Blog Web Hosting Recommendation

I get emails everyday asking for advice and one of the most asked question is, “Where is your blog hosted?” or “Who should I host with?” These two questions come up so often I’ve decided it was time to make a blog post about it.

John Chow dot Com is hosted on its own servers. The servers are collocated inside the NetNation Datacenter in the Bentall 5 building, downtown Vancouver. Whenever I tell other bloggers this, they get a bit dejected because the cost for that kind of setup is out of their price range. That leads to the next quest of which webhost they should use to host their blogs. For a long time I had no answer to this question because I don’t have much experience with other webhosting services – until now.

When Ed Lau and Paul Mudhar started their blogs, I told them to host at Monster Hosting because their prices were low, they were local, and I knew the owner. What I didn’t know was how good their infrastructure was. Ed and Paul both ordered up their Mini Unix plan. At $4.95 a month, it wasn’t expensive and it offer more than enough disk space and bandwidth to do the job. The question we were not sure about was if it can handle a Digg.

That question was answered when Ed got this story to the Digg front page. Not only did Ed’s blog stayed up but we didn’t even noticed a slow down. Most shared hosting service can’t handle a Digg or Slashdot. The server either goes down or the web host will kill access to your site because you exceeded the CPU usage limit.

Now that I know Monster Hosting can handle a Digg and not shut down, or shut you down, I can highly recommend them for your hosting requirements. I guess I should ask Gary (the owner) to give me a coupon code so readers can get a discount, but if you can’t afford $4.95 a month, well.

* Update – To 15% off any hosting plans, use promo code johnchowrocks.