Monday, January 17, 2011

In praise of LDHosting

7:33 PM / Web / Comments5 Comments

Web
LD Hosting

I thought I'd take a few moments to say some kind words about my web host, LDHosting. I've mentioned them a few times now, but I should do so more often, as I really can't say enough good words about them. After a string of ventures with other hosts who either started out good and went down the tubes or were simply not very satisfactory to begin with, I've now been with LDHosting since July 2009, and (touch wood) have no intention of going anywhere else. For €4.95 a month I get their silver plan, which gives me 10 GB of disk space, a 100 GB monthly bandwidth allowance (now reduced to a still generous 60 GB for new customers), unlimited FTP accounts and MySQL databases, support for cron jobs, Perl, SSI and a whole bunch of other services - actually, far more than I'll ever need. That, and the longest I've ever had to wait to get a response from customer support has been about 20 minutes. Oh, and they boast an uptime of 99.97%.

It gets better. Thanks to Bucks4Banners (an unrelated service), I get £5 every month simply for hosting banners on a handful of the sites on this page. (When I signed up, I put them on my most accessed DVD image comparisons.) In effect, this means that this site costs me less than nothing to maintain.

So yeah, basically if you're in need of cheap web hosting with excellent customer service and a solid range of options, go with LDHosting. Their cheapest plan is €3.50 a month (I went for the slightly pricier silver plan because I need the extra disk space, but for those not hosting a massive archive of BD screen captures, the bronze plan's 5 GB should be more than enough). They're the best web host I've ever used, and I don't say that lightly.

And no, they didn't pay me to write this post.

 
5 Comments

1. FoxyMulder said:

I'm happy enough with InMotion Hosting even though i pay £33 a month for a VPS server, i'm able to tinker more with things as i have direct access to the my.cnf file and a few other things.

My experience with web hosts tell me that they are happy to have you on shared hosting as long as your sql queries are lowish, as soon as the sql queries get higher they tend to dislike you, so it's not bandwidth that causes issues for sites it's the queries they have when using PHP applications on their websites.

Check your site speed around the world using the page below, i find that useful as apparently most users do not like waiting more than 4 seconds or so for the page to load.

http://www.webpagetest.org/

That site allows you to test many different configurations including speed, latency and repeat tests where people will have you in their browser cache and the page will load much faster.

(Posted on Monday, January 17, 2011 at 8:28 PM)

2. Count Fosco said:

This reminds me, I've been meaning to talk to you about possibly upgrading my blog to a permanent website. Was hoping you could lend me a hand. No immediate plans but possibly something we could discuss and work on when we meet up later in the year?

(Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 8:24 AM)

3. FoxyMulder said:

If anyone fancies taking my short film quiz you can find it at the top right of my site ( link below ) just above celebrity pictures and below the header, it's mostly easy and multiple choice but i have a trick question in there which only diehard film fans will likely know regarding the film Tombstone.

http://www.darkrealmfox.com/film_reviews/

(Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:11 PM)

4. Author Profile Page Michael said:

FoxyMulder:

£33 is definitely out of my price range and definitely not necessary for this site, which despite the massive stash of screen captures isn't really all that demanding.

Interesting site (the web page test thingy) - cheers for posting it. Judging by the results this site gives, I may need to look into having less material on the main page.


Count Fosco:

Sure, I'm happy to give you a hand, either when we meet up or via email/Skype/etc. We'll need to have a chat at some point to hammer out what it is you want in a web site.

(Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 9:29 PM)

5. FoxyMulder said:

I used to pay around £25 a month until the exchange rate for the pound went bad, i don't actually like paying £33 a month but it's one of the cheaper VPS packages with a host that has never failed to answer it's emails within ten minutes of sending them which i consider great customer service.

I hope the pound starts improving against other currencies this year, i used to occasionally buy the odd Japanese DVD before i got into blu ray but at the present rate there is no way i would buy a Japanese blu ray.

(Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 3:44 PM)

 
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