to another shared hosting service, then to a different company and a virtual private server, before finally going to yet another company and a dedicated server. Even there, I have the occasional problem, sometimes owing to the vagaries of WordPress and my site layout, nodes going down, and server crashes.
The bottom line, really, is that unless you’re a tech wizard and can manage your own server, you’re going to have down times, usually during peak traffic periods. It’s a frustrating reality of the online world, I’m afraid.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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The idea that the people there are "nice" is decidedly not a universal feeling.
The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) world has long been shot through with DDOS attacks, and due to this, several hosting services have developed technology and procedures to filter DDOS attacks for their clients. I wonder how well such hosting services would do in stopping DDOS attacks on blogs?
Also, even if you are a tech wizard, there will be downtime.
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