Passing on a Note From Justine Larbalestier
Posted on October 29, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 22 Comments
Since I know there’s some overlap between readers here and readers of Justine Larbalestier’s blog, a quick note on her behalf: Her site is currently down because of a dispute she’s having with her ISP. You don’t need to send her e-mail about the site being down; she knows. Also, she’s open to suggestion for a good (new) (different) ISP, so if you have suggestions, by all means let her know. In the comments here would be helpful. Because her site is down, you see.
If it’s a Windows server, I recommoned CrystalTech. If it’s a Linux server, I recommend ThePlanet.
How completely annoying for her. :(
My ISP is in England and I’m very happy with them. Freedom2Surf.com.
How much bandwidth was she typically using?
My personal sites are hosted at asmallorange.com and nearlyfreespeech.net respectively. Both have been trouble-free and responsive to questions.
( For anyone looking for personal lowtraffic sites, give serious thought to nearlyfreespeech.net– they only bill you for Actual Bandwidth Used. )
It depends…if you mean ISP as in somebody-to-connect-to-the-internet-through (which is what an ISP is :), then I have no clue what would be best for her.
On the other hand, if what she’s looking for is a hosting provider (that is, some place to put her site up on), then that’s a different matter.
For hosting, there’s 2 approaches that are worth it.
First one, “renting” a virtual server. In this approach, you do the administration of the whole site, from operating system and up. If this is what she wants, I recommend one of two places: vpslink (http://vpslink.com/) which is cheap and good or dreamhost (http://dreamhost.com/) which is not-expensive and great.
If what she needs is just a hosting service, without the virtual machine, then there’s only one option, IMNSHO, and that’s dreamhost.
I have sites in both places, and I recommend them both greatly.
Is she looking for an ISP (to connect her home to the internet) or a webhost (to put her webpage on)?
Assuming you mean webhost, Drak.net has hands-down the best service I’ve ever come across, including the webhost I used to work for myself. It’s run by girl geeks, too. :D Jen, the owner, is awesome. Drak.net has been around for a long time too, so it’s not some fly-by-night host that just popped up and will vanish in 6 months.
I’ve been satisfied with the service and uptime using a VPS at HostMySite. (However, my needs may be considerably more technical than her needs, and it is not inexpensive, as these things go.)
Dreamhost must have improved significantly over the last 3 years. I had a client on that and it was a nightmare of downtime.
kcarlile @ 7 I think it depends on which file servers they dump your stuff on. I haven’t ever had a problem with downtime, though I’ve only been with Dreamhost two years. I still hear constant complaints from users on different servers. of course, I also volunteered for their new guinea pig thing where I get moved from their stable servers to their new, probably crazy unstable servers, so I’m probably asking for trouble.
I just switched to Dreamhost, because I was having a lot of down time with iPowerWeb.
SO far, no down time at all, and their customer service has been very good.
@7: I have two separate websites on Dreamhost. The first I own myself, although honestly I never really use it, despite having initially meant to (I got distracted and… yeah). However when I have hosted files and pages on it I’ve never noticed any downtime.
The second is actually hosted on my friend’s Dreamhost account and in the four years that I’ve been using her space I have never noticed any downtime at all. At one point I had a tracker checking my downtime (out of curiosity) and I was up I think… 99.7% of the time, over a course of two years. And when the site was down it was never down for very long.
Like Bill up at #3, I’m a big fan of https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ though it’s not suitable for all sites, just lots of them.
Sounds good. I’m glad they cleared up whatever issues they might have had.
I’ve been a very happy customer of http://www.pair.com for many years, hosting a few sites there including my main site, All the Pages are My Days.
I use ixwebhosting.com and am very pleased. The few times I have had problems, their tech support has been very responsive.
I’ve been hosted on Liquidweb for a while, and like their site tools and interface. They host Dooce.com too, and I know her site gets LOTS of hits and almost never has problems. There’s a lot of options to choose from, ranging from super cheap to having your own server.
I’m on Esosoft. Mostly because they were responsive to the time when Smart Bitches, Trashy Books came under excessive bandwidth. Esosoft didn’t shut them down—instead they scrambled to get extra servers and get SBTB stable.
They also don’t charge for bandwidth.
They’re pretty responsive, and one of the guys set up WordPress for me (since then I’ve handled the upgrades and extra installs myself), and helped out with things like extra domain names. I think they would be friendly about helping out with a domain transfer too.
I like ’em.
Justine, I love pair.com. I used them for Strange Horizons and Clean Sheets when I was running the magazines, and they’re still hosted there (I liked them in part because even in the early days of the internet sex scare, they said they were fine with Clean Sheets’s explicit sexual content and had no interest in policing what we published). I use them currently for my personal site, the Speculative Literature Foundation, and DesiLit. Never had any problems with overloading their servers or such.
Pair’s rates are very reasonable, they’re astonishingly easy to work with, offering smart, clear helpful tech support, which has always responded very quickly to any of my questions (which are often idiot questions that I seem to have every year, such as ‘how do I move this domain over’ which is clearly documented in their help pages, but nonetheless they answer me politely and patiently). I lurve them.
I also use pairnic for my domain registration, which makes it all even easier. Easy to transfer over to that too, if you’re registered elsewhere.
Geekman.com has been hosted very happily on TRKHosting.com for several years. Tom Koch, the owner, is a stand-up guy of the first water, and exceptionally responsive to queries and tech support issues.
I’m a big fan of Webstrikesolutions. I’ve got 4 websites hosted by them. The first year is free, then it’s $80 or so a year. Very good support and uptime.
I’ve had good luck with ASmallOrange.com
Okay, so I’m a few days behind, but I’d like to recommend Verve Hosting. I had asked for web hosting recommendations in a forum at the site for JournalCon2004 and received some enthusiastic responses about Verve — so I tried them and have been very happy with them for more than four years now. I’ve never had a single problem with them, no technical problems, no service problems, no billing problems. I’ve currently got five domains on their servers. They’re at vervehosting-dot-com.
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