Here is one classic piece: Lunarpages: 60 reasons why web hosts suck! Some are just out right hilarious, classified as “funny, but unrealistic” (but I could be wrong :) Some are just simple fact of life, and there is really nothing the web host can do about it. However, there are also those that give you that “deja vu” feeling. “Hey, the guy with his website going down all the time — that was me!”

(Note: I was going to post this as a reply to Matt’s blog post, but his Typo kept on giving me “500 Application Error”. Well, I am now posting it here.)

Stuart Brown wrote about switching to a dedicated server after getting digged, and had experienced (1) much better page rendering time, and (2) more referrals from Google. Thus he concluded speculated:

Perhaps the effects of a quick page response are more important than the rate of spidering — could Google be using this data (site response time) to build a profile of responsiveness across sites? Could this be yet another factor in ranking?

Perhaps — perhaps not. I don’t think page response time is a major factor in ranking quite yet, but with the introduction of this feature in the Webmaster Console, perhaps sites that take a long time to load will see a slow decline in Google traffic?

I am not in the web hosting industry (merely an end-user here), but reading some related blogs help me to get an understanding on what’s going on with this hosting business. Here is a partial-list of blogs that I read, but do note that this is not a “definite list”, and will certainly grow/shrink over time.

Netcraft’s November 2006 web server survey shows there are at least 100 million websites out there. Yup. 100,000,000 websites! I think the first thing that struck my mind was, how is a “website” defined? Netcraft used the hostname/FQDN model, and an unique FQDN that respond to HTTP requests constitute a website.

While I am doing most my own websites are done in PHP, during the day I wrote web-based financial-planning applications for one of the largest deployment in Australia in this simple, elegant and yet powerful programming language — Python.

Python is a great language, and there are many great Python web frame-works out there (which is one of its strength but also weakness). However, we do not see heaps of ready-to-install open-source web applications written in Python, unlike PHP. One of the biggest issue is difficulties to deploy — PHP is pretty much everywhere, but many web hosts don’t even support Python.

Here I am going to share about getting your Python-based website/web-application hosted.

Note: This is a re-post of this same-titled entry on my blog.

I wrote this quite a while ago on Whirlpool forum over a debate on Australian verses overseas (usually US-based) web hosting. Thread has since been closed (not my fault :) but I think I will jog down my thoughts here, looking at what is the most suitable web hosting solution for Aussies.