Are you tired of paying for mediocre hosting? It’s common knowledge that big hosting companies like Dreamhost and BlueHost oversell their services, claiming to offer “300GB of storage” and “3000GB of bandwidth” for a low cost of $6 a month (or similar). When you’re site is just starting out, with only a few hits, you don’t notice any foul play. But when your site starts getting bigger, they cut-off your service well before the advertised limits for “excessive use of resources,” all thanks to a little clause in the Terms of Service.
What are your options? Well, you could use a VPS or dedicated server (pricey, but powerful) or you can escape from dishonest hosting providers.
A Small Orange, a hosting provider since 2003, goes for the “quality not quantity” approach. They offer friendly tech support, and they appear to not be overselling. They’re prices are reasonable as well. What do they offer? Well, they’ve got Shared Hosting and VPS plans for various budgets. All plans included PHP, MySQL, and Ruby on Rails.
The “Tiny” plan offers 75MB of space, 3GB of bandwidth for $2.08/month. The more useful “Small” plan has 400MB of storage, 10GB of bandwidth for $5/month. They proceed to offer various other plans for $10, $20, all the way up to the “Super” $30/mo plan with 4500MB of space and 100GB of bandwidth. Extra bandwidth will cost you $0.50 per gigabyte.
Don’t leave now! Sure, it seems that the huge hosting companies offer more for your money, but don’t forget that they oversell. You only think that you’re getting 300GB of bandwidth (30000MB). There’s no way any host can offer that much (unless they have cluster hosting, which is highly unlikely). A Small Orange has quite a following of satisfied customers.
I’m not a customer of ASO, but I can tell they’re pretty good by doing some online research. I’ve yet to see anything truly bad about them. If they find a problem with their service, they’ve got it fixed in a couple days. A Small Orange has an amazing track record for a host.
Want to read a review by a blogger who uses ASO? Look no further than Nutshell Journal.
