The short story…
I’ve decided to move my blog back over to a shared hosting account with GoDaddy hosting. If you notice any issues (strange errors, broken links, missing images, etc), please let me know. It will take a few days for the name server changes to propagate, but I’ve also updated my old host’s DNS to point to the IP address of my site on the GoDaddy server. So, I would expect any issues to have already been noticed, but you never know.
The back story of the change for those that care…
For almost four years, my blog has been hosted at aspnix on one of their Virtual Private Server plans. Ironically, I started out with my blog hosted on a GoDaddy shared hosting account, but I wanted to setup Community Server and had a lot of trouble getting it to work in their shared environment. After a while, I finally decided to move elsewhere. I stumbled onto aspnix and noticed they had very affordable VPS plans. At the time, it was more than I needed, but I thought a VPS would be a good playground in the cloud for some ideas I wanted to try. So, I pulled the trigger and migrated my blog to Community Server hosted on a VPS at aspnix.
The first few months were very painful and I almost moved again. During early 2006, aspnix experienced some growing pains. There was a good deal of sporadic downtime for a few months, performance issues on SQL Server, and their email infrastructure was practically unreliable. Fortunately, I toughed it out. Within a few months, the situation dramatically improved. Although their email infrastructure continued to be an issue, I setup Google Apps for my domain and starting using the Gmail infrastructure for my email. After that transition, I never had any more problems and remain a satisfied customer to this day.
So, if I am such a happy customer, why am I leaving aspnix? At this point, I don’t need a VPS. It is overkill for my situation. After a relatively recent restructuring of their fees, I am now paying $57 per month (which is quite a bit more than I was originally paying). While I consider it to be a good value for what I am getting, I could be getting by with a simple shared hosting account for less than $7 per month. That is $600 a year back in my pocket just for changing hosts.
If I was happy with aspnix, why not use their shared hosting account? My domain is registered with GoDaddy and there are some minor benefits to having my site hosted there as well since there is some integration between the domain registration and hosting. While it may seem like a pitiful excuse, it is one less password for me to remember by having all of it with one company.
GoDaddy has also changed quite a bit since I last used their services. You can use a SQL Server database that is publicly accessible. Previously, all of their databases were not exposed to the internet. You had to go through their clunky tool to make changes, but it isn’t an issue anymore. I’ve also moved away from Community Server to BlogEngine.NET, which seems to run smoothly in their shared hosting environment.
At any rate, I can still happily recommend aspnix for Virtual Private Server hosting. Their prices are quite reasonable for what you get. Actually, it is difficult to find anyone that is cheaper or even close to their range. If you need a VPS, they are certainly worth a look, but I am still hesitant to recommend using their email infrastructure.
