Hosting Heartbeat

For those of you looking for some cheap hosting, look no further than the current iPowerWeb sale of hosting for $3.95/month. Head on over and check it out. .

This is a few weeks old, but it might interest those of you looking for new hosting. It sounds like HostPapa is now offering an upgrade in terms of features:

HostPapa announced that due to recent industry changes, they are now proud to offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space. Their plan comes with a free domain name for life, site builder software, $25 Yahoo! credit, $50 Microsoft adCenter credit, free shopping carts and blogs, PHP, CGI, emails and all other essentials.

The plan is priced for $5.95 if prepaid for three years, $6.95 if prepaid for two years and $7.95 if paid monthly. They also mention 30 days money back for customer satisfaction.

Head on over and check out some of their webhosting packages.

I was hunting around the internet for some interesting advertising campaigns by hosting companies, and came across the GoDaddy girl, Candice Michelle.

Apparently she won a beer drinking contest recently amongst a bunch of guys. Judging from the photo it looks like she also won the wet t-shirt contest, but who’s keeping tabs really? I’m going to try and score a HostingHeartbeat interview with her in the near future.

If you’re interested in reading more about GoDaddy, head over and check out some of their hosting plans.

I’m going to add new hosting companies into the mix from time to time just to see how they compare. I’ll also let everyone know about any sales that are going on in the hosting world, should you be in the market for a switch.

To that end, I’m pleased to add Lunarpages to the mix. They are currently offering a hosting package for $4.95 per month, so go check them out.

For those of you on GoDaddy, they’ve just made a few small cosmetic changes in the back-end UI to help simplify administrative tasks. You can read more about it on their blog.

Photo from here.

This is a bit old, but HostGator recently donated $25,000 to the one laptop per child fund. I really like the OLP initiative, but as HostGator points out, the initiative has been bogged down with some controversy recently.

In terms of the donation, I think it’s a great move, and I wish more businesses would try and give a little back whenever they can. If you’ve heard of any other cases (especially in the area of hosting), then please let us know.

Alot of people immediately go out and get shared hosting whenever they want to set up a blog. While that’s a great solution, alot of people can probably make due with the free WordPress.com service. At WordPress.com you can sign up for a free WordPress blog in the form of myblog.wordpress.com. For a small fee, you can even map your own domain to it, as pointed out by Raul in Vancouver.

So if all you need is a blog, then you might want to consider something basic over at WordPress.com.

Amazon made history two years ago by diving head first into the new realm of cloud computing. Their popular Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 for short) allows users to provision servers at will, allowing them (in theory) to scale their web company on demand.

The main limitation of Amazon’s offering is that it doesn’t really include any usable persistent storage. If your EC2 instance dies a horrible death, all the data that was with it dies as well. You can, of course, using their S3 service to make backups of some of your data, but it’s really not meant to be used like a fast-access disk drive.

Amazon has recently announced that they are in the middle of developing a persistent storage (PS) solution for their cloud offering. What that means is that when your instance barfs, you’ll be able to bring it back up without losing any of the data that was stored on the persistent drive.

With that new offering, it suddenly becomes realistic for someone to set up a complete web hosting company on Amazon EC2. If the demand suddenly spikes, the hosting company could simply fire up a few more EC2 instances to handle the extra load. When the traffic dies down, they could free those instances to save money.

There are obvious technical hurdles to that approach, but it’s definitely possible. We’ll see how things look in a few months.

According to Media Temple’s official status blog, the recent issues involving their Grid-Service are now resolved.

This issue was around for well over a month. I know many people were affected by this (including this guy) so it’s good news that it seems to be behind them.

Drop a line here if you are still having some issues.