The progression from websites of old to AnubianHost is my current site.
I thought I made a blog entry about AnubianHost when I first started my blog. But Anubian Host is the web provider that I use which hosts all of the data that you see before you and keeps it nice and fast to boot. It's been a few years and perhaps it's time I should tell you a little story about why I moved to these guys.
History of web providers I have gone through in the past.
Every site has its beginnings.
The picture above represented my very first website. It had DHTML animation, frames, and all of the hip new features that would make a GeoCities or AngelFire free hosting service cry for. Rendering all of the graphics on a Pentium 233 takes days to do. It was something I wanted to show everyone that everyone has to start somewhere.
Exec-PC Internet.
My very first art site was hosted on execpc.com in the mid-'90s when a lot of people had shell accounts and the dial-up PnP 56kbs connection was starting to become a thing. Powered on a windows 3.1 machine running with Netscape I coded my first website by hand using the front page and some DHTML code to give a cool mouse-over effect on the icons in the sidebar. The website was all hand-coded which meant a lot of breaks in the linkage. and I had a total of 10Mb of space for my entire site which filled up very quickly! I managed to cram everything down to 8MB because the average resolution monitor looking at my website back then was 800x600 so it was easy to compress down to that size. Needless to say, I moved on from this not because of the limited size but because they ended up changing hands and merging so many times they ended up screwing up my billing completely for an entire 2 years of service. ExecPC now CoreComm was by far the most incompetent group of people I have ever dealt with.
GoDaddy.com
I originally went through GoDaddy for everything. Back when GoDaddy was innocent and believed in supporting people like the TechTV crowd in the early 2000s. As time progressed GoDaddy's services got more and more underhanded by re-directing 404 errors to their content and redirecting parked DNS names to point to them as well.
The final straw is when GoDaddy decided to get all sorts of political with supporting SOPA in mid-2011 which honestly is none of their business to get involved with! They also got a surcharge crazy to the point of threatening me with a $60 termination fee if I didn't renew one of my domain names with them. While there is a fee of close to $60 if you lose your domain and someone decides to jack it from you. GoDaddy explained this very poorly.
GoDaddy's web interface was almost from the dark ages of computing and hasn't really been overhauled or updated since. So that was pretty much the end of GoDaddy as a viable choice to do any business with.
Bluehost
BlueHost came into the picture when I was working on a lot of convention websites. For a time a lot of Milwaukee Conventions also relied on the service. They had the whole mantra of unlimited space and downloads for one incredibly low price. For a while it was good!
As time progressed, however, the sites that I was running underneath BlueHost got slower and slower. When asking their help-desk team about it. Their response wasn't to check the other accounts on the slice to see who's hogging the bandwidth. They simply stated that I needed a dedicated server plan at almost $100/mo. Otherwise, there's nothing else they can do for me.
Bluehost never believed in the freedom of speech or expression.
The biggest thing that drove me away from BlueHost is an amendment in their TOS stating that you could not swear anywhere on your site. What if they find any form of vulgarity on your site? Simple, your account could get pulled.
Now, this can be perceived as minor to a lot of people that have a closed site such as e-commerce or a simple business front stating your existence to the world.
But what if you run a blog as I do and one of your subscribers or editors decides to go all ape-shit? Well, people on the net can do just that. Suddenly, they can have BlueHost shut down my account for something that we didn't even write! The reason why such restrictions on the freedom of speech are to have a neutral SEO ranking for all of their shared server accounts. That the theory (at the time) was Google would simply blacklist an entire IP range that the web provider hosts because if one site is vulgar then it is assumed that every single site is the same way. I don't think Google treats Web Providers in such a way. But I could be wrong about this. Either way, I was unbelievably displeased with their services and ejected them hard style.
The Web2.0.
The major site I used for web 2.0 in displaying content used to be Furaffinity (but you can think of web 2.0 as Facebook, DeviantArt, or MySpace, pick your poison really!).
