Natural Order Development

After a long and generally good relationship with Netriver.net things finally got to a point where it was worth the effort to move to a new hosting service. Generally speaking we just kind of grew apart. Netriver had decided some time ago to focus more on their co-location services and began trying to simplify and reduce their web hosting services.

In August I started trying to ramp back up my development projects, at the same time I got the next year's bill which went up almost 700%. The technical challenges alone were causing me to start thinking of shifting, that bill tipped the scales. Thus began a month long look at who the new hosting contenders were.

To be honest I had a pretty strict list of requirements (and if you are going shopping for services you should list on paper what you are looking for before you shop). The list was:

• Domain registration less than $12 per year per domain.
• DNS services included
• Python, PHP, and Perl support
• Email aliasing included
• Domain grouping (meaning change one and all in the group follow)
• MySQL or Postgres database
• greater than 30GB storage available
• reasonable bandwidth in and out (not less than 256Kb up and down available all the time for my sites)
• ssh/scp support
• ssh tunneling allowed would be nice
• at least 3 years of proven 3 nines or better SLA (service level agreement of 99.9% up time)

Oddly enough I ran into some great services:

• Inmotion
• WebHostingPad
• GoDaddy
• FatCow

I ran into the above most often and I read a lot of reviews. It was difficult filtering through the fake reviews (also know as docutisments). I have worked with GoDaddy before and was not really all that happy with their constant and over-the-top (tm) advertising even inside their paying customer admin area. FatCow (although poorly named) kept coming up as a great top contender. So I decided to try them out. I called them up and they gave me access to a temp account to poke around. The pre-sales engineer answered my questions well and told me where I would have problems (correctly too).

However, price, function, and support were a winning combination. I bought an account, set up a test site. Pushed it hard (and broke it nicely, but hey that is what test sites are for right?). Then I blew it all away and set it up again. The database's were fast, I killed, rebuilt, installed, configured, blew it all away again and again. In the end I created 6 or so sites trying out my own code and their installable and supported stuff. I grew to like it. I also found that they lived up to their reputation. Tech support was fast, when I had an issue they immediately corrected it if they could, apologized if it just couldn't be so and even compensated me for things I wanted that were not possible with their system even though it was no fault of theirs.

I have also dropped DJango in favor of Drupal. Yes, this means I am moving from python back to PHP. But, sometimes you just have to go with what works best given the constraints. FatCow actually had Django fully installed and available as a shared asset. They keep all their Python, Perl libs, and PHP assets up to date and very nicely integrated. But, in my experimentation I found Drupal to be more in line with what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. More to come as I move everything from my existing systems to FatCow.