DowntownHost – Recommended Shared, Linux Web Hosting

Over the years, I have used Yahoo, Hostway, Sharkspace, and Godaddy, sequentially, for my web hosting services until finally changing to Downtownhost in 2008. Yahoo was great during the Web 1.0 years, but became expensive in comparison to other services and I migrated to Hostway around 2001, using its servers to run an online art gallery for over 6 years. When I launched a new web development company in 2006, I shifted to SharkSpace hoping to use their reseller hosting package as a good way to manage disk space for multiple clients, but the price and disk space could not compare to shared hosts like Godaddy. (For reference, $24.95 per month vs. $5 per month.) I signed up for a Wild West reseller account thinking that would be a better option for hosting client sites cheaply – big mistake. I had innumerable problems with Godaddy doing CMS development and hosting multiple domains on the same shared space. So many problems in fact, I decided I could not offer the services responsibly to my clients or even use the disk space for my own sites.

I canceled my Godaddy account and began a serious search of all hosts for the best one to build my own sites on as well as host my client’s sites reliably, securely, and economically. I checked all of the main web hosting companies, all of the review sites, forums, bulletin boards, etc. A lot of people had good things to say about DowntownHost, something that is really rare if you look at discussions of hosting companies. One thing that was mentioned, is that when hosting companies offer disk space in massive quantities (500GB, Unlimited Storage) and unlimited bandwidth for a super cheap price, they are overselling their servers – i.e. selling disk space and bandwidth they don’t actually have, and betting that most users won’t even use a fraction of their 500GB. That is fine, it probably wouldn’t happen anyway, but then the same shared hosting companies have the server processor use restrictions and can shut your site down even if they promise unlimited bandwidth. In a nutshell, you get what you pay for, and with cheap shared hosting a lot of the servers can develop small problems with configurations that cause nightmares for developers. Godaddy is the worst example here probably, just check any CMS board about the host-specific problems developers discover there.

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