Choosing a web host is never easy. I created this website in 2007 and over the past 3 years I have changed website host a number of times. In today’s blog post, I will be discussing why I have had to change hosts, and what some of the advantages and drawbacks of choosing a shared hosting provider like HostMonster and MediaTemple over more expensive hosts like VPS.net cloud hosting.

HostMonster – A great host for beginners with small sites

When I launched this website in 2007, I hosted it with HostMonster. I chose HostMonster because it was cheap ($6 per month) and you could host an unlimited number of domains on the same account. I found the HostMonster support to be quite good because I could chat real-time with technical support team online if ever there were any problems.

As GoodWebPractices grew in popularity and a number of posts like ‘10 Epic Website Failures’ and ‘20 Digg users revealed’ received thousands of visitors a day through sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, I had to move away from HostMonster to a server that could support spikes in traffic. HostMonster told me that if I didn’t move the site, they would close my account because HostMonster was ‘for small sites’!

The screenshot above shows traffic figures for GoodWebPractices.com after publishing the '10 Epic Website Failures' post on October 6th, 2008.

MediaTemple – Able to withstand spikes in traffic but slow and not very secure

In 2009 I chose to migrate GoodWebPractices hosting from HostMonster to MediaTemple.net. I chose MediaTemple because of their Grid System package, which meant that when my site had a spike in traffic I could buy extra server bandwidth to ensure the site didn’t go down. MediaTemple was recommended to me by my friend Danny Ashton who runs TheToyZone.com. Danny regularly had content which hit the front page of Digg and Reddit so needed a host which could cope with a spike of 10,000’s of visitors within a very short period of time.

At $20 per month for the base package, MediaTemple was considerably more expensive than HostMonster, but GoodWebPractices had out grown HostMonster and we needed a host that could deal with spikes in traffic. Moving over to MediaTemple was relatively straight forward, and in similarity to HostMonster, it was possible to host multiple domains and run up to 100 instances of Joomla, WordPress or Drupal on the same account.

For the year that GoodWebPractices was hosted at MediaTemple I was relatively happy. In 2009, the main problem I had with MediaTemple was that the server was quite slow and page load time was too high. I changed a number of settings in Joomla to help make the Joomla load quicker, but still the load time was higher than I would have liked. I did contact the MediaTemple’s technical support about this, but they didn’t help solve the problem.

In June 2010 I had a much more significant problem that pushed me away from MediaTemple... On June 15th 2010, I received an email from Google alerting me that GoodWebPractices had been hacked and was being used to host phishing content. A bit of research showed that the hackers had got into GoodWebPractices.com through another site hosted within the same account as GoodWebPractices. All the sites that were hosted within the same account on the MediaTemple server had been compromised.

Unfortunately MediaTemple were unable to help in securing the websites and it became apparent that I needed to find a more secure host which offered excellent support.

VPS.net – Scalable, fast and secure: An excellent choice for bigger Joomla sites with bigger budgets

As I needed to find a good, reliable host, I turned to the people I have contact with on Twitter to ask what Host people would recommend. A number of people including Tim Nash and Joost de Valk (aka Yoast) recommended VPS.net. Having spent some time looking into VPS.net it really did seem like an excellent solution because of the positive testimonies surrounding the company on Twitter and the fact it is scalable, so I could buy more resources as and when I needed them.

I got in contact with the team over at VPS.net and they assured me that they would help with the transfer. With help from Tim Stiffler Dean and Brian Teeman I cleaned up the Joomla database and files which had been hacked. VPS.net then installed cPanel for me and setup the database and I transferred the relevant files. After a few days, everything was up and running, and it was noticeably faster than when it was hosted with MediaTemple. In the screenshot below from Google Webmaster Tools, you can see how page load time has reduced following the move over to VPS.net on the 5th of July.

So far, I’m definitely with the choice of moving my website over to VPS.net. It is considerably more expensive than HostMonster and slightly more expensive than MediaTemple (though it depends how many nodes you choose). If however security, backup and support are things that you place high value on, I think VPS.net is an excellent provider.

Quick summary of why I chose VPS.net

• Trusted – Recommended by industry experts like Tim Nash and Yoast.
• Scalable – You can buy extra nodes when you need them, so as your traffic grows you won’t need to change host.
• Secure – If you host multiple domains, they won’t share the same FTP details: each domain will have its own cPanel so if one domain is hacked the rest of your website’s won’t necessarily also be hacked (unlike MediaTemple and HostMonster).
• Fast – VPS.net is significantly faster than MediaTemple was. GoodWebPractices now loads around 4 seconds faster hosted with VPS.net than it did when hosted with MediaTemple!
• R1Soft Back up – You can securely backup your VPS.net account using R1Soft backup. This comes at a cost of $15 per month but if you have gone through the pain of losing websites in the past because you haven’t backed them up, $15 is worth it.
• Excellent Support – The technical support is excellent. Although you need to pay for support requests, the fact you pay means that the requests are dealt with very promptly and I found that they would work around the clock to find a solution.

So who are you hosted with? Is your Joomla host fast and secure?

Please share your thoughts and experience with us in the comments below.

Comments (3)

Riekelt

August 02, 2010

82.169.149.87

Votes: +0

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This is a test of the comment system

darklooker

August 04, 2010

83.45.207.8

Votes: +0

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hi: How many nodes has you?.. and how many visitors?

thanks in advance

Johnux

September 03, 2010

208.86.47.3

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FANTASTIC article. Seriously, this is exactly what I was hoping to stumble across tonight. I'm currently hosting 10 Joomla sites on HostMonster and it's so slow I can hardly stand it. I have my highest traffic Joomla site hosted on a VPS over at WebbyNode but using a cloud VPS and command prompt is difficult for someone who has been using Cpanel the last 5 years and they don't offer a CPanel, though I'm sure I could install one myself. I will definitely look into VPS.net. Do they make it easy? How is the setup compared to Hostmonster? Thank you so much.

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