For almost three years, this website had been hosted by a web hosting company based in Manila, Philippines, using, then, starter 150 MB Linux Plan, for which, I pay a measly Php 150.00 (US$ 3.6) per month. However, there were some hassles;
- Billing and technical support were not so attentive. There were times that I need to follow-up my technical queries, specially, during downtime, or need to confirm if they had received my hosting payments.
- Payment method is not automated because I still have to go to the bank just to deposit my annual hosting fee. But I think it’s not their fault since the client has an option to pay through credit card. It’s just my weakness that I don’t trust fellow Filipinos in terms of online credit card transactions.
- And maybe the worst of all, my website was hacked few weeks ago, which made me think that they still have to improve their internet security measures.
- I’m also trying to get rid-off of so many server downtime. I`m not satisfied with their guaranteed 99.5% uptime since it is still equivalent to almost 44 hours of downtime.

I`ve searched web hosting companies outside the Philippines like in Hong Kong, UK and United States. However, based on my observation in Hong Kong, it seems that hosting my website there could turn into a disaster. Hosting in UK, on the other hand, is very costly for a small website like this.

I end up my search in the United States. There is a lot of cheap one dollar hosting in the United States, however, it’s very hard to trust this web host, specially, if there is no one, to whom I could trust and can give me a first hand experience dealing with these guys. Maybe, what were left to be trusted host are the already established and top web hosting companies in the United States. Webhosting.info helped me in evaluating each and everyone.

In my research, I observed that it seems web hosts in the US are very generous in giving away disk space and bandwidth. Hostgator, for example, offers 350 GB of disk space and 3,000 GB of band width for only US$ 7.95 (Php 333.00) per month. That’s almost 1600 times of disk space in my old web host at a price of only twice. Looks promising, but our friends in the websmasterworld.com advised me that this big space is more on a promotional only, or they call it “overselling”, of some web hosts. There are usually some fine-print clauses in the agreement that allow the host to discontinue your account for other reasons such as excessive server “resource usage”. In short, its almost bogus.

The last two hosts that remained in my mind were onlinenic and godaddy. Both are known to be a reliable domain registrar who also offers web hosting. Both offer a big but realistic disk space and bandwidth. However, onlinenic’s web hosting plan is good only for resellers and, as off now, I’m not inclined to do web hosting reselling business, though I consider it in my business plans. Besides, onlinenic is my registrant for this domain and I don’t want my web host and domain registrant to be in the same company (for security purposes).

What was left, and where I decided to host my website is godaddy. Goddy offers 10 GB of disk space and 300 GB of bandwidth for only USD4.08; almost the same cost as my previous web host. Their technical support is also fast that they could reply in your query within 12 hours. Payment, on the other hand, can be through credit card. I feel that my credit card transactions are secured in Godaddy. And since Godaddy has been in this business for a long time and may already employed competent technical team, hosting security could never be an issue. I also expect a fewer downtime.

Maybe, the drawback that I, so far, have experienced in hosting with godaddy is that its control panel is not so user friendly. That’s it, they are not using cpanel. It’s pretty obvious that cpanel is better than what godaddy uses.