The Naked Flame

It is so easy to get used to the hosting you have that you neglect looking for a potential better fit. Recently I went off on my adventure to compare hosting options and see if a change was in order... turned out it was and we're now on our new 'home' with Host Done.

What better day to get off my ass and actually write about it than Labour Day?

First of all, there was nothing wrong with idologic and I would wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone looking for reliable Linux-only hosting in the US.

The reason I have been looking around is that I really wanted to see if there were affordable hosts in Australia yet that did reseller packages, preferably including a mixed Linux/Windows hosting option. I wouldn't consider using Windows for my existing sites which are all a much more natural fit for LAMP than anything else... but I have recently started looking into ASP.NET due to an existing code-base at work, and I thought it'd be nice to be able to experiment on some personal space too.

In the end I constructed a very large lists of hosts that were well reviewed or sounded interesting after trawling a variety of review and comparison sites, and the results of my research can be found below the fold... may it save someone somewhere some time. (Note: no warranties, this information was accurate when observed from Sydney around the end of September 2008).

A few quick notes on methodology; hosting plans vary wildly from provider to provider, so I have tried to pick plans that are somewhat comparable in price bracket. The Ping and Average Speed were gotten by accessing the host website. Note that this is not entirely unbiased, but they form a good best-case scenario. I am not sure if hosts typically bias their routing to their own site, or if they just run within the same framework as the sites they sell. Anyway...

And finally a few comments on the contents:

• All hosts had reasonable reviews on some or all of the sites; note that "user comments" are easy to falsify though
• Some plans just sound too good to be true; I cannot believe that the 1TB of transfer per month promised by ServMatix is not severely oversold; I doubt it will actually be attainable in reality
• The plans on Australian servers (AUD prices) obviously stand out because they have fewer hops to travel... good pings and speed, but typically more expensive than US hosting, sometimes a lot more
• I personally discarded any plans that did not reach at least 60KB/s on the hosts own site from consideration; I was looking for more speed, and most US hosts do not actually provide it sufficiently
• If www.cove.com.au had actually had Windows hosting as part of their plan I would have wholeheartedly put them as the prime recommendation for Australians, with www.serversaustralia.com.au as a very close second

In the end I settled on www.hostdone.com as a good compromise between the value-for-money of US hosts and the speed of AU hosts. I do not know how they manage, but their round-trip latency significantly beat all other US hosts, and I re-tried the measurement several times to make sure I was not making a mistake. For some reason their hop-count was proportionally lower as well, so they somehow find themselves on just the right spot of the backbones to be an Australian contender.

Make of this what you will... it definitely is not a universal recommendation to follow the path I have chosen, but it may save you some legwork.

I like the idea of Linux... honestly, I do. And I think Open Source is the greatest thing that has ever happened to software... ever.

But as much as it pains me to admit, I just do not have the patience to fight with my OS over the basics like OS updates that break half the stuff on my machine, or sound never quite having worked right. And though some may say the following is a benefit, if I have to reboot to be able to play a game, then I just don't end up playing at all.

The tipping point for me realising it was okay to be okay with Windows came in the form of the Linux Hater's Blog, but to be entirely honest, Vista has always been fine for me.

Being a sample size of 1 means that my results may not be representative, but I built my machine myself, didn't go out of my way to get "Vista approved" parts, and everything just works. I don't know whether having Ultimate x64 has anything to do with it, or that I've pretty much always run SP1, but I've just never had a problem.

Vista has not run in any way noticeably slower than XP used to. Add on top of that the consistent 2-second resume from sleep and fantastic overhauled sound sub-system (per app volume control, who would've thunk it?) I have no intention of going back to anything else.

I don't blame anyone for picking something else if they prefer it, but my choice "just works"-tm for me.