So how does our foray into paid hosting shape up. Well unfortunately, poorly.
Our trial of paid hosting, was prompted by all the downtime on X10Hosting. We thought parting with a bit of money ($12 in our case) might get us a much more reliable hosting solution. Whilst it was much more reliable, I don’t think we had a single minute of downtime, HostASP crawls speed wise and in the end that was a deal-breaker.
We opted for HostASP’s Linux hosting (they also offer Windows-based hosting) and choose their Starter package. This Starter package comes with the following features:
- cPanel control
- PHP 5
- MySQL5 – limited to 1 database
- 500MB of disk space – which isn’t actually that much
- 2000MB of monthly data bandwidth – again this isn’t that much
- Free shared SSL certificates
- 5 free email accounts
- Install scripts for Joomla and WordPress etc
So all of this sounds ok and it is, except the disk and data bandwidths. The big downside though is the undocumented slow bandwidth and limited RAM. Once we moved to HostASP our blog slowed to a crawl and we had a number of “our of memory” errors when PHP code ran on our website. This was a deal-breaker in the end and much worse than the X10Hosting downtime.
Having done some more reading, perhaps we should have gone with another paid hosting provider – a bit of reading showed that iPage could have been a good choice – oh well next time!
X10Hosting – The Free Hosting Service – 4 Stars
Ratings time – so here we go!
Pros
- Can’t complain about the price – after all it’s free
- Not a bad feature set – as good as anyone we’ve tried (free or paid)
- No ads
- Unlimited bandwidth and disk space
Cons
- Having to log into your control panel every 30 days – very annoying
- Limited CPU time
- Only one database
- Down-time – X10Hosting have a few of these – sometimes some big ones too!
- etc