Chad Things

It’s been a week since we moved in, and our place is almost livable. Hurray. Shayna’s fast – she got her art studio (ok, desk and drafting table) set up in a couple days, organized her stuff, and has been decorating our place like we’ve been living here for months. Makes it feel … homey. Meanwhile, i just finished going thru all my boxes today – man, do i have a ton of stuff. And i still have some personal stuff from work and friends over the last 10 years that i need to .. process slowly. We had most furniture we needed, but did buy a bed, a shelf, a few other little things from Ikea last week. But i’m really excited about my recent purchases on monday – a new TV and DVD player. Here’s where i bust out the geek in me – After 10-20 hours of research and shopping online, i got a 42-inch Philips LCD from costco. A beautiful, true HDTV – 1080p screen (not that 1080i crap), and it can be a 1920×1080 monitor for my macbook pro. It was fairly inexpensive for the features i got – hopefully there won’t be any problems. So far it works great as an external monitor. To go with it, I had to buy a true 1080P DVD player (Pioneer DV-400V-K) and hooked it up with HDMI cable (most expensive cables ever). Oooooo.. Ok, ’nuff of da geek.

On a side note, we also enjoyed the Treasure Island music festival over the weekend. Shayna and i went both days, as did Juan, and we ran into lots of other friends as well. The venue was awesome – grass field along water, 2 stages, food, beers, ferris wheel (didn’t go, line too long), some bman style art, and 2 stages for the bands. Saturday was the electronic day, ghostland observatory and flosstradamus were both crews i never heard of but loved, MIA was a bit disappointing, Gotan project was great as well. Sunday Modest Mouse was the best (Isaac is a great performer), but i also was pleased with M. Ward and Built to spill. Clap hands say yeah and Spoon were good as well. I hope they do more concerts there.

Last of my big trips for the year – Burningman. My ninth time going, always glad i went. This year’s favs include the dust storm thursday, my boy pete hudson’s monkey-snake thing (read wired, mercury news, grist.org), the big rig, and the oil rig tower (hello? coolest fire EVER). Oh, and the glowing ping pong balls – best visuals ever. And how could i forget our very own monkey island art car. Good times, good times. Check out my flickr pics and the youtube videos.

I have several domains hosted out of my apt, meaning the computer that controls samo.org (among others) sits in my apartment. Now that i’m moving, i decided to look into hosting these domains somewhere else a bit more reliable (although it was fun to walk fritz and shayna thru a reboot from Thailand).

Here’s what i’m looking for

• cheap monthly (less than $10/month)
• virtual hosting (2+ domains)
• linux/BSD/Unix
• PHP access
• ssh access (csh, cron, .htaccess, php.ini, etc)
• web stats (access to apache log files)
• decent disk space and bandwidth (?)

I’m happy to see that shared hosting (one machine serving many domains and many customers) is pretty cheap ($5-$10/month). This is in comparison to dedicated hosting, where a customer gets their own machine – for high bandwidth and/or highly customizable stuff. I used to think i needed that, but now i don’t. First I tried to find current reviews of web hosting, starting with GoDaddy, since that’s where i have some domains registered. Basically they are one of the cheapest around, but there are many on the net that complain about their customer support. After a bit of digging, i found some decent review sites and decided to do it right.

Webhostingsitesreviews does a good job evaluating the company and their offerings – their top linux sites were BlueHost 95%, StartLogic 95%, IX Web Hosting 92%, HostMonster 92%, HostGator 87%, Yahoo 87%, and last place GoDaddy 83%. I also liked Hosting Review’s top 10 table with links to their verbose reviews. YourWebHosting also lists a top 10 with BlueHost at the top, followed by IX, GoDaddy, Dot5, StartLogic. Top 5 Hosts picked Hostmonster, Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic, and Hostgator. Ahh, those names sound familiar – I think i see some patterns. Good.

I also found a few sites that seem… off. Perhaps paid placements? Hostsearch allows people to review sites, which is nice to get user issues, but they are not as thorough as webhostingsitereviews. Hostsearch’s top picks are (in order) Webstrike (402 reviews), WebHostingBuzz (258 reviews), eBoundHost (43 reviews), Galaxyvisions (22 reviews), HostForWeb (259 reviews). Web Hosting picked these as their tops: Globat, Poweb, HostRocket, GoDaddy .. and none of them seemed like a good deal.

Anyway, on with the Round-Up – My Summary below. Most of the top ones were about the same, altho I noticed a few things i wanted that not everyone has, like SSH access and access to log files (i like to ssh and tail logs while troubleshooting).

And the winner is … Hostmonster, everything i need for $6/month.

Notes – doteasy.com only had 1GB storage and 20GB/month xfer for $7/month plan. Yahoo was equally lame.