Software Developer, Media Nut, and Proud Father of Two

Several of my client's sites, as well as my own, have been moved to my new VPS with Slicehost.com, which I think has provided me with the best bang for my buck. I appreciate the service that Dreamhost has offered in the last 18 months, but enough is enough. Performance and reliability have become an issue with disks failures, random MySQL downtimes, and utter slowness. This is to be expected when you're on shared hosting... or is it? I can't help but sense that Dreamhost has started over-hosting, taking in more and more sites that have affected how well my sites run. I've been developing on CakePHP for the last few months, and even a barebone install has yielded in slower than desired results. I may be more sympathetic to the slowness if the site were running a CMS that had a large number of modules, but a fresh install of CakePHP? This isn't a diss on CMS' though, because some are well optimized, such as this site running Drupal.

My other move involved consolidating my registrars. A week ago I only had two registrars to deal with. A registrar is an accredited company that can properly register your domain for everyone in the world to see. The problem I was having was that my old host, Aplus.net, charges annually for custom DNS. You can register with them and pay just the registration fee, typical of every registrar, but the domain is useless without some kind of DNS setting. I was ignorant at the time, so I dealt with it. Eventually I learned of their wicked charge for anything mentality, which prompted my move to Dreamhost. The drawback, however, is that Dreamhost only registers .com, .net, .org, and .info TLDs; they can host, but not register .biz and .us sites. I considered a big company like GoDaddy for both my registrar services and for shared hosting or a VPS, but there's a moral/ethical dilemma in how the company is run, their particular method in advertising, and my integrity as a man of God. I couldn't give my money with a clear conscious, so I had to go elsewhere.

Because of my hesitation to use GoDaddy, I decided to go with another big hosting company, 1and1.com, whose advertising states that domain transfers are free. Domain registrations through 1and1 are among the cheapest for certain TLDs. However, there was a footnote with about domain transfers: they charge you an annual registration fee. year, meaning that they do not honor whatever time is left on your domain's registration. Let's use a real life example: I registered SpectrumResourceServices.org a few months ago for a friend and now I'm moving it. The domain was registered and paid for for two years. I'm now moving to a new registrar, and by going with 1and1, I'm not only paying a fee for the registration through 1and1, I also have to pay this fee again next year. Let's say I registered the domain for five or ten years, I would still have to pay this registration fee every year until I told 1and1 to not renew the domain. I've never heard of a company having such a stupid policy, so now I'm in the process of moving three domains away from them. Pure joy, and a wasted $18, correction, $42, because there's the transfer to 1and1 and now the transfer away from them. My patience level is low, so I'm doing it now instead of waiting to save a few bucks in a year's time, which leads me to Namecheap.com.

I asked for some input on a reliable and affordable registrar on a few forums, and on Neowin I had three different people recommend Namecheap.com. I had never heard of them, so I had to do some digging to find out if there were any hidden costs involved. They only charge for the domain transfer, and like most registrars, extend your domain's registration for another year when you transfer. Reasonable, no gotchas, just being a registrar without any hidden motives. Despite having unlocked and canceled the service with 1and1, I'm still unable to transfer my three domains, and APlus has yet to respond to the transfer request that I put in place 24 hours ago, while I was able to completely transfer my domains away from Dreamhost in 12 hours. I hope I don't have to do this for a very long time.