During my research into a reliable web hosting alternative I’ve discovered Wikipopia (formerly Serversiders) which offers a lot of interesting information about the web hosting scene: Who does what where with whom?
First of all it is interesting to see that Wikipopia itself has hidden its Whois ID behind a Domains by Proxy registration.
So I’ve checked a couple of sites randomly to see where they are being hosted:
- Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress, interestingly uses a .tt, a Trinidad and Tobago TLD extension to have one of the shortes URL’s available. Funny. According to Wikipopia he hosts at Layered Tech.Com. Off course they host the whole WordPress rigmarole and they do cloud hosting.
- Hotel Chatter is hosting on Voxel.net, also involved in cloud hosting.
- Tnooz is hosting at Media Temple.
- Mashable is hosting at Rackspace.
- Hotel Marketing Strategies at Bluehost.
- Everything Everywhere at Media Temple which is interesting: It is photo heavy like my sites.
- Nomadic Matt is hosting at The Planet
- Problogger is hosted at Peer1 Hosting
- Travelrants is using Blueconnex
- Europe a La Carte uses 1&1 Internet AG
So be aware: Just fill in your own URL at Serversiders.com and they will have some of your details which they share with you and the world.
(Random) Updates
- The reason I’m sharing this with you is that there are several pitfalls in the hosting trajectory. One of them is Load Time. With firebug I’ve tested the load speed of several sites mentioned above and am not really impressed. Some SEO guru claimed that every 500 miliseconds your site loads faster, your conversion betters 20%. So my focus currently is on load time.
- I also found out that my Dutch hosting company is a reseller rather than a dedicated hosting company.
- WordPress itself recommends hosting hosting companies. Plus recently it introduced Vip Hosting, only for the happy few.
- Mashable and Techcrunch show load times up to 20 seconds! How come they keep being successful?
- Booking.com, the online OTA (=On Line Travel Agent) has an amazingly short load time, less than 3 seconds. Moreover It feels slick. Same with Tripadvisor, the online review company about 2 seconds…
- I prefer my blogs to be photo rich. Problem that causes is long load times. Since Happy Hotelier is now hosted in the US, while it used to be hosted in The Netherlands I all of a sudden see my page load time doubled or tripped. Probably because each tiny little file has to cross the Atlantic Exchange.
I’m considering upgrading my hosting package to virtual cloud hosting, but that may be too expensive.. Another way is deploying images over a free or paid CDN (Content Delivery Network). But you could also consider to trim your blog in other ways. I’ve found some great posts in that respect:- Speed Up WordPress – Ultimate Guide to make Sites Super Fast
- 38 Ways to optimize and speed your WordPress Blog
- It would have saved me tons of time if I had known this little trick on beforehand: Host Images in Subdomain
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Last edited by GJE on October 23, 2010 at 2:52 pm
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post. A very interesting read.
Maybe you should be using VPS.net services for hosting as Yoast.com recommends. He succeeded in having very speedy loading times as Pingdom shows.
Also, regarding image resizing, I don’t know if you use WP Smushit or puny PNG.
@Costin
Am considering VPS and thanks for the pointer to Smushit and puny png
Interesting….
I’m using HostMonster for hosting, by the way – does this mean they’re re-selling Bluehost space?
@Josiah
Yep, seems so if you look at this link: http://serversiders.com/hostmonster.com
I was speaking over help chat 2 weeks ago with someone from Bluehost and he told me they are sister companies. When I asked him which are the differences between them (as HM has lower prices than BH) the answer was: none.
So far I’m satisfied with Hostmonster as before I had an unpleasant experience with GoDaddy.
What is your URL Costin?
Is coming soon, I’m still working on a WP theme.
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