web hosting

We lasted nine months. That's right, for nine months we hosted our Drupal site with a shared hosting account. Last January, I knew we were taking a gamble but the monthly cost savings for hosting the site was just too tempting. In this end though, CMS Report was too busy and exceeded the shared hosting provider's CPU usage policy.

So, during the past few days I've been busy moving the site onto a a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server. This time, I'm going with GoDaddy but as far as self-managed VPS/VDS goes there are a lot of good companies you can go with. Although I can do Web server administration in my sleep, I think I'm going to miss having someone else doing the server management for me. I know there are better hosting options for professional Drupal sites but I don't think I'm in need for a high-end hosting plan for this amateur site of mine.

One of the common mistakes website owners make is not recognizing the growth of their site. We all try to do things as cheap as possible and often fail to recognize the increasing size of our content management system or the increasing popularity of our site. In the Fall of 2007 I made this mistake. The hosting provider locked access to my site and I spent a stressful week getting my database from the hosting company and placed onto a new server.

I have never had good luck hosting my Drupal sites on shared hosting plans.  My last venture into budget hosting was a disaster with the hosting company locking me out of my own account due to too many requests to the remote database.  The truth is that I've only been happy with running my personal Drupal sites on virtual private servers (VPS).  However, I'm having a difficult time justifying my yearly costs of using a VPS to host my sites.

The problem is that I'm finally realizing one of the goals I set for 2007, a resolution to reduce my workload outside of work.  Specifically, I've spent the last year getting rid of most of my freelance work not related to my day job or CMS Report.  So now that I have less sites to host it has become less cost effective to run my remaining Drupal sites on the VPS.  With my yearly VPS contract up this month, I decided to give cheaper shared hosting another chance.

A couple weeks ago, I moved CMSReport.com over to AN Hosting.  My choice of using AN Hosting for CMS Report is solely based on John Forsythe's recommendation that AN Hosting provides a reliable Drupal hosting service.  CMS Report has only been on AN Hosting's plan for a couple weeks and so far the site seems to be running fine.  I am a little concerned during peak traffic hours my Drupal site may be to much for this shared hosting plan, but I'm hopeful that everything will be fine.  One of my posts last week attracted quite a bit of attention and yet everything appears to be running smoothly.

If I do run into problems with AN Hosting, I promise you this...John Forsythe will likely be the first person I talk to after I've recovered my site.

For my remaining Drupal sites, they have been moved over to shared hosting at Go Daddy, the Deluxe Plan.  I've also moved a few Wordpress sites over to this same plan.  My experience with Go Daddy's shared hosting plans for running non-Drupal sites such as Wordpress, Joomla!, osCommerce, and SMF have been positive.  I'm hoping for low traffic sites that Go Daddy is now ready for Drupal.  Go Daddy's shared hosting plans have improved greatly over the past couple years in terms of database privileges.  Even better yet, Go Daddy now offers secure shell in their higher shared hosting plans.

So in a nutshell, besides using a VPS for your Drupal sites you might want to take another look at cheaper shared hosting plans.  Or then again, you may want to just watch CMS Report and see if we crash and burn once more.  I hope not...

Earlier today, I officially canceled my reseller account for Dakota Hosting.  I started the account at the same time I started to build websites as a side business.  I finally decided to stop pushing the hosting business not because I was losing money, but because it wasn't personally rewarding.  I learned a lot about the business and decided Web hosting just isn't in my blood.  I will build a Website now and then for a friend or acquaintance, but to be honest my IT job during the day keeps me plenty busy.  I'd rather find some new challenges using my free-time for doing good instead of the sole goal to make money.

What I have found rewarding these past few years is blogging here at CMSReport.com.  I enjoy not only taking a look at the various content management systems in the market, but also getting to know the people behind the application.  I tend to be drawn more to the open source projects than the propriety content management systems due to some of the cool people behind those projects.  With business fast becoming dependent on the same social network model that their customers use, I can't imagine the propriety-only business model having as significant of a future as it once had in the past.

So, with one less "side business" to worry about, I hope to keep the promise I made to myself more than two years ago.