The truth of the matter is it doesn't matter which art server you are a part of. Eventually, there will be drama with the administration team, and/or you will have the person hosting it have a major breakdown and say something to the point that not enough people donate money and that bandwidth costs money if you think that you can do better then go ahead and do it yourself in a fit of frustration and rage.
Which we thought of this and came to our own conclusion:
What if i remove it from your site? Then it's not your problem anymore.... - S
Going to another furry art conglomeration server is only asking for the same nightmare to happen all over again. We never believed in benevolence on the internet because it only hides the intentions of those running said servers. Do they want power? Loyalty? No, we want to deal with web admins who are... Well. Stable?
On another note: Furaffinity has no way of transferring binaries unless I place a dropbox link into a still picture designed of that binary. Eventually, you start stacking web 2.0 on top of web 2.0 and giving away more of your property to others than having it in control for yourself.
Beyond drama-Lamma.
We do have to thank FurAffinitiy because their ads provided a solution to the problem which is to buy website space from a furry getting into the web-providing business. Despite all of the drama that happened. I must stress that being on Web 2.0 is free for most cases because the people running these servers rely on you the user for content to push them up in the Google Page Ranks which means advertising revenue becomes better off for them.
When you think of web 2.0 and social networks. Think of them are little birds. They make a lot of noise and get your message all over the place quickly. But since everyone is flying everywhere you lack any reasonable foundation.
Present-day with AnubianHost.
Click here to be taken to AnubianHost
AnubianHost came during the time when all of my convention work was done and I wanted to reactivate my art website from the ExecPc days. The web-hosting plans the AnubianHost has are more traditional stating how much your disk space quota and how much can be downloaded off of your site every month. I checked my CPanel on the old BlueHost account to see if the 50gigs per month are acceptable. It was more than what I needed! At the time my blog was only getting 2-3 gigs per month in traffic.
It now gets around 5-7gigs of traffic a month which is around %15 usage. So for the most basic rate plans that AnubianHost was offering it was MORE than enough for what I needed or used it for. When I first started their CPanel seemed a little more stripped down than Bluehost but I later found out that those tools such as all of the CMS installation scripts were merged so Anubianhost had the same amount of tools just better organized about it!
I knew how to move my SQL databases and WordPress over to the AnubianHost server and was able to purchase a new domain of www.s-config.com from Anubian as well. But what Bluehost didn't have was speed! I no longer have to wait 6-10 seconds for my website to load! I should also note that every-time AnubianHost has upgraded its services with me on it. That I get a little more storage added to my account every time as a thank you. And we appreciate that! As for their support, every question we asked was answered the same day which exceeded both Bluehost and GoDaddy Customer support. This is impressive considering it's only being run by one man! And for a shared server I have the freedoms to post whatever I like so long as I'm not breaking the law everything is good.
Even a certain level of porn is even allowed because the web admin knew that people would be transitioning from sites like FurAffinity over to a private hosting plan and artists do not want to be tied down by censorship laws. The only thing you can't do is run a pay-for site. pay-for-porn sites required a dedicated IP account which we understand. I do not regret a single day moving away from all of the previous web providers or even FurAffinity because I have received far more hits for not only my art and my blogs as well. Web 1.0 should be the base and foundation of every artist.
Oh yeah, the server up-time is higher then Furaffinity too! - S
Some people in this day and age may view "paying for a blog" to be a little absurd when there are so many free sites out there. The truth is when you are providing content to those sites. Who are you helping? Is the content you make and create helping the guy running the site get a higher ranking than even you? Shouldn't your art and your blog be your credit? It takes a little more time to learn the ins and outs of WordPress. But the level of customization is worth every penny. And don't trust other web providers which claim to be 'unlimited' because there is a wall on everything! I have been with AnubianHost for 3 and a half years at the time of this blog. And hope they continue to grow.
The story continues here where we clarify and track our years with Anubainhost.
That's what server said
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