Freehostia vs real hosting!

When I set up the Pixel Shoppe I wasn’t sure which host to pick from.  I did a quick researched. I came to the conclusion that I would not be able to attract many visitors or earn a decent amount of money. So I thought I did not need to worry about a reliable webhost…Ha ha ha! What a mistake. Pixel SHoppe has been running for 3 months now it it was sheer hell from beginning to end. But hey, we all have to start somewhere and I have learned allot. I learn by doing not reading.

The first thing I did was buy my domain. I paid it about 10 dollars because I added “anonymous something” (sorry, I don’t recall the exact terms), so when people go to who is, It’s not my name and address that shows up, but the registrars info. Error number one. Why buy only a domain name? Many hosts give them free with paid hosting…Dahhh!

Then I went to Freehostia and used my domain with their free account. Terrible decision that I still regret today. See Freehostia support is quick and polite. Their answers are vague, brief and usually not helpful at all. To make things more aggravating the site has been down at least 40 times in 3 months!

The hight of torture came when they installed a script on their servers to block sites with adult content. Wonderful! If a nit wit sends you a spam comment and your blog has spam prevention, that means your site is down. The only way to fix it is to go in your database and search for the comment from there.

That is quite an exploit for a n00bie like me. I couldn’t find the comment. My traffic and money was dropping everyday. After 4 days I decided to delete every comment and my site came back. At this point I dared not change providers because I already had my pagerank.

A few weeks went by and my blog crashes less and less. I think they solved every issue because things have been going fine for a few weeks.

This morning I had a horrible email from Freehostia. Perhaps it is not that horrible, it could even be the beginning of something fun and exciting. But with no credit card at hand it was a horrible email stating I had used up the allotted CPU %. Ah what’s that? Not another freeky thing to read up on! Can’t they just say, “you’ve used up all your bandwidth”?!

Three messages sent to Freehostia support and I still don’t know what CPU is. They answer like politicians. By beating around the bush and using many words that don’t mean anything. I tell you, their employees are master at writing polite fancy notes that mean nothing!!!!!

So I looked up CPU for myself and found out some neat stuff. It seems that the providers universally avoid putting too much detail into their caps on CPU or bandwidth so that they have the latitude to shutdown or force upgrades of customers that are using an inordinate amount of resources and causing problems for the rest of the customers on the server.

The best alternative I found was getting virtual private server (VPS). Check out Wikipedia for more info on VPS. There are plenty of interesting offers at about 20$ a month.

Again I’m being a coward because I know their services does not correspond to what I need, I upgraded anyways! I feel retarded, but I like my tiny pagerank. So if anyone has any interesting info about VPS please leave a comment we all want to hear about it.