I took the plunge today and purchased some webspace to host my new website. After much deliberation I went with Express Hosting UK, a company that offers hosting solutions to consumer and business users. I decided against going back to 1and1 because their packages are expensive compared to the features that EH provide, they’re not based in the UK (last time I left them, you had to send a fax to America to cancel your contract), and despite being aimed at consumers, their interface is really clunky and overly technical compared to the intuitive icon-based approach used by EH.
Of course it’s a bit early to tell if everything is golden with EH, but i’m very impressed so far. I got a very rapid response from their support team when I posted a ‘ticket’ to discuss my hosting options, and for a very modest sum every month I get access to lots of cool features such as mailing lists, MySQL databases and statistics trackers – the stuff 1and1 makes you pay extra for. The only limiting factor seems to be the amount of webspace EH gives, but the idea is you grow into the extra space as and when you need it.
The MySQL database and PHP support was a must so that I could host the wordpress.org software (the starter and home packages with 1and1 don’t provide this at all), and thanks to the Fantastico suite of applications that EH gives you, installing wordpress took only a few clicks. Admittedly it took me a few attempts before I was satisfied as I tweaked the database a bit, but it was all very straightforward (It turns out WordPress creates it’s own database so creating a custom one was unnecessary).
The only downside is that EH doesn’t manage upgrades so after the install I had to do a manual upgrade to the latest wordpress version, but again this is simply a case of deleting the existing files and copying over the new ones, while preserving any I needed to keep such as the configuration files.
Another cool feature that I get with EH is access to 15 email accounts. Admittedly I’ll only use a couple, but there’s a whole suite of options to forward and manage emails to your domain. I was very impressed that EH provides a little script that configures Apple Mail to access my emails, not to mention the one for setting up virtual disk so that I can drag and drop files. There’s also the same functionality for windows users too=)
Once I had WordPress set up I thought I would attempt copying over my blogger posts. This part is supposed to be straight forward but unfortunately I was one of the unlucky ones to be hit with not very much happening on the import screen (The progress shows 1/173 before “Importing..” changes to “Set Authors”). If this affects you, there’s a very simple fix to be found here that involves making a blog with WordPress.com, importing your Blogger posts, exporting the xml and importing to your self-hosted WordPress blog.
Importing the xml was easy-peasy but there is a snag: WordPress doesn’t import any pictures. So i’m chewing my lip at the moment over whether to copy some of the images in my old posts over manually..
On the whole though, WordPress has some really cool features and really easy interface (and the self-hosted version looks pretty much the same as the online version) but i’ve only really had a couple of hours to have a fiddle with it so there’s a lot about WordPress that i’m still learning. An advantage of WordPress is the ability to add additional pages – a feature lacking from Blogger that always bugged me. I had intended to create pages seperately in my root folder, but doing it through WordPress makes it super easy.
In case you haven’t noticed, i’ve reverted to hosting my existing blog on blogger while I mess around with the new WordPress version. For those of you that are interested in seeing the ‘work in progress’, you can take a gander at my custom domain at www.straydogstrut.co.uk (EDIT: I’ve added a redirect back here for now), however there’s little functional difference at the moment and I need to edit the default template which looks a bit bare bones at the moment.
That’s all for now folks.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Be very careful before you choose a hosting company. I wish to God I had checked out 1and1′s reputation before I signed.
If you refuse to pay for domains you did not want, they lock your account but keep sending you renewal messages. How can a person decline a renewal without access to their account?
Now because I won’t pay for domains I don’t want renewed, they have sicced a collection company, NCO, on me.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Hm that’s weird, they seem fine to me…Been a great host for 3 years so far.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Yeah, I have to agree that they were fine with me when I used them before.
The only negative I have with them was the need to send a fax to America to cancel my account, and that you seem to pay a lot more for some of the basic stuff offered by other providers.
On the whole though, they left me to it which was what I wanted at the time, so I don’t have any major gripe with them. However, this time around, the level of personalised support provided by EH really impresses me=)