As I have posted before my sites are currently hosted at 1and1, apart from this blog which is at WordPress.com. Recently I received an email from them to say that the price of my hosting package was going to rise, although I would be getting some extra email accounts and other stuff in compensation. None of the extra features listed in the email were of any interest to me. My only issue is the number of sub-domains so I wrote to 1and1 asking whether the new package would include more. Unfortunately it took them nearly two weeks to answer my question (12 days to lose my original question, 1 day to answer a different question and 1 to actually answer). Sadly the answer was “no”.
That set me thinking about alternatives. The sainted Lifehacker recently ran a series of articles asking readers to nominate their favourites. The most highly recommended was Dreamhost so I checked them out.
The listed cost is a bit more than the upgrade package I would need with 1and1 but their wonderfully simple package offers unlimited domains, email accounts, sub-domains and so on. Better still, Dreamhost offered Lifehacker readers a discount of around 70% if they signed up for a 2 year package. That worked out at less than my current 1and1 package. Sold!
However, I can already see that this is going to turn into quite a project. Dreamhost allows you to install various software packages, such as WordPress, to use for your sites. This means that I can move everything to one place and offers more configurability. Of course it leads to more decisions, more trial and error and so on. However, I am looking forward to learning about CMS systems such as Joomla and Gallery. More to follow.