Young Writers Society

I get a lot of PMs about hosting providers, so I thought I'd just go ahead and make a post about my own experience.

For a long time I used Yahoo's hosting; first Geocities and then Yahoo small business. It was good, but expensive and terrible service. When I started YWS, I decided I had to switch to someone else who was cheaper. That was when the trouble began.

Turns out the hosting business is full of scams; if a hosting provider sounds too good to be true, it is. Take a look at hosting-excellence.com. They promise you all sorts of things, but their downtime is terrible and the server speed is absolutely abhorrent. But I went with another one called ipowerweb that a web hosting rank website said was great. What I didn't know was that the ranking website was being paid by ipowerweb.

YWS was at ipowerweb for about two months, and at first everything was alright. The cost was only $7.95 a month and I did get a whole lot of cool features with it. However, as time went on, I came to find out that their server speed was not good whatsoever.

Faced with tons of downtime and slow loading times, I went to search for another provider, and that's when I found out most hosts are terrible. So I decided to go with a brand name one; either hostway, yahoo, or godaddy. Hostway looked good, but was expensive. I had a good experience with Yahoo before, but it was too expensive as well. Godaddy, though, was cheap AND it had an ad in the superbowl. I decided it had to be good.

Well, I was right. So far, I have nothing to complain about. It hosts www.nathancaldwell.net for only four bucks a month (I get 25 gigabytes of bandwidth with it) and it hosts YWS for ten bucks a month (100 gb of bandwith). But getting great server speed and a cheap price does have its downsides... one, I can't get detailed stats anymore on the site since it doesn't allow for access logs to be made. Two, I have to use FTP for everything (an online file manager costs more). Three, customer service doesn't know anything, though they are responsive, and the help section is terrible. Moreover, the interface is incredibly bulky and it can take forever just to make a new subdomain.

So here's the rundown...

Yahoo: Don't go with this. While easy to use, it's expensive and the customer service can take a week to respond.

Hostway: If you don't mind paying a lot and have little or no experience with hosting a website, then go with this. It's simple, easy to use, and great customer service.

Godaddy: Very few features, but if you don't want to pay a lot and know what you're doing, then go with this.

Ipowerweb: If you're website is just a personal website, then ipowerweb is a good choice. It's cheap and comes with a lot of cool features. But for medium to large websites, it's not good.

Hosting-excellence: Do not use this!




Of course, there's also the free ones. I see a lot of people using freewebs.com nowadays, and it seems to work out alright. Proboards is another popular site, and is the one EBM uses for the young writers clan. There's actually even websites out there that will host your domain (you have to register the domain first) for free with no ads or anything. Sounds like a bad idea to me, but it's probably good for small, personal websites. Just do a search on google for free hosting services and you'll find tons.

I have a proboards forum, 2 actually, and a freewebs site. You'll find quite a few clans use them, it's free, is fairly fast, and easy to use.

If you are looking for a free server with lots of goodies, here is a useful method. First, put the name in your bookmarks (favorites) and forget about them. A couple of months later, check them out again. Still there? Look for a community that forces you to write a resumé of your site. Yes, it's a hassle, but once if it gets accepted, it has a greater chance of staying up since that person spends time on the website.

Second, make sure that you have direct contact with the server or, if that doesn't work, that you have direct with a community that the server sets up. And participate in the community! I had a webserver suddenly quit and throw everyone off the server, but because I was active in the community, he kept me on with a couple of others. Now, for some strange reason, I have a gig of space, 50 gigs of bandwidth, and I'm as happy as a clam. Of course, this all doesn't matter since nobody visits my sites, but it makes me feel happy anyway.

I visit your sites! Mainly because you ask me to though But I do visit THE COUNCIL website, just remember to put up more of TTAC!

I love your site Snoik! I've had it in my favorites for like a year, I had no idea it was your though.

ineedhosting.net is a great free host. In fact, it's the only one left that is worth hosting with and does not require ads. You do submit your resume and don't get official support, but they respond quickly and have a great service. Additionally, I can attest to GoDaddy.com's usefulness as well. But yeah, if you don't know what you're doing, you'll be more than lost with this place. But if you know what your doing, especially how to use FTP, there's really no problem.