New Hosting Provider
Posted on: 09 April 2008
Until the end of last week, this blog was hosted on my free web space from my ISP, Freedom2Surf. Now, while these guys have been great as an ISP (good value, uptime and performance, free regrades to higher bandwidth, turning a blind eye to occassional overstepping of my monthly bandwidth allowance!), their free web space is pretty basic. There's PHP and MySQL, and all was fine until I wanted a proper domain name for the site. Having bought a domain name, it seemed there were two options for making that domain name take users to my site:
- create a frame on the domain name host - not so good for SEO, and the links between pages and for trackbacks don't reflect the new domain name
- create a permanent redirect on my domain name to my ISP free web space domain - the same drawbacks as 1, but even worse, as visitors' browsers will also show the free web space domain
So I figured I would have to get a proper web hosting account. As it's not really mission critical (I'm sure the world will go on if my blog goes down for a few hours), a quick look around at free hosting providers threw up X10 Hosting as likely candidates. You get cPanel 11 site administration, 300MB disk space, 10GB bandwidth per month, 3 MySQL 5 databases, and all the other stuff you'd expect from a paid-for hosting account like email addresses and FTP accounts. The only caveat is that you have to log in to their user forum once every two weeks, or else they shut down your account. We'll see how I get on with remembering to do that (or scripting an automated job to do it!).