In Traction

This all started when I wanted to create a new blog.

Typo seemed impressive. However, it required Ruby on Rails, which wasn’t supported on Lumumba. I figured it would be cool to redesign my homepage with Rails as well, so that I could dynamically add content, and more tightly integrate my blog with the main website. The old homepage used a custom-made PHP templating system, which was only sufficient for small changes to the content.

Maybe getting a dedicated host would be the best thing to do. So I went through the list of web hosts supporting Rails. I came across sneaker.nl, a Dutch blog using Typo. We exchanged a few mails, and apparantly he was using DreamHost. After a couple of hours of comparing hosting plans, the choice was narrowed down to TextDrive, Planet Argon and DreamHost. DreamHost is really cheap for the web space and bandwidth it offers, but TextDrive and Planet Argon seemed more customizable, which I found very important. Unfortunately they are a bit expensive for my liking.

And then I stumbled upon Site5, which seemed to combine both enormous bandwidth and disk space with great support and reliability. I found a guide comparing Site5, DreamHost and TextDrive and a whole bunch of of Site5 reviews, of which the majority was positive.

Registering .be domains is free until January 31st, so I registered jozilla.be, and ordered a shared hosting plan at Site5.

And this blog post is the result My homepage still requires some migration work though.

I didn’t regret signing up at Site5. Their community forums are very helpful. Yesterday, I sent an email to support and received an answer within 7 minutes!

Tags: blog, homepage, rails

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 7:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.