About a year ago I made the first steps into web hosting. I didn't know a thing about setting up a new domain, ftp-ing was just a mildly amusing acronym and MySQL, re-directs and 404 Not Found pages were just meaningless words. A good job I found A Small Orange (ASO).

Everyone on the tech forums raved about them, and they even had a waiting list. I felt quite chuffed when I waited up til 12.00 and 3 seconds and bagged myself one of their daily quotas. (I suspect it was more about great marketing than practicalities, but they had a good thing going and I wanted a slice of it.) I took a gamble and signed up for their not quite totally crazy cheap package at $5 a month.

You may wonder, how could I go wrong? but you really can go wrong, big time, if you pick the wrong hosts.

Dreamy daniel hosting

The big trap is falling for huge numbers - Sign up, sign up - 250GB of bandwidth, 30GB of storage, all for $10 a month yadda yadda, oh yay. It appears to be a thinly veiled scam that will most likely see your site installed on a server that is jam packed full of other sites also living under the illusion they can do what they like within these ginormous capacities. Somewhere along the line, though, these massive theoretical figures they quote mean nothing, because once a server is working flat out, they just put a brake on everyone's usage. This can often leave sites high and dry, loading sporadically when there is a gap in demand.

It is hard enough getting visitors in the first place, but to know your web host is driving them away because they are badly serving a thousand porn sites alongside yours, is a bit demoralising. And if you are trying to make money off your site, the wasted $10 just adds insult to injury.

At least with ASO, I know (or I believe I saw a log that showed) that there are 50 sites on the same server, and we all operate within practical (not theoretical worse case) limits that the server can cope with when we come close to our individual thresholds. With my package I have 400MB of disk space and I can use up to 10GB of bandwidth a month. With 200 MB of material installed and no more than 4GB of bandwidth used last month, (or 8000 visitors / 30000 page views in real money) it is a plenty big enough package so far and I suspect would serve most blogs, handsomely for years.

Technical support

Another issue many people have is the lack of help when they have issues with their site. As it happened, it wasn't critical that I was clueless about setting up a domain, and there is plenty of help getting your head around MySQL, re-directs and 404 Not Found pages. However, when all else fails (ie the technical terms get too much to bear) ASO have been unbelievably helpful to a numbnutz like myself. I can only assume they don't get many problems and their staff sit around praying for something to do, because they have spent loads of time helping me out.

I hope I don't get anyone in trouble, but one guy set up my mail forwarding for me, I gave him my password and let them muck about with whatever needed mucking about with. And recently I had trouble with firewalls and god knows what and I didn't have a clue how to solve it. The ASO guy said, I can't help you because our support doesn't stretch that far, but if you do this, this and this, you may be good to go. Needless to say, it went!

And they have the ubiquitous C-Panel where you can easily organise your site behind the scenes, upload files, run email... and Fantastico is a one-click wizard for totally painless installations of software, like Wordpress, Joomla and dozens of other scary-looking PhP / MySQL nightmarish-to-novices dealios.

The imperfections

It wouldn't be right to say that if you sign up to ASO you can expect a flawless 100% experience, because we are talking computers, right! Servers need to be maintained, so it seems like most days the site isn't accessible for a few minutes. I think this is more annoying to me than to visitors, because it seems to coincide with Mrs Ed screaming that we need to go out after I have foolishly said, Just a moment, it won't take 2 seconds to publish this article. Maybe for $10 you can enjoy no downtime or domestic ear ache whatsoever?

In conconclusion

All said and done, I don't think you can go too far wrong with A Small Orange. You can start small and know they will expand to meet your needs, to the point you can have your very own virtual server all to yourself. Having said that, the last time I looked, they were out of those too, due to demand. Perhaps one day in the future I will have to wait up past midnight to get a slice of that action?

As everyone is into transparency these days, I should say I get nothing for writing this in terms of hard cash, but if you happen to mention The Pisstakers when you sign up, I may get a month or two credited to my account. But that isn't why I am writing this. ASO rocks!!!!