dll Hell .net

I hope this is my last post on shared Windows hosting for a while (unless I have a lot of good things to say about my new host). It’s still a little early to have a strong opinion one way or another about WebHost4Life, but I thought I’d throw out my initial experiences after about a week on their servers…

Ordering Process

Anyone who has ever purchased anything from Go Daddy knows what it’s like to have add ons thrown at you every step of the checkout process. Go Daddy tries to upsell you everything from related domain names to hosting services. I’d call WebHost4Life Go Daddy Lite. They have three Windows hosting plans costing $5.05, $11.95 and $22.05. The gimmick is that each day, a special discount is extended through that day. When I signed up on 5/7, the prices were discounted to $4.95, $9.95 and $19.95 each month. The discounts are always there. As far as I can tell, this is all marketing.

After picking a plan and a payment method, you have the option to “Turbo Charge” your purchase. This option ($1.95/month) gives you a bunch more hosting and database space, plus SAN storage and a virtual OS. They seem suspiciously careful not to say you don’t get SAN storage without the “Turbo Charge” option, so this too seems like a gimmick. But for $2/month more, the extra space was worth it to me. I took the bait. Oh yeah, and the bonus extra storage expires soon and is worth $500! :p

A couple things to keep in mind with WebHost4Life’s plans. You get only a single domain/website. Though you can create multiple websites with subdomains off of your primary domains. You can also point unlimited domains at your primary domain. If you wish to run multiple websites with different domains, you can pay an extra $15/year each. You’re limited to 8 of these additional site/domain purchases per hosting plan. Also, WebHost4Life offers only annual billing. You’ll have to prepay for a year, but they offer a 45 day money back guarantee and a pro-rata refund if you cancel during your year.

Control Panel

Within about 3 hours of signing up for a plan, I received confirmation that my account was ready to use. When I first logged into the control panel I was nervous about using another home-grown panel. But after getting used to some more gimmicky marketing mixed into the panel, I found that their “Total Control” tagline wasn’t all that off.

The panel has reasonably complete IIS management tools. It allows for controlling .NET versions, virtual directories, application settings, IIS protect, custom errors, directory browsing, application installers (DotNetNuke, etc.) and a handful of other expected features. Short of mapping custom extensions, I can’t think of anything missing with IIS management.

DNS management allows for creating MX, CNAME and A records. The panel also allows for creating and managing MySQL and SQL Server 2005 databases, FTP accounts and pretty much everything else I’ve seen in a commercial or home grown panel. I actually like the panel. It’s a bit primitive. You set paths by typing in a text box, not picking from a list for example. But overall, it does everything I need it to do and doesn’t have the awkward workflows that I found with panels like DotNetPanel.

The one thing that struck me after migrating my first site to WebHost4Life was that everything just worked. I moved the domain, created the site, created my database and ran the backup from my previous host, copied the website over, updated the config and browsed. Everything just worked with no headaches and no hassles. It was the best migration experience I recall.

Support

I have mixed feelings about support so far. Live chat is available and always a quick way to get an answer. They also have a telephone number, though I haven’t called it. But tickets (I’ve opened two) are very slow to be answered. It takes several hours to get a reply to a ticket. They do have priority levels in the ticket creation process. I wonder if higher priority tickets get expedited. I’ve left the default as I’ve yet to have a critical ticket. But again, with Live Chat available and phone support available 24/7 I’m hopeful that an outage wouldn’t get such a delayed response.

Performance

Perhaps the most impressive feature of WebHost4Life is performance. I’ve moved two sites over so far, Code Voyeur and Jeopardy Story. Both sites scream (OK, maybe talk very loudly). Ultima Hosts, where I had previously hosted these sites wasn’t too slow. But I definitely find consistently better performance with WebHost4Life.

For the curious, Code Voyeur runs Spring.NET’s Web and Data framworks and uses SQL Server 2005. Jeopardy Story is running Castle’s MonoRail and ActiveRecord and uses MySQL 5.

Other Thoughts

Again, I’ve only been on WebHost4Life for a week, but overall it’s been a good first week. Historical experience with WebHost4Life seem mixed. For example, back in 2004 there were some good reviews out there. Here is one and here’s another. A year or two later, opinions looked like this or this. Another two years later, I’m having a very different experience. I’m hoping they had some growing pains, but are on the right track now.

In general, I’ve learned it’s best to get with a host that doesn’t offer unlimited everything. I used to feel nickeled and dimed by getting limited websites, databases, etc… The dark side to to unlimited plans is unlimited outages (see Ultima Hosts). I’m happy to pay a little extra if it does indeed get me reliability. I also like that when I use Management Express to view my SQL Server database, I don’t see every other database on that server… I’m not sure why so many other hosts can’t get this right…

Anyway, I won’t come out and say definitely use these guys. But they’re worth a try if you’re in the market for a host. If you do give them a try (shameless referral link to follow) they do have a referral program. My referral link is below, for your convenience.