2008: A Web Host Odyssey

To start this blogging shindig I thought I’d share my story of why I even have this domain.

It all starts with my old web host which was owned by a single guy (and no I don’t mean he wasn’t married) running a server leased from ThePlanet. About three months ago I started noticing my pages were not being served as quickly as they used to. Since it was a shared box, I figured it was some other customer being smart by, like, uploading 300 pictures from his jaunt to the gas station for grandma to see.

Last week, however, when a single page took 84.1884 seconds to load, I decided it was time to get in touch with John, a personal friend and owner of the server. After some digging around, John forwarded me the logs for another account (don’t start with the privacy rant) that had an abnormally high number of mySQL queries. The coders who wrote the scripts for this other site appeared to either be completely oblivious to, well, everything or just trying to break the record for least efficient script ever (which, by the way, I hold the record for).

Their idea of dynamically creating pages with PHP was using fwrite() to pre-create all their pages so visitors to the site did not have to wait for pages to load. Don’t get me wrong, page caching is a great thing when done correctly (i.e. only create the page when the first user visits it, etc.). Too bad they decided it was a good idea to do this with a cron job that ran quite frequently. Every single minute in fact. This amounted to just over 560,000 queries every hour. Smart.

This is the point in time at which I decided non-programmers should wear helmets and oven mitts so they don’t hurt themselves trying to write a basic script.

Since I run sites for a number of non-technical individuals, I had to find a solution before my phone started ringing. I didn’t have time to go and picket ICANN to have the previously-discussed coder banned from the interwebs, so I ventured out on my first web host search in years. I looked through maybe 15 hosts on my own and then checked my favorite online magazine, which recommended ImHosted.

I was impressed by their selection and surprised that, by complete coincidence, their offices are located about 2 miles from where I grew up in Wilmington, DE. In the end I decided to buy their premier package which allows for unlimited domains, and pretty much unlimited everything else. Not only that but, they are also co-located in five cities so when Mr. Cauliflower at the Los Angeles datacenter spills his Venti, sugar-free, non-fat, vanilla soy, double shot, decaf, no foam, extra hot, Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with light whip and extra syrup Starbucks beverage on the mainframe, my sites will be up still.

I’ve also had to talk with their Customer Service about five times (for billing and non-technical problems) and their help has been nothing but top-notch.

At the writing of this article, I have migrating about half of my sites over (read more) with minimal trouble and would recommend them to anyone else looking for a host.