Posts Tagged ‘web hosting’

A screenshot of the mysterious dbboon which has been wreaking havoc on GoDaddy sites. More information to follow once we know more.

This question comes from an Internet associate:

I’m actually creating my own website right now (and no, it’s not cosmetics-related) and I seek some advice from you regarding hosting. Just like you, I buy all my domains thru GoDaddy, only so far I never had to worry about hosting and FTP upload. I am reading horror stories online about GoDaddy hosting services and I’m having a hard time evaluating where the truth is… Some love it, some hate it!

Is GoDaddy a decent option for hosting? Or is it for suckers/newbies who don’t know any better?

Regarding hosting, I do recommend GoDaddy, but it may be that I am highly familiar with it, so I am used to ignoring the upsells they send you through when you are setting up services with them. I have had sites run poorly, I have had problems with hacking, but overall, with over 100 sites hosted with them I’d say they are good bet.

For someone better, and at $60 per year paid upfront very comparable in price, we use KnownHost.com. It takes longer to setup, you have to wait for emails and such (24 hours) but the control panel is much more powerful and the service is somewhat more reliable. Main difference, they don’t provide telephone support. So if you you want more personal support, go with godaddy.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Yahoo! has officially shut down Geocities. And they’re just in time for Halloween in case anyone wants to go trick or treating as their dead GeoCities page. Spooky.

But why would Yahoo! just throw away something that they spent good money for, about 3.57 billion dollars in 1999. GeoCities web pages still saw around ten million visitors per month and some may think (as many did) that those kind of numbers were worth having around. At the very least they could have tried to sell the company, basically anything they made would end up being more than what they got by unceremoniously shutting it down.

Of course, they could have been trying to cannibalize GeoCities into their Yahoo! web hosting service. An offer to join the service was included with the announcement that GeoCities was closing to its users. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow: “So, yeah, we’re shutting all of this free stuff down but now you get to pay for web hosting for only 4.99 a month! We know you must be excited.”

And while 4.99 isn’t a lot for web hosting it’s still 4.99 more a month than most GeoCities users were paying. Besides, 4.99 is good for almost two gallons of gas in some places. Maybe.

Yahoo! never found a way to make GeoCities profitable or at least–profitable enough for them. And while I’m not going to say that they ran it into the ground–that’s surely where it is now.

R.I.P.