Good Web Hosting Blog

After digging around in the back of my head I remembered 6 free web hosts I have used. It must have been around the year 2000. The list is:

• 20m
• Crosswinds
• Prohosting
• Terrashare
• Redrival
• VR9

I have visited the website of each of these web hosts and tried to find out how they are doing today.

20m

• + Reasonably priced plans
• - One of the three plans highlighted on the front page leads you to another web host through an affiliate link
• - Some presented plans are "outdated"
• - Google ads
• - Website is designed as spiderbait (many similar pages, little content)
• - Many links to other websites.

Based on the appearance of the website I wouldn't recommend to sign up for a 20m hosting plan. Outdated plans, 3rd party ads and the links to other websites gives the impression that the website is there to make money on ads and increase pagerank for other sites, not to sell web hosting.

Crosswinds

Crosswinds looks like a regular hosting provider now, targeting normal webmasters. Their website isn't very well polished but besides that, they fit right into the overselling budget hosting market. Not free hosting anymore.

• + Quite reasonable hosting plans, maybe a little too cheap.
• - Google ads on their website.
• + A page trying to explain why they are displaying ads (still strange though).
• - Virtual private and dedicated server appears to be available if you go to the sign up form, but only then
• - FreeBSD 4.10? That's ancient.
• + Email-only hosting
• + Ruby On Rails, shows they are trying to follow the technology

Prohosting

Still free hosting, paid hosting from www.prohosting.com as before Reasonable plan, uses free hosting to attract paid customers. Not unlike what they used to have, except the free hosting plan is very limited and probably meant to attract customers to their paid services.

• + Seems to have a devent business plan behind their free offer.
• + Nice website compared to the other web hosts.

Redrival

Paid and free web hosting. Mostly for the free market and those who want just a little more.

• - Amateurish website
• - $1.99/month, too cheap
• + Reasonable size for the money, 100mb
• + only 2mb on free accounts (so it's not too expensive for them to provide free hosting)
• - 2mb is enough only for very small websites.
• - Blank help page
• - Advertise with us-page.
• - help page is empty and forum page is broken

The website has too many weak points to make a decent impression, and does not give the impression of a reliable web host.

VR9

• - Gone

Check out http://vr9.com if you want to see for yourself. I do not put up links to "domain parking/advertisement" pages.

Terrashare

• - Gone

Instead of regular free hosting they tried to pay the webmasters by sharing income from ads on their sites but as time has shown, that didn't go so well. The url is http://www.terrashare.com (currently a domain parking/advertising page)

Conclusion

So, of those 6 web hosts, 4 are still alive, of which 2 appears to be alive and well. The result of this step back to the past can be summarized like this:

• Winner: Prohosting
• Runner-up: Crosswinds
• Uncertain: RedRival and 20m
• Losers: Terrashare and VR9

The .mobi top-level domain is not without critics. It's goal is to create a place for separate mobile-friendly websites under .mobi. Critics will quickly point at the available technology for creating single websites that adapts its presentation to the type of device that is used to visit it (semantic html + css). If you want to see that in action, just visit http://www.goodwebhosting.info with your internet-enabled mobile phone. Same site, just mobile-friendly presentation in a separate stylesheet.

More information available at domain registrars everywhere and the dotMobi registry. I find it amusing that the current link the latest dotMobi news points to a Word document. That's definitely not mobile-friendly ;-) And they have a mobile-friendly stylesheet too.

Go to your favorite domain registrar now if you really really want some good .mobi domains. General registration begins october 11th.

The situation escalated four days ago and could be followed in this thread in the Hostgator forums. After hard work and two days, Hostgator could announce that the cause of the issue had been found and a permanent fix was applied.

Now, Hostgator didn't do anything special to get attacked, and the attackers could just as well have targeted all the other thousands of servers running Cpanel. It also took 2 days to solve the issue. Combine that with reports that Cpanel patches didn't work and we have one of the most, if not the most serious cracker attacks targeting the shared web hosting industry. This could have been a lot worse.

As of now, all web hosts running Cpanel should have applied the patches and we can only wait for the next attack. Those who are still using Internet Explorer are not safe, because the exploit in VML handling has not been patched by Microsoft (not that it's the only unpatched hole in there...) and exploit code could float around other places. The Secunia report for the VML hole in Internet Explorer should be of interest.