About a month ago, I began looking for a new hosting solution for foolip.org, having started with a wardrobe computer in 2006 and never really having found a stable home. My needs are modest, so I went shopping for the cheapest possible shared hosting. I settled for JustHost, which popped up on many comparison sites and seemed to be good value for money, at $2.81/month including VAT.

JustHost isn’t terrible, but there were a few problems. The server (just44.justhost.com) seemed starved for memory and I was unable to work with my www.git because of it at one point. Another time I couldn’t log in over SSH for the better part of a day. Finally, on August 2, there were some major problems, with my site going up and down like a yo-yo. One of the first things I did was to point Pingdom at foolip.org to get some good uptime data. I have a public status page, where you can judge for yourself.

Wanting more control, I started to look for a VPS instead, and eventually settled on DigitalOcean, based on the location (Netherlands), technology (KVM) and price ($5/month, but counted hourly). As of August 6, foolip.org is hosted on a virtual machine running Debian and nginx. Having root access and doing things the hard way is great, it feels like having a wardrobe computer all over again. Time (and Pingdom) will tell if it’s robust or not, but so far I’m very happy. Also, JustHost will refund me for the remaining time, which is very good of them.

In closing, if I were to pick a Web hosting solution all over again and was not in a hurry, I would try to ignore individual reviews and claimed uptimes, and instead use Pingdom to monitor sites hosted using my candidate solutions before making a decision.