Servers

[bennyboy]

Godaddy sucks terribly.  For shared hosting, I found ICDSoft to be the best.  I mean, it’s shared hosting, but they did as well as possible with it

I made a phone app which exposed Android audio to my homepage, and uploaded files to the server's FTP. Godaddy was so fucking unreliable that the app would literally time-out about half the time it tried to connect to the FTP server.

That being said, I do like Godaddy for registering my domain names.  Very easy to go through the process of generating the SSL certificate, a nice little interface for updating fowarding etc.

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Also I’m pretty sure Azure is mostly VPS instances right?

Azure runs virtual machines.  So short answer-- right; my server is basically a VPS, but I believe it's distributed in a local cloud rather than installed on a single rack.  Long answer-- I think Azure is more of an enterprise environment than just a VPS. There are a lot of plug-ins you can add under license, and in addition to the VM, you have a virtual network, separate data storage that can easily be plugged in and out of this or that server, etc. Because it's so modular, you can move items among resource groups, up or downgrade components easily, and so on. I have only my previous web hosting people to compare to, so I don't really know how much of this is standard or how much is unique to Azure.

But my main reason is that it just works. It works well, 100% of the time-- no slowdowns, no mysteries, no restrictions whatsoever that I've come across. Everything just does what I want it to do, and does it better than I thought the cloud possibly could. It's possible I might one day go with a different cloud solution, but to me the idea of having a share in one hardware rack somewhere has gone the way of the dodo.

I'm going to keep recommending trying the free trial until someone actually does it. I'm curious what more experienced admins think of the bells and whistles.