Web hosting companies are evil Vast distances one must travel through rain, sleet, snow, through leech infested lakes and bat filled caves in the hope that one may find the ever so prized discount web hosting plan so perfect, reliable and support friendly that their website and budget will match perfectly.

This is the search many look for over and over every day across the net and yet, so often it seems that no company ever offers the services they promise. I will regale you with my stories of heartbreak with past websites.

My first domain name was viewjokes.com which I purchased when I was 15 and built the site to host huge collections of jokes that I found. I hosted this site with my uncle who had the server at his office and while this had some benefits such as almost unlimited storage space and an almost dedicated server, the site just wasn't very popular and my uncle didn't really know how to admin a webserver that well.

I decided for my next site, thegreatmendoza.com, I wanted to just pay a small fee to have my site hosted so I went with Yahoo! web hosting. I dont remember ever having the website go down ever. I never really needed customer support at the time because everything I was doing was pretty simple but I was paying $11 a month for hosting which provided very little storage space and bandwidth. That was when I was 19 or about two years ago. I then tried to cancel because I was done building the site for thegreatmendoza.com and didn't really want to mess with it anymore but I spent the next three months trying to cancel.

Then I found an add online for a discount web hosting company that would give me a gig of storage and 30 gigs of bandwidth for $4 a month. At the time, that was an awesome price so I signed up with them and my site was up and online within an hour which impressed me. That website was called pauldmendoza.com. Within a month, I had purchased a second domain name with them called ultravisionmedia.com for another website I was developing.

Then the problems started. For a month after buying ultravisionmedia.com, everything seemed fine. Then suddenly there were these outages that would last for hours at a time every couple days. And then my sites went down for almost a day before they came back online. And then on that fateful day about 9 months ago, the sites disappeared. A week later, I received an email from the owners of the company I was hosted with informing me that they were having some financial issues and that they were working to resolve the sites.

A month later, I got another email from them telling me that they had declared bankruptcy and had moved the company to Australia. And to top it all off, I was never able to get my domain names back from that company that I registered them with. Some day they will expire and maybe I'll repurchase them again.

Since that company, I've been ever so careful about who I chose to host my sites. Here are the two companies that I really like.

First is ICDSoft. They are the best discount small hosting site I have ever been with. Literally, support emails are returned in minutes and there is awesome uptime.

Second, Yahoo! hosting. While their support isn't great for time responses, everything else rocks. Their uptime is great, setup takes a matter of minutes before the domain name and everything work, integrates automatically with their email system and works well for php and mysql sites. Not sure if they support Ruby on Rails or any of those other things but I'll have to check on that later.

In conclusion, you get what you pay for with webhosts.  ¶ 2:44 PM