After over a year hiatus, I am finally getting the blog up and running again. The Blog has been moved to a new hosting provider SiteGround and is now served over a secure connection (https). The blog is loading a little slow right now, but the speed should start improving as caching and speed optimization to fully kick-in. After 13-years with GoDaddy, I started parting ways with them back in September 2019 by moving all my domains to a new Registrar, NameSilo.
Overall, been impressed with both providers. NameSilo site is very simplistic and has been described as stuck in the early 2000’s. Really don’t need anything fancy to manage my domain names. You’ll rarely access the site as when I started moving the sites to SiteGround at the beginning of this month was the first time I had been there since I moved the domain in September. The big reason for the move to NameSilo besides they were a lot cheaper than GoDaddy was domain registration privacy is free. GoDaaddy charges another $9 per year for each domain. NameSilo does not offer email directly (neither does GoDaddy except if you host with them, otherwise you have to buy an Office365 email subscription).
The move to SiteGround was partly about costs. A new 3-year contract was the half the price of what GoDaddy wanted to charge for renewing my 3-year contract with them. Also for whatever reason GoDaddy still refused to use Let’s Encrypt with their shared hosting services. Most of the major hosting providers, including SiteGround offer this free service. I presently don’t run eCommerce sites, but over the past years web browsers (especially Google Chrome) make it apparent to the user they are not visiting a secure site. However, most site owners either can’t afford or don’t see a benefit to paying $64 a year for am SSL. Plus with GoDaddy’s architecture each website needs to be on its own hosting plan in order to use an SSL which is another $50+ a year expense. Keep in mind Let’s Encrypt certificates are not designed to be used on eCommerce sites. However, for those who want better search rankings (yes, Google with demote your rankings if the site does not have SSL) or don’t want their visitors seeing ‘Not Secure’ in their address bar Let’s Encrypt is the prefect solution.
SiteGround site is very clean and with very little upsell (they do want me to buy their site scanner). Sites are not hosted on SSD drive, which some providers gimmick you into thinking you will get better performance with SSD based hosting. That may be true for non-database driven sites and if your site falls into that category you are going to be an ever so slight increase in load speeds. Sites running WordPress (such as this one) or Joomla are database driven and that is where the slow down typically occurs. SiteGround MySQL servers are using SSD drives, plus they offer free caching/speed optimization.
Should have some new content up within the week, so stay tuned!
