It’s been nearly a year since we started this web site. One of our first articles was a piece on how we picked our web hosting provider. Now, a year later, we thought it would be nice to revisit our choice. When we first chose DixieSys as our hosting provider, they offered us 40 MB of disk space for an annual fee of $19.95. It was the cheapest, most functional option we had available.
Now, a year later, let’s take a look at what we need and what we have. The www.bernardandagnes.com website is currently 165 MB in size. This includes large 1280×960 sized images for pretty much all of the pictures we have in the Journal section of this site. If we needed to, we could probably get rid of many of those larger pictures, and shrink down the size of the site considerably. Conveniently, DixieSys upgraded our plan to allow us a total of 400 MB in space, at no extra cost. This has been a great deal for us since all of their plans for new customers are quite a bit more expensive.
Our plan also provided 1.5 GB of data transfer each month. We have been nowhere near that capacity during the entire first year of this site. Because DixieSys continues to satisfy our needs, we’re signing up to continue with them for a second year.
The original article on picking a hosting provider recommended DixieSys to other people who wanted their own websites. Since that time, though, DixieSys has changed their pricing scheme. For smaller, personal sites, we currently recommend www.8-95.com. Their services are run by the same people who run DixieSys, but the 8-95 services are aimed towards personal sites. DixieSys has decided to focus on resellers and small businesses.
If you decide you want to start your own site, we would be more than happy to give you a referral to 8-95. Just contact us, and we’ll give you the information you need.