As I was saying, I have searched around for a new hosting service. I had used ClickArtists for many years, since the days of the dive center. John had built me two professional web-sites and had become a friend. The first sites were done with Joomla, (actually the first was my own done with MS FrontPage, but it wasn’t great). John did a great job and one of the sites gave an impression of a large professional company that got attention. I stayed with him for years. He moved on from Joomla to WordPress, as did most of the country and he moved his services to a Godaddy retail platform.
ClickArtists/Godaddy would still have my business except for the issue of SSL certificates. Godaddy wants about half again as much for a paid certificate as the others charging for them. They don’t offer any free certs and try to discourage anyone from getting them. If you want to certify all subdomains, well, that’ll cost ya.
I tried to get help from support, that was useless. So I went in search of how to install free encryption certifications, there are some available, but I also found that hosting providers were not only offering lower prices but also free certification of all domains and subdomains. Great!
I reviewed several, there are several good ones, fast great up time, etc. Some bad ones, too and some too expensive (or at least more than my budget will accommodate right now). Anyway, I chose HostGator. They are fast, have a great reputation, use cPanel, Softaculous, and other positives. Almost all of the services and support I need. Except, they have disabled Default Address within cPanel. Now that is a feature that I have used for several years. I inquired/complained about it but was told, that is just how it is, for security reasons, ya know.
Well, I thought it over and calculated the time it would take me to work around not having Default Address and did some more research and found Hostwinds. They have almost all of the same qualities and benefits and they have not defeated Default Address. So I set up a hosting service with them and canceled my contract with Hostgator. Hostgator was great though and they were Johnny-on-the-spot with returning my money. If you don’t need Default Address, they are a great hosting service.
So I have my domains with Hostwinds. So far, they too have been great, very helpful tech support, (you could be a complete know nothing and they will help you), and the price and services are right.
So now it’s time to develop those websites I have been noodling for several years, (and a couple new ones I just recently hatched).
More on that later.