Blessed by the Potato

Well, my trustly little webserver has been locking up with increasing frequency. I still get nearly a week before I have to reset it, but it’s no longer a guaranteed seven days like before, which puts me in the embarrassing position of having other people tell me that my website has gone down. So as a bit of a thesis gift to myself — and since the website looks to be fairly stable and extremely productive at the moment — I’m going to buy some professional webspace. I tried to find a Canadian host since Americans scare me a little at the moment, even though I know I don’t exactly have schemata for Rube Goldberg devices of terror hosted here. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim.

Right now I’m trying to decide between Monster Hosting, a Canadian host with a fairly cheap plan at $7/mo, and LunarPages, an American host at $8/mo (Canadian). BlackSun came highly recommended and was in the running for a while, but I’m trying to do this on the cheap, so their $10/month rate and $25 setup fee pretty much killed that. (I know, it’s lunacy to be agonizing over like $20 per year, but there you have it.)

LunarPages is offering a ton more bandwidth as well as a free domain name. I also know of one person using LunarPages, so that’s another plus to them (both for the more relevant referral, and also because I can help out a friend through their referral kickback program). MonsterHosting seems a lot smaller, and I don’t really know how much I can trust the few positive reviews of it I’ve seen. But I don’t really see their lower bandwidth offerings as a huge drawback since it’s still well above what I’m using now, and it might indicate that they’re a little more honest with being able to deliver what they sell. While the domain won’t be free, I can register holypotato.ca through them, which appeals to me a bit more than holypotato.net (or going with some other .com for my free LunarPages address).

So if anyone has any final advice before I end up flipping a coin and taking the plunge, let me know (especially if you can get a referral out of me :)