Luna Tail

Oh my gosh is looking for hosting is complicated and confusing.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ trying to decide what I want to do, and what I can afford to do.

So the hosting options are as follows… cheapest to most expensive:

Shared Hosting - Where you share the server with many more accounts/domains. Like sometimes up to 500. These sites may limit your CPU Usage, but dangit they don’t say that on the specs. They can give you a ton of Bandwidth but if you exceed the CPU usage of the box for your little corner, your account gets suspended for a few minutes (this is what my current host, Bluehost, does).

VPS - Virtual Shared Server. The host splits the server into, say, 30 accounts. Each account has a virtual server installed. You get 100% of your allocated usage… RAM, storage, bandwidth etc. But, unlike shared, you only get 100% of your small percentage of your virtual server. So it may or may not be better than shared. Plus, it’s more expensive, and if it’s unmanaged (cheaper) you have to install and maintain all your server software, from OS (like Linux) to Apache, PHP, etc. Ugh.. I did that when I ran my own server and it’s so time consuming!

Semi-Dedicated - Like VPS but you don’t have to manage anything, you just get a portion of a server. More expensive than VPS.

Dedicated - You get your whole server. This is the big bucks I cannot afford!

So anyway.. not sure what I want to do.. what I can afford. Shared or VPS. VPS, however, is in the $30 to $40 per month and upwards range. I don’t think my blogging earnings can really cover that. Shared is less, maybe $25 a month or so… with decent storage and bandwidth and CPU usage. I can probably pull that off with blogging earnings. Bluehost, that I’m on now, is only $6.95 per month, but I’m getting so many Exceed CPU usage errors now that I really need something more than what Bluehost can provide.

And so the search continues… anyone with knowledge of reliable shared hosting with decent storage, bandwidth, and CPU usage… please let me know.

Oh and I want to add… I have 10 domains, 13 MySQL databases.. I run a number of Wordpress Blogs, 2 Galleries, and a phpiCalendar. So my account is fairly resource intensive. Bluehost says I have 4500 Meg (4 Gig) of hard drive space used, and I use over 10Gig of Bandwidth per month. I am starting to get, too often, the Exceed CPU usage message on my sites. And I apologize for that!