Outside the Beltway

Blog Hosting Services

James Joyner · Monday, August 6, 2007 · 2 comments

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.