My TextDrive Story
Today I bought a lifetime supply of hosting from TextDrive. Yep. For a good number of months, I’ve been praising them as the best shared hosting service for developers and elite techies alike, but only today have I put my money where my mouth is. Cool beans, eh? Now allow me to indulge in writing the back story of how this came to be.
Previously, my hosting situation was that I had a box up at Community Colo that I let Andy Smith administer. It was our shared personal server, which we used for hosting our websites, blogs, source control, photo galleries, etc. If we wanted to prototype something like a new web app, we could put it up there. If we wanted to give a friend some web hosting, we could throw them on there.
Andy did a good job of maintaining the server, but recently we’ve both been too busy to keep it running smoothly. In fact, all my websites somehow fell into a state of disrepair. Luckily, most of my web presence exists in a decentralized network of hosted solutions (TypePad, Flickr, pbWiki, LiveJournal, etc). I’ve been living off GMail a little over a year for all my email, and most of my code has been living happily on my local machine, so I hardly even needed to use our little community server.
Looking back, there were many times when I was dependent on Andy to get things done on the server. I sort of felt limited in the things I could do. Since we got that server, I had become quite adept with FreeBSD using it in various projects for other companies, but our server was Gentoo Linux. Though similar, FreeBSD and Gentoo are by no means immediately interchangeable from a user perspective.
Some time ago, I had decided I needed my own box. I had even built one, but I didn’t have any place to colocate it. Community Colo was full. I started plotting to get hosted at a friend’s hosting company, Simpli Hosting, but I wasn’t very interested in paying colocation costs for a personal server. The plan became to get her enough referrals to pay for it fully with commissions.
That plan seemed fine until I felt a pressing need to host a particular project somewhere. I didn’t want to jump through hoops, so it would have to be my native server environment, FreeBSD. This brings us back to TextDrive, which I had known about for some time, but was never interested in a shared hosting environment. Then again, what they provided was very inviting, and they were very reasonably priced.
I decided to mull it over some as I went over their site again. I stumbled upon a page of their site with the heading "Hosting for Life." A lifetime supply of hosting? For $400? Their marketing strategy was overpowering. (They even engineered this post in that way)
I started to pull out my credit card before I realized to stop myself and actually think about it. The plan specs were about the equivalent of a $30/month plan, only here I’d pay for just a year plus $40 all upfront and I’d get it for the rest of my life (or theirs). Sounds good to me. The only question then was if it would actually suit my needs, so I subscribed to the cheapest plan. After a day of trying things out, I was sold. Today I have a lifetime account.
In about a year, I can safely say I have free, reliable hosting. Not only that, it’s probably better than yours. The shared hosting environment? They’ve done a pretty good job with it. I already knew it wasn’t going to be like Generico Brand Shared Hosting that’s been resold about 10 levels deep and uses cPanel. You don’t really have to worry about it since they already have installed or will support just about everything you’d need. Plus, their customer support is great.
Would I take a colocated server over TextDrive? Probably, but not for personal stuff. I can do everything I did with our shared server at Community Colo. In some cases even more, plus convenience. It’s just not something I have to worry about anymore.