I’ve been receiving emails via the contact form (which unfortunately is being used by spammers as of late) asking why I chose Page.ly for hosting, despite the fact that it costs 8 times more than my previous host, HostMonster.

While the answer why I left HostMonster is easy (the price was cheap but so was the quality), why I selected Page.ly amongst rivals is a bit more complicated.

Believe it or not Page.ly wasn’t my first choice. Or my second choice. Or even my third. So why did I even choose them?

First Up: Host.Co

Basically my first choice for hosting was Host.co. After testing out their service upon one of their lower tier plans, I was amazed at how fast the site was and I like how they measured a site’s strength by not how many visitors a site had, but by the number of concurrent users viewing it at the same time.

You can read the full review upon the Blog Herald, but basically I was very impressed with the service overall and the only reason I decided against moving upon their servers was the price (as I had to move multiple blogs. If it was just one blog I would be using them right now!).

They also offered a migration service which was awesome, but since I had to move multiple blogs, they were unfortunately beyond my budget. Being generous they did offer me a discount, however I declined as I believe that people need to be compensated for the services they provide (which unfortunately is NOT what people expect nowadays which is sad).

So I declined Host.co and took a look at…

BlogOnCloud9: WordPress Heaven

After testing out their service I was impressed overall with BlogOnCloud9, as well as the services they offered. While it was not as fast as Host.co (note: truth be told only WordPress.com beats Host.co), they were a lot better than my previous host, and even better was the fact that their pricing structure was within budget (about $65/month for 5 blogs).

They even offered to migrate my blog for free! Unfortunately BlogOnCloud9 hosts their clients upon RackSpace, which unfortunately does not mix too well with VaultPress (the greatest backup service ever!) so I had to sadly cross them off the list.

Did Someone Say Malaysia?

My third choice was WPWebHost (see my review) who I actually started migrating my blogs upon. For those who don’t know, WPWebHost is located in Malaysia which is a located in Asia (somewhat near Vietnam for my “I hate geography” friends).

While their price was really cheap, I was not encouraged by their use of Fantastico to install WordPress as I found the “back end” to be a bit too chaotic for my taste plus the fact that they never installed the latest version of WordPress (which can leave a site open for hackers).

Note: Simple Scripts is IMHO a superior solution, one that WPWebHost declined using (despite the fact that it was free and helps keep bloggers up to date on the latest software).

I was also not too thrilled with their sales team, although their tech support was very helpful. After moving one of my sites upon WPWebHost, I decided to cancel my account due to my concern for security, especially in an age where governments and anarchists are launching DDoS attacks against people they disagree with (which has intensified ever since Wikileaks hit the scene).

Tie Breaker?

For those wondering why I even considered the previous three hosts, I can sum it up in 3 words: migration, migration, migration!

All of them offered to migrate my blogs for a nominal fee or for free which meant that I didn’t have to download my blog from my VaultPress backup and FTP everything into a new host (which I eventually did with Page.ly as they do not offer migration services).

So in the end I was left with Page.ly and PressHarbor (see review), the latter which was less expensive. However in the end I chose Page.ly not because they had better features but due to the little things like:

• The fact that they do not use “admin” as the default username
• They install plugins to handle security to help prevent hackers from breaking in via brute force
• They are hosted upon FireHost whose security ranks up there with “the big boys” (okay so that is not a little thing).
• They utilized complex usernames and passwords to upload content via FTP
• Configuring your domain to work Google Apps was dead simple. As in one click setup  simple
• The fact that they offered reasonable discounts for hosting more than one site (which made it cheaper than BlogOnCloud9 to my surprise!).

Those were basically the gist of why I chose Page.ly over rivals despite the fierce competition between WordPress only hosting sites/services.

While everyone will have a different need as far as hosting goes, IMHO you should choose specialized hosting for your website over “ala carte” hosting, as the former will actually care about the performance of your site verses how much profit they can make off of their server.

Hopefully this satisfies everyone’s questions (so please stop emailing me! ) and feel free to hit up @Pagely on Twitter (or even the other companies like @BlogOnCloud9, @WPHostCo, @PressHarbor, etc.) for specific questions.

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After the dismal failings of Skyline (thanks to everyone who warned me about it!), I think I’ve found the movie that I’ll pay big bucks to see.

As far as I can tell from the preview, it has everything I want in a movie: action, adventure, suspense, drama, aliens, war, and most importantly a good story.

Truth be told I’m not sure if this is going to end up being one of those happy stories where humanity saves the day thanks to Area 51 and a flight to the Moon, but if I were a hostile alien species bent on conquering a highly aggressive world known as Earth, I’d blitzkrieg it from afar instead of risking alien flesh and blood taming the hostiles.

That said, I’m still rooting for the humans. Mainly because of this photo:

Okay so it was more than this photo. But truthfully this looks like a more realistic alien invasion. Note: Are the aliens using robots as their “shock troops?”

Image Credit: Richard Cartwright, image via IMDB.

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After swearing off iGames (because they were too addictive, boring, mindless or all 3) I found a game that is as challenging as chess, as fun as Snail Mail and as addicting as Twitter.

I came across this game via Mashable and after paying 99 pennies it’s now my favorite app! It’s a great way to de-stress the mind too!

The first levels are really easy, and the hardest part is getting all 3 stars when starting out.

They then throw in these blue “blowers” (which sound like someone is farting?) which makes the game a little bit more interesting.

The spikes add some fun to it until you encounter SPIDERS!!!

This is probably me but if there is one thing I loathe it’s bugs in (or near) my food.

So making sure Goober (what I’ve named the green monster in a box) receive his sugar high soon became an adventure of it’s own.

I think 30 plus levels in I’ve decided to put the game down, but whether you’re a kid, adult or kid at heart like me I think you’ll enjoy this game.

–Posted from my iPhone

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I’m in the process of migrating my sites off of HostMonster and upon ________ (will reveal all later).

While Hostmonster has been an excellent host, I’ve worn out my welcome (more or less) and I need a host who loves WordPress more than I do.

Since I’m tired of my sites going down, creating errors anytime I create a post, tweak the site, etc., I’m switching away.

So the site will appear weird for awhile, but no need to fear! Everything should return to normal in 24-96 hours. :-/

–Posted from my iPhone

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