In the past years, I have had my homepage hosted at the TU Delft Visualisation Group. I have worked there for about six years, so all that time I had free hosting, lots of space and lots of features.

I had also registered my domain (bvrolijk.net), six years ago, without hosting, but with domain and email forwarding, at redirection.net. So no disk space, just forwarding to the TU Delft.

Ever since I left the TU, I’ve been thinking about hosting my domain elsewhere, possibly even doing it myself. My homepage consists of only a small number of pages, but I like putting some photos online, I have a wiki, which I use quite a lot, and a weblog (yep, this is it). But since there are so many good, free services nowadays (at the moment, this weblog is hosted at wordpress.com, for free and with lots of space; and I uploaded lots of photos to picasaweb.google.com, also for free and also quite spacious), I was in doubt whether it would be worth it to buy a hosting package.

After a lot of searching and comparing, I eventually decided to buy the hosting package at ANHosting. 500 GB of webspace, 5000 GB of bandwidth, and all the features you could possible want: MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, unlimited subdomains, unlimited email addresses and SSH access to your account on a (shared) Linux server. Furthermore, they support WordPress, Drupal, Mambo and many other packages with auto-install scripts through Fantastico.

In fact, my search for a hosting provider resulted in three very similar candidates, of which I (almost arbitrarily) chose ANHosting. The other two providers were DreamHost and Bluehost. Take a look at this site for a comparison. You will see there are not much differences. Whereas DreamHost and ANHosting offer 500 GB of space and 5 TB of bandwith, with Bluehost both the disk space and bandwidth are unlimited. On the other hand, the first two offer unlimited email accounts and MySQL databases, which are both limited at Bluehost. Well, for me, and for my personal website, I think 2500 email accounts is enough. And 500 GB is more disk space than I have in total at home! So, in practice, I would say it’s all the same. BTW, contrary to what it says in the comparison table, ANHosting do offer SSH access. You just have to ask them nicely…

Why then ANHosting? Basically because they’re the cheapest. DreamHost is cheaper, but only if you pay 10 years in advance (instead of 2). And if you google for “anhosting coupon”, you can even get a bit of extra discount.

And what about my experiences so far? Well, the email support is very fast, they often reply within minutes. I’ve installed MoinMoin for my wiki and it’s working fine. Besides that, I haven’t done anything special yet, so nothing special to report either. The only thing is that I’ve had SSH access being disabled all of a sudden a few times now. They say it’s because of a server update or something. But every time they’ve fixed it within 10 minutes after I email them about it. So, as long as it won’t happen every week…