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