IX Web Hosting

Alright, before I'm going to bed, I'd like to share with you a strange experience I just encountered.

Now, some of you might remember the first blog I posted about web hosting... well, I decided to give it one more shot and re-review some of those candidate companies I didn't choose the first time.

So I was looking at the IX Web Hosting site and something really weird happened.
OK, first of all, you might not be able to reproduce it because it depends on the configuration of your computer. Since my PC laptop broke back in June, I have got an iBook G4 as a replacement, and so far, I'm not too too good using it.

Nevertheless, I use the Safari browser (v2.0.4) that comes with OS X Tiger.

So here are the steps (again, that only worked using Safari with OS X Tiger):

1) go to http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.planBusinessPlus



2) click on the "DEMO" link (next to "Free Site Builder") or go directly to http://72.41.4.29:8080/demo/psoft.masonry.Builder?, and that should send you to this page



3) finally, click on the first link ("Click here to continue editing your website.") or go to http://72.41.4.29:8080/demo/psoft.masonry.Builder?action=last
and you should see:



WTF!?!?

Now if you try with firefox or IE, you will certainly get something more politically correct.
By the way, IX Web Hosting is based in Hopkinsville, Kentucky...


Or maybe I was just too tired and dreamt the whole thing... can someone let me know if that content is still live??

Choosing the right web hosting service.

In this time and era of infinite choice, one could think that it would be really easy to pick a web hosting provider... in fact, pick ANY web hosting provider and be merry and on the way to creating a web site.

After searching, reviewing, searching again and reviewing and reviewing again, I found out first hand, that this experience can be quite astonishing, in a bad way.

First of all, there are so many providers out there that it becomes quickly overwhelming to decide which one to pick.
Second, most of the web sites that are supposed to give reviews on these web hosting providers, well, usually give different opinions from "best choice" for one review site, to "avoid at all cost" for another one.
It would not surprise me at all, that some might get commissions for signing up new customers, but this is a different thought I would spare you today.

After reading a guide on http://www.work.com and running a few searches on http://www.business.com , http://www.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com keyword 'web hosting', I decided that the best candidates would be 1and1, godaddy, IX hosting and maybe host department.

However, after running a search with each provider's name and the keyword 'reviews', I was extremely disappointed to find out that the sheer number of negative reviews for all of them. I must say that these opinions must be taken with extreme care, since competitors could simply create bogus comments just to sink the rating of another provider, but still...

So after almost a week of fine tuning my research, I finally decided to go with http://www.bluehost.com
Let's hope I won't have too many problems with them!