If you are a regular to the site, you may know that I have had some great service from my previous hosting provider, Hetzner. Which may make you wonder why I decided I needed to move the site. Well the reality is it is about the money at the end of the day. When I joined Hetzner earlier in the year I took their Basic package since it met my needs, and I was able to sign up get sorted etc.... very quickly. Plus they are a South African company so getting help over the phone wasn't hard. What I didn't realize what how much space I got from my previous provider.
So I ended up with tight limits on what I could upload. Eventually I exceeded it (mostly with the photos) and started paying extra per month. Now based on how many photos I had sitting to upload I realized that this would get expensive and put a hold on uploading them (until today). Interestingly enough I hardly used any of the other services on the packages (bandwidth never exceeded, no mailboxes used, I have one forward to GMail etc...) so all I needed was disk space. I had thought of using sites like Flickr but it didn't appeal to me too much, and when my wife decided to start her own part time business and she needed a site I decided to look around again for something which would meet both our needs, as with Hetzner I would need another package.
Browsing the Drupal site (which I use for my CMS) I found a list of recommended hosting providers and started to go through that. I found Web Hosting Buzz through that and was very impressed, and the fact there is a 30 day money back guarantee put me at ease. I signed up for my wifes site first and got that setup and once that was on moved my site across.
To give you an idea of differences:
| Hetzner | WebHostingBuzz | |
| Cost per month | R99 |
R36 ($54 per year * R8 exchange rate) |
| Disk Space | 100Mb | 300Gb |
| Transfer | 1.5Gb | 2000Gb |
| Number of websites on package | 1 | Unlimited |
It's kind of a no brainer for me ;) And I have put WHB to the test already with some interesting support calls and they have come through each time. One such example is I saw SSH access listed on their site (which Hetzner didn't provide) and when I inquired it was setup in minutes for me.
Would I recommend Hetzner still? Definitely but you need to be the right type of customer, the type who needs South African hosting and (ideally) has their own server. Nowadays for personal sites the options (free or paid) overseas are too good to compare.