Well, my web sites have a new home. I haven’t purged all of my content from Dreamhost yet, but I moved my domain registrations and changed the name servers so everything is being served from StableHost. For the WordPress content, instead of copying the files (along with themes, plugins, and images) I did a clean install. I exported the posts and comments from the old sites before changing DNS, then imported them into the new installation. I have re-added most of the images on this site, but there is still some cleanup to do.
Tag: hosting
Leaving Dreamhost
Since April 2002, I have had an online home at DreamHost. I don’t want to leave, but in less than a month they are disabling catch-all email addresses, and that is a feature I can’t live without.
I have spent the past few days searching for a new place to host email and personal sites, but let me tell you – it is not a fun process. When I started here 16 years ago, I don’t remember having so many choices. GoDaddy was the cheap place to register domains, but if they offered hosting it was not attractive. DreamHost was a relatively new company using open source software and a custom control panel. I started with a package that cost $20/mo, but in 2005 I switched to a package and payment plan that worked out to $8/mo. I think that’s about the time that I brought the family on board, hosting a family-name domain that I could share with my brothers.
Today, there are hundreds (or thousands?) of web hosting companies. There is one company (Endurance International Group) that operates over 100 different hosting brands/companies. There are sites that pose as review lists (like these) that promote only EIG brands, and sites that warn against hosting with EIG. There are even (hopefully objective) review sites that give reliability and performance statistics for some prominent hosting providers. PC Mag and cnet have their own lists, but both of them get affiliate kickbacks that may affect their ratings.
But then I start poking around on IsItDownRightNow, and I find conflicting reports about reliability and I wonder if the Pingdom stats (like this one for DreamHost) are telling the whole story. I need to do more research, but I’m running out of time.
Java hosting
Most of my sites are running on dreamhost. They’re pretty good for sites running Python, Ruby, or PHP, but they don’t support server-side Java.
Over the years, I have searched for Java application hosting to fill that void. I was mostly looking for a place to explore and try new things, so I wasn’t willing to pay much. The inexpensive ones I found usually had very low RAM, and sometimes shared JVMs between users. To get a private JVM capable of running a decent app server usually cost more per month than I was willing to spend, and often required a dedicated server or VPS, which was more of a time commitment than I wanted. Eventually, I stopped looking.
At some point Google came along with their App Engine. It allowed part of what I was seeking, but came with its own limitations.
Today I discovered OpenShift, though it appears to have been started two years ago (May 2011). In additioon to Java, it supports a handful of other languages, as well as an assortment of frameworks and databases. It has a free version that is limited, but even the free version appears to support JBoss and MySQL!