Egg head stuff

Wow we have some speed back, I decided to move hosting companies again after my nightmare month with GoDaddy. I am with www.justhostme.co.uk and they are pretty decent. Their support is a load better and also the speed of serving up web pages is about a million times faster.

I also finally took the plunge and have moved over to WordPress, I use WordPress for some of my other websites as a CMS and have always liked it. For what it is, it is pretty powerful and if it is good enough to power Techcrunch, Mashable, Nasa, Spotify etc, it is definately good enough for me!

Before I got into wordpress, I decided to use BlogEngine.Net as it was coded in .NET with c# and an MS SQL back end. The theory here, is because I am pretty decent .NET developer, even if I do say so myself was that I could do any customizations pretty easily and quickly. The reality was I never had to do any development i.e. how complicated can a blog be? Anything out of the norm is usually catered for by plug-ins.

So what was my driver behind it – pure economics, basically LAMP hosting is usually a lot cheaper than a Microsoft package. Unless you go with someone like GoDaddy and then you get what you pay for. WordPress is best run on LAMP servers whilst BlogEngine requires a Microsoft box.

Funny thing though, is my brother uses GoDaddy for his website and it performs ok, I think it maybe just the luck of the draw. If internet speculation is to be believed, then on the amount of websites they host on a single shared server, you probably only need to be sharing with a few high traffic sites and you are buggered.

Also as I have become more familiar with WordPress maintaing my other websites, I have picked up a bit of php, so am more than comfortable doing any customizations that maybe required (probably nothing on this site as it is only a blog). The process of importing the data over from a MS Sql database to a mySQL database with a different schema was painless because, guess what – they have a plug-in that handles it! Double bonus  - WordPress even has a 301 redirect plug-in, this meant I could easily set up 301′s on 50 of my most visited pages.

Anyways I am pretty happy now that speed has been restored and as an added bonus I have moved over to WordPress. You maybe saying to yourself that it is not fair to compare speeds between a WordPress and Blogengine website on different hosting providers, my argument is that I had a WordPress site running on that GoDaddy package and it was even slower than this blog, infact it would time out quite a lot when requesting a web page!!

By the way I have nothing bad to say about BlogEngine.Net, it done what it said it would do on the box – good stuff!