In Search Of A New Webhost

I look back on my days when I used to run all of my own servers and cringe. I had 2 Windows 2000 Server machines and 2 running RedHat Linux, plus some development machines. Then there were the RAID arrays - 2 big Dell Poweredge boxes that held a bunch of SCSI drives which could barely be lifted when everything was in there and barely provided any storage by today's standards.

And then there was the administrative headache of managing all of those servers; keeping them patched, secure, and running smoothly. It was a big task, to say the least, and something that kept me on-call 24/7 for way too long. The worst of all, though, was the bill I received every month for bandwidth and co-location of my equipment at a local ISP.

One of the things that really changed things was Amazon S3. Not having to have to rely on providing my own storage infrastructure, it was much easier to switch to a ColdFusion hosting provider and not look back. I went with a host that I felt provided good support and that were focused on ColdFusion to know what they were doing. And I have been hosting my sites there ever since.

But ColdFusion hosting is not cheap either. The cost of hosting around 10 sites for myself and for customers still landed me with a pretty hefty bill each year, and I knew a lot of the sites weren't getting all that much traffic. So I set out to find a better way...

I had always looked into having a dedicated server at a provider as a way to solve my problems, but the costs of that were even higher than going with a dedicated ColdFusion host and not having to worry about managing anything. But that also has its drawbacks in a lack of flexibility to install your own software, and the fact that I am at the mercy of some other developer's code running on my box that I can't trust.

So what's the answer? I think it lies in the new breed of web host companies like ServInt and SliceHost. For as little as $20 per month, you can have your own Virtual Private Server running your choice of ColdFusion engines.

In the following posts, I'll be sharing more experiences on my search and setup of a low-cost, high-power ColdFusion hosting solution. Stay tuned!