New Hosting Service

Fewer and fewer people host their own website using a hosting service. Designers use Framer or Webflow or EditorX or even trying the new Figma sites. Corporate websites are usually hosted in the corporate cloud like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. Content creators have moved on from blogging to either short form text like Bluesky or Twitter (I refuse to say X), or video content like Youtube or TikTok.

I have always liked blogging. This is post number 2,191. It has served as a journal of my ideas for almost 3 decades. I blog less often than I used to, but it still feels good to record my ideas and life.

Hosting services are a tricky business. There are many, many competitors and many things that can go wrong. I have been using A2 Hosting for the last 6 years. A Small Orange for the 6 years previous to that. They usually have a great promotional deal and then try to jack the prices up by 300%. Usually I just call them up and say that I want to stay and am willing to bump up the process modestly and they comply.

It’s a dumb system. I don’t really want to keep moving hosts. It’s a hassle. Give me a ten year contract and I would be happy. Anyway, A2Hosting refused to give me a reasonable price so I had to cancel the service and move. I started a spreadsheet to track possible companies. The candidates were gleaned from reddit threads in /r/ProWordPress and /r/hosting. I started with:

• InMotion
• Siteground
• Hostinger
• GreenGeeks
• Bluehost
• Host Papa
• Ionos
• Domain Racer
• Nixihost

I spoke to each one using the Chat on their websites. Some were clearly AI driven. I was not speaking to a human, I was speaking with a bot. This was somewhat expected, but it left me with a weird feeling. I did not feel confident in the answers I was given. The reviews were almost always mixed.

NixieHost

I saw a good review of Nixiehost and used the chat. It was very clearly a human living in Texas. It was someone knowledgeable and conveyed the information in a clear and concise manner. Within a few minutes my questions were answered and I felt confident in the service.

Their model was not to jack up the prices after 3 years, but rather to pay more up front and keep the price steady perpetually. I liked this model much better. Transferring the services was easier than ever. Backup of cPanel did everything automatically. It’s been one day, but so far, so good.

Hosting forever?

I wonder if personal websites on hosting services will eventually just die out. Do I need this blog after I retire? What would I do with it? Will the content be useful to anyone? Do I just let it die? This is the first time I have contemplated the end of this blog. Who knows what will happen in the next 10 years. I am still anticipating the singularity. Time will tell.