Hosting: Dragging Down Profits so Consolidating

One of the most difficult things that bloggers have to deal with is hosting and for me, that issue is coming up more and more as I build up bigger sites, and I now want to bring everything under one hosting account with one hosting company.

Currently, over half of my projects are hosted on Host Gator, and while I have nothing but happy words for the service that they have provided me (see my recent post on Host Gator’s support), I am starting to hit a wall due to the popularity of this and other sites that I run on their hosting. Basically, I have had too many open connections more than once, and they haven’t been able to tell me the exact cause, thus leading me to think I need bigger, better hosting.

The rest of my projects are hosted on Mosso, except for my personal blog. Mosso is great, except I am not a fan of their control panel. I find it fairly limiting, and I hate learning curves when dealing with hosting. I try to stick to hosts that allow me either a cPanel control panel, or root-like access through SSH. Anything else, and I get frustrated. Who wants to spend a day learning how to manage hosting, especially when you have enough work in just needing to run a dozen sites?

My personal blog is being hosted on VortexHost. This is a smaller hosting company, but the service, and support has been bar-none the best I have ever had. Pricing might not be the most competitive, but it was one of the first web hosts I had ever used, and I have never been disappointed by the decision. Justin, the owner, has always been very helpful and adds his personal touch to making sure I am happy, whenever he can. Most other hosts I have used have been compared against my experiences at VortexHost.

I just feel like it is time to pick one company to manage all my hosting needs. This would hopefully help cut down costs, as I am paying what I consider a pretty penny for all my hosting.

On average, I would say that around $60 each and every month is spent to host my various blogs. This one has the highest traffic with nearly twenty-thousand page views a day.

I was thinking about looking at other “cloud space” hosts that work in a similar vein to Mosso, or maybe going with a company like Slice Host, as they keep coming up on my radar.

Some hosts I will not consider, due to personal experiences:

  • Dreamhost
  • A Small Orange
  • eMaxHosting

If you have any thoughts or recommendations for me, please let me know. Who should I be hosting with? I would like to keep it under $40 per month, and I would like to have cPanel and/or high level SSH privileges. I would like to have a high level of stability, and great support. I am fairly tech savvy, but I am not going to sit around messing with ipchains on the server.

Originally posted on April 20, 2008 @ 7:44 pm

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