Here is the story behind the hosting of the wiganworld website, if you create a popular website I hope you can learn some lessons from this.

In the early days I was fortunate to have free hosting by a local company. In return for the free hosting I drove business their way - give'n'take.

Unfortunately, the hosting company went bust. Another company took over. This new company said they would honour the original contract of hosting wiganworld for free in return for business. Phew! Or so I thought!

After the new company invoiced all of my customers I got a nasty phone call from them saying wiganworld was too busy and I would have to pay.

No way. That was not the deal. I moved the site to Zen. I also moved ALL of my customers away from them, their loss.

Zen was great for a while then the service started to suffer. Shame really, but it was a shared hosting plan and someone else on the server was running CPU-intensive scripts (or bad code) that brought our sites down.

As the months rolled on, wiganworld was now receiving 2,000+ unique visitors and using 2GB+ of bandwidth every day! Frightening.

Time for a dedicated server. 1&1 seemed to offer the best deal so I went with them. Unfortunately they are poor. Their uptime guarantee counts for nothing, their support is abysmal, the server is in Germany, the clock is wrong and I can't correct it even though its my own server!

So, as I type this, I'm looking at another server (£99+ VAT per month) and I'm still paying for 1&1 and Zen.

Therefore, hosting wiganworld is currently costing me (1&1) £57.57 + (Zen) £46.99 + (fasthosts?) £117 = £221.56 per month!

The moral of this story? Sorry, I don't know.... If you have experiences of good, dedicated hosting please contact me - brian@wiganworld.co.uk, I would love to hear from you, thanks.

Update 24th March 2008

I've moved everything away from Zen, and am currently paying £175.07 per month for 1&1 and fasthosts. I have 3 sites left with 1&1 and hope to move away from these cowboys very soon.

Fasthosts are reliable so far, touch wood, as I type this the server has been up 110 days (almost a third of a year!) without a crash. I've never needed to phone their support to date, its probably poor but I've managed to do everything I need myself so far... including cocking up the mail services, lol.