Wow. Just wow.

How long have I been troubleshooting my website? I’ve been facing the debacle of trying to get my domain name fully functional ever since I moved to a new web host. When was that? Over a week ago. A week.

And yet, that whole wait wasn’t even necessary. My domain name has still not been transferred over to my new service - perhaps because the guys over at the 1&1 transfer department are difficult to cooperate with (I almost called them douchebags) - but fortunately, before I had canceled my old hosting account, I had set up a DNS with the domain name to work with my new service, and I simply just had to tinker with some of the settings with my new host to get things working. Once my domain expires, I will reregister it with NFSN.

…NFSN, that is, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. They are my new web hosting provider. There are multiple reasons why I switched, which I will sort into an easy-to-comprehend bulleted list:

  • Customer service. 1and1.com really isn’t too bad of a host… but they aren’t too good either. While they settle with outsourced tech support in India, NearlyFreeSpeech actually really cares about their customers.
  • Pricing. What really struck me about NFSN is the way the payment works. You only pay for what you use. It can be equated to a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan: You pay one cent per megabyte per month, one dollar per gigabyte of data transfer, etc. At this rate, I am only paying about one dollar a month for hosting. I need to be careful, though; obviously I don’t want to store gigabytes of data on my server for the sake of not paying a ton more money.
  • SQL. 1&1’s MySQL service was pretty slow. Thanks to NFSN, my site loads a couple seconds faster. This may not seem like much, but since Wordpress relies on SQL for dynamically generating pages then it can really mean a lot.

I think that’s all I’m really going to say for now. There are plenty of other things I could write about, but at the moment I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I’ll conclude by recommending NearlyFreeSpeech.net as a great web host. There’s just two things I want to emphasize if you’re considering using it: If you’re a newbie to web administration, or if you plan on using it for storing large files, then I suggest you go somewhere else.