Since I bought my own domain 3.5 years back, I have been associated with dot5hosting. At that time I got the web hosting plan at an unbelievable price of $18 for 2 years including domain. I felt so happy to shell out less than $20 to avail both the domain and web hosting account. This was around Oct ’06, dot5hosting were running a promo where in I got almost 80% off on the 2 year plan. I had no idea of what I was going to do with that account by then, but still went for it to have an identity of my own in the internet world!
Since I had no concrete plan, the domain and web space was simply lying idle for next 6 months. Later, I gathered my interest towards blogging and chose to make the best of already purchased account with a self hosted wordpress blog. I was hardly getting any readers in the initial days until late 2008. I renewed my account with Dot5Hosting for another 2 years term at a cost of $3.95 per month! Since the traffic was less on my site, I never had issues with the performance or the speed. But as the reader base increased to current levels of ~1500 unique visitors a day with about twice that of page views, I could clearly make out that dot5hosting was not scalable. Every now and then there were ‘Error in connecting to Database’ kind of messages. This got into a totally annoying situation a couple of weeks back when my blog used to have a down time for more than 50% of the time.
I never needed their tech support until that point since I was good enough to handle and sort out issues by myself. The system failure is something that is not in my control and thus the ‘database connection errors’. Though I provided them all the details, they were helpless and kept on asking for silly things like screenshot when the error appears etc., to delay/deny the solution. After fighting out with their pathetic and technically incompetent tech support for over a fortnight, decided to give up on them. 
After my initial evaluation, I zeroed on two web hosts – DreamHost and BlueHost. Dream host has an amazing offer of 97 day free trial period, if you don’t like their service, you can always cancel the account without paying anything! But if you register a new domain, you will be charged about $10. I searched on net for any promo codes for these 2 hosts, I got one that said $97 off on 2 year plan with Dreamhost. I went on with registration and when I looked at billing console, I was charged differently! Instead of $97 discount, they had given just $50. When I enquired with customer care, they said that promo code is only for US citizens and not for rest of the world.
Why the hell they do not say so while creating an account? I got really skeptical about the not so open charging modes and decided to give up on 
DreamHost too immediately. The only option that I had evaluated was bluehost. Over the weekend I purchased an account with BlueHost. Though the price is almost twice that of what I used to pay all these days, I am happy with the speed and the way it is responding right now. Not sure what is in the store as the days pass by, I am happy for now at least!
Because of my expertise with WordPress, I was able to migrate to new host in less than 30 minutes! I shall post a detailed article on migration from one web host to another as well as things to keep in mind while preparing for a migration. Now the lesson I have learnt is that, never get distracted by heavenly discounts while going for self hosted sites. Look for reliability and scaling. Do a though review of the web host you have finalized on and evaluate the pros and cons, then finalize on a web host. Since a majority of blogging friends at IndiBlogger were thinking of moving to self hosted accounts, I thought this would be of some help on evaluating web hosts.
{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }
I had a blogspot blog for around a month, and then my blog one day came crying to me about not being able to play with the big guys (not having true links [whatever that means], not being able to get a account at ShareaSale, not being able to make subdomains, and such) so I bought the domain name and hosting via HostGator and have a self hosted WordPress blog.
One of the major reasons that I don’t have a blogspot spot is the bad neighborhood and bad linkage. For example, if you visit sites like alexa, you may get the information for blogspot.com and not yourblog.blogspot.com.
Then, since we have small sites we may or may not have the resources for Google AdWords account or know that much about SEO to have our blogs ranked. This brings us to link building and blog submission sites. Blogspot has a range of blogs, right from adult stuff to politically incorrect stuff – and google takes all domains as neighbors. Think about it.
Well, what you have said is right when we opt to use the free blog solutions. That is the one of the reason why people move to a self hosting with an own domain for better tweaks and there by to generate good traffic.
Well Bluehost is quite a good host and I believe you will enjoy hosting with them. Even though I use Arvixe a very less know host which is also quite reliable. My top there are Hostgator, Blue host and Arvixe all others are not that good
So far it has been good. Hope the service gets better as the days progress. Thanks for info on other hosts as well.
man i wanted to ask about this for a long time……………..who is hosting your page……???? i want to shift to a domain….and add more meaning to my blog….but don’t know wat do………any help on this…would be useful…..
