Web hosting

I must be going insane from sleep deprivation or just the stress of being jobless for the last month or two. Being totally broke I still went out and took a risk and invested in Dreamhost to do my webhosting.

Okay, so that first bit was maybe a bit more personal than you or I wanted. So I will get back to how I rationalized the situation. Hivemindz Magazine is growing and running out of space. Initially I thought to split the website up into two parts and use the Hostpc.com test site but delays in getting Cpanel setup with PHP put me in a bad mood. I am the impatient type when it comes to working. Sitting on my hands is not something that I do well which is why I have turned to writing. There is always something to write about. More on that later after I talk about Dreamhost.

I was curiously looking around for better hosting and took a look at both Site5.com and Textdrive.com. They were nice but they some how did not catch me. Too expensive and not enough space. On a whim I looked a Dreamhost. I was shocked! Their hosting plans were not normal. There had to be a catch. There was. The catch is that you have to sign up for two years to take advantage of the discounted rates and sales. But still it was too much for me to take in. 20GB for a typical website hosting plan was over the top. 1 terabyte in transfer ?? I don't usually think in terms of that many zeroes.

Space was not all I needed. I can't get along without some type of CVS. Earlier I was using a small sh3ll.net account but that is soon to run out. Checking the Dreamhost site I saw immediatly that they had CVS setup. They are probably the only webhost around that has this information in clear plain text right upfront. Most webhosting companies hide CVS and Subversion information in a FAQ or Knowledgebase.

Well, I was convinced that this was the right place but there was still PHP5. There is a catch 22 involving PHP5 and the webhosting industry. Webhosts will not switch without a demand for PHP5 and open source PHP projects are slow to support PHP5 because webhosts have not switched to PHP5. Slowly open source is moving to PHP5 but not fast enough. Well anyway I like PHP5 and there are tons of things that PHP5 can do that just will not happen in PHP4 like reading recursivly through objects. I have to have PHP5. Dreamhost does not have PHP5 installed by default. But they do let you compile your own PHP5!! A web developers wet dream. To be able to roll my own version of PHP and run it as a FastCGI. Right here I am hooked on Dreamhost.

The only thing that remained was the costs. As mentioned I am a poor man living in an over-developed socialist country. But luckily for me my birthday is coming up in 20 days. So it was good-bye to that spiffy new electric shaver that I wanted and hello Dreamhost. So if you feel that web developers should be clean shaven then you can help me get a new Braun Electric shaver by visiting some of the sponsers of this site.

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