If you’re seeing this post, it means that DNS nameserver changes have propagated and you’re looking at my site on a new webhost.
It was about time. I liked my old hosting provider but last year they decided to switch convert their plans from a US pricing to Australian pricing, using a really unreasonable conversion rate. They claimed the conversion rate was based on the rate at the time the decision was made to convert the pricings but this meant that my hosting costs were to go up by approximately SGD5 a month, which makes 60 bucks extra a year. Additionally, their services were getting uncompetitive in comparison to similar plans in reputable hosting companies that were a lot cheaper. My biggest problem with switching though was that many lower priced plans in US companies offer only MySQL4 and PHP4, while I’ve been on MySQL5 and PHP5 for a while. Also, I badly needed SSH access, which not all budget hosting companies provide. In addition, I wanted to be hosted on a reliable company with relatively good support.
After hunting around for a bit I finally decided on Hostgator. For about 8-9 bucks cheaper a month I get similar scripting functionality and much much more space. Although I don’t think I will ever use more than 5-10% of the space allocated to me the cost savings are great. Additionally, I managed to get a coupon code which after deductions meant that I had to pay only USD0.01 for the first month: no harm to try out to see how the service is like and if I liked it I only needed to modify the DNS nameservers to point to the location. I’m still testing this host for the current month and will definitely stay on if the current quality of service is maintained for the next couple of weeks.