\,,/
Hi Hitesh, I am currently hosting my blog on BlueHost. Sure, Let me know when you plan to move, I can help you out!
wordpress.org also recommends bluehost. :)
Oh thanks for the info Krishna! I didn’t know that :)
What host are you using now ? can you suggest some good ones. I am considering moving to a self hosted domain but, want it to be within reach, not talking to some rep over email from the US ?
Hi Melvin, I am using BlueHost currently since last sunday :) So far I am happy with the performance. Even an article having 200+ comments is loading in less than 6 seconds. I am pretty happy with their support as well.
I think all these scary or expensive hosting websites are the only thing that keeps me away from Wordpress. I’m happy with Blogger, for now at least. But I must say it really is admirable that you migrated so fast!
Well, it isn’t really scary. It is all about choosing the right web host :) Enjoy as long as you stay on blogger, once you switch over to wordpress, you would never want to go back for sure!
Dear Mohan,
Im also a member of dot5hosting and my site is for Tamil actor Ajith – starajith.com . The database error is due to the limitation of dot5hosting server. Dot5hosting server’s MySQL database can have only 10 concurrent connections. It means, at a moment, for a dot5hosting user, only 10 of his members can access the site. The number 10 is very very less. It will get even worse if you put multiple websites with databases coz, the number 10 is for all databases. This problem started for me in Jan 2010 and its gets worse day by day.
I planned to switch on to other servers and saw bluehost and hostmonster. But a sad thing is both are sister concerns and everything will be identical. While reading reviews, i saw tht most people in these servers are complaining that they website is suspended without any notice for using more CPU data. Even the CC person warned abt this whn i chat with him. So, i decided not to go with both of them.
Atlast, after several discussions, i chose HOSTGATOR and im migrating my site in this weekend to new server which provides 25 concurrent MySQL database connections.
Anand, thanks for the detailed information. However, I am not sure what you meant by 10 concurrent users. Is it only for write operation or for both read and write? there have been instances when there were more than 30+ users simultaneously on my site. I think more analysis needs to be done here.
Mohan ji, the word concurrent doesnt refer to the number of visitor online but the no. of persons among those 30 who are accessing the database at a time.
30 persons may be online but only few of them will be opening pages at the same fraction of second. Our site’s informations are stored in MySQL databases including the registered user details, news entries and everything. When each user opens a page, the server will connect to MySQL database and will disconnect once the page is fully loaded. The number 10 i mentioned is the amt of users who are connected to a database like this.
It can be very well related to a house and a room. As you said, 30 person are in a house. In tht house there is a room which can accommodate only 10 persons. People can go inside the room and take things and should come out. When exactly 10 people are inside the room and we want to enter as 11th person, we get error. We can only enter the room only if 1 person comes out.
Sorry if my example is silly. :)
The MySQL connections are happening within fractions of seconds. Sometimes there may also be script errors. In our scripts, we have commands to open a database to get infos but we dont write commands to disconnect from database. In such a time, those who are connected to the database stay there for a hour till the MySQL refreshes per hour.
For my site, the concurrent connections 10 is very small since when i put a new news in the site, ppl will come and read more and more in number for the first few minutes. And the error will start.
See the errors i got :
Error page while accessing Admin Page : http://i41.tinypic.com/13zxt92.jpg
Error page while accessing Home Page of website : http://i41.tinypic.com/n149as.jpg
The lines 6 & 16 in functions.php tht is mentioned in the screenshot is nothing but connecting and disconnectng database. The “vmsanandh” mentioned there is the user name of my database. I did a very big research on this , scolded dot5hosting customer care person many times since i have a doubt that they even wont give that 10 concurrent connections and cheating me.
I got the exact “max_user_connections” error and others may get simply “Error connecting database” error. But im very much sure tht this shud be the reason of those kind of errors in tht server.
