So I mentioned before that this is a completely new web host from before. I used to be a big fan of hostgator, but had some issues getting support issues resolved quickly through them on a couple occasion. Usually this would correlate with hostgator high-jacking my traffic to one of their pages which featured lots of ads…. this wasn’t really ideal.

The other big deciding factor was SSL certificates. Let’s Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org) is a new Certificate Authority which actually offers free SSL certs.  It does things a little differently, as it is completely automated and open source (and free).  But its certificates are only valid for 90 days.  They do this for a couple reasons, both to limit any damage from a compromised key, and to encourage people to automate their deployments.  Well, their 2nd reason got to me. Hostgator had no easy way to automate deployments of Let’s Encrypt on their shared plans.

Dreamhost is who I settled with (non-affiliate link: https://www.dreamhost.com). They had some great reviews, I talked to some fellow nerds who recommended them as well, and most importantly, they had integrated Let’s Encrypt SSLs.  It’s as easy as turning on https on your dashboard, and selecting let’s encrypt.  The other feature it had, was how easy it is to turn on cloudflare, in case my sites ever actually get any visitors, this is a nice feature to ensure uptime.

A lot of you are probably wondering why I’m even bothering with a shared hosting plan.  I’ve got servers online at home and I’ve got a VPS I maintain for various projects… why not just set one up as a webhost?  There are a couple of reasons, (not the least of which is being lazy), but I haven’t ruled out that yet either.  I don’t, on principle, like to host websites out of my house.  I usually am pretty hesitant to host much of anything directly from any of my public IPs at home.  This is really just for peace of mind.  The second I point any of my domains to any of my networks, my IDS and firewall freak out.  It never fails, someone from China or Russia is just trolling along trying to brute into every domain out there, including mine.  So I lock down my stuff pretty well, but I really don’t want to attract any more attention than necessary to my network.  I also don’t like trying to host something on a residential connection, my bandwidth is pretty awesome for residential, but I don’t want to have my upload speed creeping and crawling because of a surge in traffic, (I need to be able to kill people on Arma and Xbox)

I generally use my VPS for experiments or for projects that I want to test before taking live, but there is still the chance that I’ll switch to using it eventually.

Ultimately, it is easier, and if I ever decide to go back into making affiliate websites, then upgrading to a dedicated server won’t be difficult with Dreamhost, they’re also pretty dang affordable. So I’ll stick with outsourcing the work to them. (Unless I can convince the Boss of the house to get a commercial grade connection to the house with multiple public IPs)

-Peter