After years of struggling with various web hosting limitations, I finally shelled out for an upgrade, and registered matthewbotos.com before the food terror guy Matthew Botos got it. (R/C helicopter Matt Botos already has mattbotos.com). I’ve dealt with the limitations for a long time because it was free, courtesy of my dad’s “family plan”.
I was primarily looking for someone with better PHP performance, having seen how slow both WordPress and Gallery became even with built-in caching. (Purehost declined to install the recommended PHP accelerator, which would’ve reduced their load as well.) As long as I was shopping, I also wanted to add a few other features: PHP optimization (of course), SSH, SFTP, unlimited email quotas, and one-click installs of popular packages. A2 Hosting, who has good street cred from hosting 43folders, offered all that for a reasonable price, plus Subversion, Python, and Ruby (so I can finally see what makes people so fanatical about it).
Activation was incredibly fast; my account was created and domain live in seven minutes, on a Saturday afternoon. These guys are obviously on the ball enough to have the whole thing automated, which really makes you disdain anyone still charging “setup fees”. I paid none, even though I only bought a month as a trial.
I think I’ll be keeping it, though; it’s noticeably faster. Their support was also pretty good; I got an actual engineer on their chat to help me out with setting up my ssh keys, so that I can automate my FTP mirroring and logins. Having a proper shell is awesome; especially for things that shouldn’t be served publicly like raw photo data and backups. Even the error logging is a step up - they actually have them timestamped!
For the moment, I only moved my Gallery beta to the new host. The old one is still here, though in a funky move state, along with WordPress. Once everything is ready to go at the new place, I’ll announce a hopefully seamless transition.