At last i came to know tht, most ppl in dot5hosting are getting the same kind of MySQL errors. So, i planned to move to Hostgator server after several disussions.
On Saturday (tomorrow), im starting the migration work.
If u have any more doubts, kindly askand i ll tell what i know.
Im really not a person who knows scripts and all. I just update my site with news and other stuffs. But Dot5hosing made me know about MySQL databases, scripts and all :)
I got some clarity, but not precise.. Thanks for the pointers, let me explore more. I haven’t created any other user on my blog except me. Now what I need to understand is the number concurrent requests or the number of registered users that block the performance. Good to know about your migration and all the best :)
Not only registered users, all those who are surfing are taken into account.
Hey that’s quite an ordeal. Thank god I read this as I was about to buy a hosting space pretty soon! I really wanna know how to migrate a blog. i am not planning to do that with the current one, but planning to start another one. Will be waiting for that article! I tried opening your site last evening and it didn’t open up… was it the time u were migrating?
btw… 1500 visits a day is awesome… good going!
Tavish, don’t get into buying an account without proper evaluation. Sure, the next article is already being cooked :) Could be… nevertheless, it must be doing good now. How do you find the speed of the site now?
yeah will have to do some research… the speed is good… to be honest not much of a difference from before… i always found the speed good here… :)
Better you do that home work, it will be good for you.
Thanks for confirming on the speed. Yes, there has been a lot of work to improve the performance. You can expect a post on that soon :)
hey that Dot5Hosting is crap re its from diya system .
if you need any hosting and domian related just call 9880606087
or support@idaksh.in
price rates are very affordable and there are some offers till this march end
They are absolutely clueless. I wonder how I survived for 3.5 years since I got hooked to them initially! Thanks for lending a helping hand.. but I have already moved to bluehost with a 3 year plan :)
I have been trying to move to a dedicated host as well. I am currently looking into bluehost and godaddy. Any ideas on godaddy?
No idea about godaddy. I didn’t like their site at all… when I went through to see the plans. I simply dropped them on my first impression. Currently I am on bluehost and so far it is good :)
Blogspot is cool…Why migrate?
I didn’t like blogspot from the beginning! I have been on WordPress all the time. Self hosted blogging solution gives a lot of flexibility to experiment new ideas which is not possible with free ones.
I have been thinking of going self hosted for some days now.. but the fact that I am completely illiterate regarding technology and such things make me wonder how I shall get that done. Also I do not know how to migrate stuff from the blogger account to a new domain.
One thing I am so keen on is using wordpress over blogger. It is so much more convenient and has a host of features which I think blogger has no plans on implementing.
Moving to a self hosted blog needs some expertise for sure. If you can’t handle, then there must be someone to help you out :) If you are happy with the free blog solutions, continue… feel free to get back to me if you need any help :)
Well.. what are the pluses on self hosting?? Have you done a post on this…maybe a comparison as to why one is better than the other? If you use wordpress as a host, or if your blog is powered by wordpress, whats the difference?
Well, there are many advantages Aathira. If you are planning to expand your blog to scale for higher traffic, self hosted gives you lot of convenience to tweak the code and install the plugins to do lot of creative work. Just to quote an example, you would have got this reply comment in your mailbox! Similarly, if you look at page optimization for speed etc., are much easier when you have a self hosted blog. I don’t have an exhaustive study article on why self hosted is better with wordpress. But will write one soon :)
What You should also look for is unlimited bandwidth and the ability to control htaccess. hostgator provides that. so does powweb. Hope bluehost gives a Cpanel as well. I have not used their service.
Presently I am not Znetindia and service seems ok, though the servers could be faster.
give them a look as well.
Yup, the things you have mentioned were on my checklist while shortlisting the webhosts. So far happy with BlueHost since last sunday :)
Hey, how did you get an automated mail sent to me when you replied? Is that a plugin?
Yes, it is implemented using a wordpress plugin called ‘replyMail’ by 冰古
My friend is dealer for bigdaddy, let me know if you still need to hosts, I can ask him to contact you!
Thanks
Well, I have moved to bluehost already and I have taken the plan for 3 years :) Thanks for extending a helping hand though!