As a bit of a longer version on this, let me explain what all I had done. This past weekend, I decided to finally swap to a bigger server. I want to add more pictures to the server, and those don't exactly take up a small amount of space. I'm making attempts to make the Longbored Photos a bit cooler, or at least to have more photos. On my previous hosting solution, I was limited to about 50mb. For those of you unfamiliar with space, and a web server…. that's fairly tiny. The pricing was great though, at all of $1/100mb, I couldn't complain. I had great control over the server, and could do anything I wanted to.

I originally was looking at two places for my serving needs. The first was (mt) Media Temple and the other was ICDSoft. MediaTemple offered a GREAT package. It allowed me to have 3GB of space, 6 domains, and a blazing fast connection, all for $8/month. I couldn't argue with that. ICDSoft offers 500mb for $5/month, but only 1 domain. Clearly the winner for me was MediaTemple, so I went with them.

I got all of my content uploaded for the various domains that are part of the Longbored Network, and then the fun began. For various technical reasons their service was a pain. Their lack-luster control panel was horrid, and lacking in features all over the place. They demanded that PHP run in safe mode, and anything created by PHP belonged to a certain user, which only brought my photo system to its knees. You couldn't easily manage zipped files, without getting SSH access. Nor could I restore my MySQL databases without SSH access. It's not that they didn't give you SSH access, but then the files that you unzipped were also owned by yet another user, and the process to restore the database was a pain. Add slow tech support to all that, and you don't have a winning solution.

I didn't/don't have time to sit down and figure out all the details of who owns what so I can run my server. I just want it to work. I want to upload photos, and then my photos show up. I don't want to ensure proper ownership and file permissions. It should be user-friendly enough to do that for me. Despite their blazing servers, and the great price for the space, I just stick with them. So the weekend was hardly over and I was already looking for another server. In all honesty I really just wanted more space for LBS. PabloNoEsta is going to be changing enough that I don't feel like I need the space quite yet for it.

My third option, which I didn't pursue, was with a place called FuitadNet. Don't ask me how to pronounce it. Their Quartz package was what I was looking at. I know their service works just fine, since that is roughly where LBS was hosted before. They offered all the space I would dream about, and also had all the tech options I needed. It was/is a sure winner for me. The ONLY drawback was the price. I can't really afford to pay $13/month. By the time this is all over, I probably could, but that's not the point.

I'm pleased with ICDSoft. They've got a great webmail interface, IMPECABLE tech support, and pretty good uptime and speeds. Recommended to me by Cliftonite, it was nice to have a first-hand opinion/experience with a place. With all that said….. welcome to the host, ICDSoft.