For the better half of the last decade I’ve been in what now seems like an abusive relation - a relation I chose to have and uphold for about 7 years now. At the outset the relation was all I could hope for. The lack of change in the relations has however, over time, eaten away at its foundations and is now about to collapse. I’m leaving my hosting partner.

Somewhere in August 2002 badsoda.com was born and got itself a slick hosting partner named ReadyHosting. The deal was pretty good at the time providing one of the best cost/benefit ratios on the market. I’ve chosen to stick with them when they were bought out and through the service disruptions this has brought about. Over the course of the last 7 years I’ve only had to open a handful of tickets with their ever helpful support staff which is pretty good considering the mayhem I’ve read about elsewhere.

So why leave?

It is true that after the acquisition the site ran a little slower. That in an of itself is not reason enough to leave though - certainly not for a site with this readership. It’s also true that their service, as I said earlier, is pretty good . You would think their price of $9.25/month is pretty sweet as well. Well this has now become the sticking point for me.

I’m leaving because of pure cost. This website uses about 150MB of space and 0.15GB of bandwidth a month. My plan provides for 1GB of space and 200GB of bandwidth a month. While $9.25 may seem cheap for the plan it’s darn expensive considering my usage patterns.

This discrepancy has led me to a wide search for more affordable, and appropriate hosting. After a couple of false starts and a few evenings of intensive investigation into hosting reviews, plan comparisons and cost calculations I think I’ve finally found a partner matching my needs on all fronts: financially, support wise and ethically - OK that last one was not on my list but a nice bonus that my new hosting partner just happens to support. In short, I’m moving to nearlyfreespeech.net

Free speech what?

They’re one of the few hosting companies that successfully provide pay-as-you-go web hosting. The bottom line on them is that they have really decent reviews, a no nonsense approach, a business model that I support and best of all I’m likely to pay between $20 and $25 for my hosting annually. That’s about an 80% saving compared to what I’m paying today.

Their model is pretty simple:

• Data Transfers (Bandwidth): Starts at $1.00 per gigabyte and goes down
• Disk Space (Storage): $0.01 per megabyte-month

If you’re considering swithching hosts and you run a pretty low-traffic, low-disk usage site you might want to check them out too.