I just set up a hosting account at www.nathosting.com . Although they are for sure not the cheapest,hosting just about anywhere is still relatively cheap and I'll tell you why I went ahead and went with NatHosting.
First of all, Veretekk used to recommend NatHosting. Then, and I forget exactly why, Tom Prendergast, the owner and 1st Chair Solo prophet of Veretekk had some kind of bad experience with them and ceased recommending them.
But......I had already purchased a few domains there (6). So I just let'm sit there.
Then a few weeks ago I started getting automatic notifications that those domain names were coming up for renewal (that's the way it works regardless of where you buy your domain names). So I knew I had to make a multiple decisions:
- Was I going to keep the domains
- Was I going to actually set something up on them, and
- Where was I going to host them...i.e. NatHosting or somewhere else (e.g. Hostgator.com where I already have several domains).
End result was that I decided to stay at NatDomains with those few that I had there. And the reason was because they do have 24/7 phone hosting and the two guys I called and talked to were very nice. Also......I liked the music they had while I was waiting on hold (it was the "Cherry Poppin' Daddies" or something like that) and they site seems to have a lot of good stuff on it.
I called back a second time because I needed some guidance on how to get into the 'Fantastico' tool that automatically sets up WordPress blogs(automatically.....that's why they call in 'fantastico'!). And again, the tech support guy was very nice.
They had a cheaper package but it didn't allow me to set up multiple domains as I plan to do. So, I'm spending about $8 a month there. Just a couple of Smoothies, right?
Anyway.......I still like Hostgator too but the reason I wanted a second hosting account is because I've read that Google, when they 'crawl' your sites, it can detect if they're all hosted on the same server (i.e. with the same host) or not. And somehow, they regard your sites more authoritatively if they don't appear to be related (i.e. obviously all hosted at the same place).
Thus, I needed an alternate hosting location.
Just as an aside, I've been told that there's a lot of money in setting up your own hosting company. You can do it strictly as an affiliate. You don't really have to know or do too much. Apparently there's a lot of hosting being sold, and domains being bought, nowadays and much of it stays on the books and renews and renews and renews and renews. So it's good income that grows over time. That's something I might do someday.....might.
