By artarmon42 | No Comments
Last updated: Wednesday, December 27, 2006

I’ve been doing some ”Internet Entrepreneurship” lately, and have a few projects under development. None that I want to talk about right now though…

Anyway, I had been using Godaddy to register my domain. Originally because of “those” commercials, but mostly because they’re cheap (which if you get some good coupon codes, makes them one of the cheapest registrars out there) and has some reasonably cheap add-ons like domain name privacy and web-hosting. However, as I became more of a “business class” user, I was fnding that their hosting just wasn’t meeting my performance needs and that their technical support really was quite poor (”Google-monkeys” is probably the best that I can say without getting sued). So I struck out in search for a better host…

It turns out that it’s really hard to find an honest opinion out there. If you simply Google “web host”, you’re likely to find alot of self-promoting or fully-paid-for marketing-information out there. To cut to the chase, I’ve discovered that Web Hosting Talk is one place where real webmasters hang out and you can probably learn alot about what works and what doesn’t.

After alot more research, I decided to move to Liquid Web. What made me go with Liquid Web?

• I wanted a dedicated server to house all my projects. They had very good reviews for both price, service and product in this market.
• They manage my server’s backups (one of the things I always dreaded as a sys admin).
• They proactively patch the operating system and system-level applications (one of the things I always dreaded as an IT manager).
• Their technical support is top notch! I’ve had to call them 3 times (to walk me through cPanel, to rename my server and to recompile Apache to install GD), spoke to 3 different people (one on Christmas day!) and they were all technically compotent and a pleasure to work with.

I’ve been in the “game” long enough to know that as a company grows, it’s hard to maintain the same standards. I hope Liquid Web can keep the momentum!

So after I got my server all setup, I struck out in search of some SSL certificates. I remember a time when Verisign was the only game in town for certificates, my how times have changed! So, once again, I went back to Web Hosting Talk to see what good deals were out there. That’s when I stumbled onto ServerTastic, a reseller of various certificate providers:

• Geotrust (#2 certificate provider in the world, after Verisign) certificate for $89/year from a regular price of $249/year? Bargain!
• RapidSSL (not sure where they rank, but as a Single Root and built into 99%+ of all mobile devices, can’t be that shabby!) certificate for $13.95/year? Bargain!

Only time will tell how happy I am with these two companies I’ve stumbled across. But so far, I’m happy enough to give them positive praise on my blog!

Disclosure: I have not been compensated in any way for this personal opinion. I paid the full regular price for products and services I’ve purchased from these two comapnies.

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