Jim Sutton's Web Hosting Rumors and News

Site5 Review

2006-04-05T08:31:00.000-04:00

The Web Hosting Handbook is on a roll. They got more reviews than you can shake a stick at. The latest being one of the best Site5 reviews we've ever read.

Site5 was a relative unknown until a couple years ago when they repositioned themselves as the web host for a new generation of web developers and designers (if you don’t fall into this category you should probably look elsewhere). Their current rapid growth stems from a major shift in focus towards innovation and engineering coupled with a new website loaded with Web 2.0 terminology and exclusive brand names. (more...)

New Review Site

2006-04-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

Check out this new web hosting review site. I'm friends with the webmaster and it's gonna be great.

Bluehost Review

2006-03-31T03:12:00.000-05:00

Ok, the Web Hosting Handbook has just posted a decent Bluehost Review. Check it out.

In other news Netfirms just launched some pretty sweet reseller plans. Your MultiPro Control Panel lets you view and manage all of your Sub-Accounts in one spot. As the Reseller and Super-user, only you get 100% control over all your hosting plans. With Netfirms Reseller plans, each of your clients has their own Sub-Account, and does not have access to your other clients’ accounts.

Cheaper Than a Cup of Coffee ... Get a Domain!

2005-11-26T02:22:00.000-05:00

It's official. Any cheaper and '.com' domain names will be free. Of course Yahoo and Netfirms have been battling it out all year with prices ranging from $3.00 - $5.00, way lower than GoDaddy's $8.95 / year plus additional fees. Now iPowerWeb has joined the fray at $2.95 for one year - the lowest yet. So will 2006 be the year of the free domain name? Coffee keeps getting more expensive, somethings gotta give.

What Free Blog Business Model?

2005-11-16T01:52:00.000-05:00

It looks like after making a go of it for almost a year Fortune City is dropping their free Blogging service. I guess ad-supported revenue wasn't cutting it. Here is a snippet from their official notice:

"After a careful evaluation of our product portfolio, we have decided to no longer provide a blog service. We value you as a loyal customer, and want to do everything we can to ensure that you will still be able to continue blogging and keep all your current postings and photos. So we'd like to introduce you to a compatible blog service that you can migrate your account to, BlogHarbor!"

Incidently BlogHarbour charges $8.95 per month which is rather expensive considering there are a plethora of good web hosting companies out there charging less and giving much more. Also incidently both Fortune City and BlogHarbour use Tucows BlogWare to power their blogging platform. Perhaps Tucows is setting themselves up to lose even more partners as they slowly go direct to consumer with their wholesale products.

Web Host Reliability

2005-09-21T23:13:00.000-04:00

Its funny just how fragile the web is. Last week 3 websites I partly maintain all went down simultaneously. All 3 hosted with different companies, all 3 companies going down at once. All 3 advertising infrastructure capable of withstanding most natural disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes, power outages and just about anything else Mother Nature can muster. It didn’t matter.

Dreamhost, PowWeb, Media Temple and just about every other web hosting company in the Los Angeles area went dark last week for almost an entire afternoon. Apparently backup diesel generators, UPS and alternate power grids had no effect when rolling blackouts hit town.

Dreamhost had this to say: “We do not know the exact reason for the generator failures at this time. We have received some vague explanations that we have not found to be satisfactory”. PowWeb threw the blame upstream: “The power outage caused problems for both of our backbone connection providers, which is why we disappeared”. Media Temple went as far as to say that “human error” was the cause of their generator failures.

If I were a hosting company I would invest $0 in redundancy and post pictures and a tour of Fort Knox on my website. Actually maybe that’s what really happened.

Tucows Going Direct to Consumer

2005-08-23T22:53:00.000-04:00

With profit margins on domain names sinking fast, Tucows / OpenSRS is planning on doing an end-run around their resellers and going direct to consumer. Of course they have always maintained a non-competitive brand through Domain Direct, but our sources tell us a relaunch with competitive pricing and heavy marketing is in store early next year.

DotEasy Breaks the Bank

2005-07-20T11:11:00.000-04:00

Sedo reports that DotEasy has just purchased the domain name "website.com" for a whopping $750,000. I guess the $35 setup fee on DotEasy's "free" hosting product is here to stay ...