Besides the recent relaunch of this site with a new theme, you might not notice that I’ve made a transition of the hosting service. It took me almost a full month to complete the transition ...
Well, that’s a long story but let me start on my hosting service first.
I’ve been a faithful customer of ICDSoft for quite a long time (more than 4 years). Don’t misunderstand me, I did not say they provide lousy service. Quite contrary to that, they have the best customer service I’ve ever seen. Though they don’t provide telephone support along with my cheap hosting plan, they do have an almost real-time on-line customer service. During the last 4 years, I’ve opened 20 support tickets to them and each of them was responded/resolved within 5 minutes. These tickets were opened both at day and night. I have to say they really take customer support very seriously (considering my hosting plan only cost $4 a month).
So what’s good about ICDSoft?
- Cheap!
- Damn superb customer service !!
- Support all major scripting languages (php, perl, python, ruby ...). This is a must for developers like me.
- Generous. My hosting plan initially has only 333MB but now it has grown to 1GB (for free!). They occasionally upgrade all plans for free.
- You get to choose the physical location of your server (only two options, HongKong or U.S.). This might be beneficial if your audience are mostly in Asia.
- See the plans for yourself
Seriously, why did I switch? Just got bored?
Well, sort of :) I was somewhat disappointed at the following facts:
- No FastCGI support. This is probably the main reason as I really couldn’t stand for the slowness of my Rails application.
- No shell access (unless you pay more). So I didn’t have the leisure to install whatever I wanted but not provided by them (for example, subversion repository).
That led me to DreamHost. What’s good about DreamHost?
- FastCGI support.
- Shell access, either telnet or ssh. Now I can have my own subversion repositories. I even installed svk :)
- Incredibly large disk storage (200GB!! Better yet, it grows every week!). This made my remote secondary backup plan feasible.
- Cheap. I really doubt if there’s any better price tag on the net with the same set of service ...
- See the plans by yourself.
Unfortunately, there’s no perfect world. On one hand, I really miss the customer support of ICDSoft (yes, I’m implying DreamHost only has so-so customer support compared to ICDSoft). On the other hand, DreamHost’s plan gives me what I want for so long. However, DreamHost’s server downtime seems to be a little bit more frequent (at least so far). Also, the FastCGI support is not yet solid enough (except for Rails) at the moment.
Oh well, I probably would stick with DreamHost for now. I really can’t afford of having another transition back to ICDSoft (unless I got bored again someday :p).
