I’ve now changed hosting companies on this site. You may notice that it’s loading a lot faster than before. We are now hosted with HostGator, who seem really good so far in terms of speed, uptime and customer service (aside from their somewhat stupid alligator logo). They have a server partnership with one of the largest and most reliable server colocation facilities in the country (The Planet) and what they do, they do really well. (ie., provide excellent load balancing, speed and uptime). In fact, HostGator ranks at the top of most all shared hosting companies for uptime. As for speed, click around my site, you will likely find it loads very fast with no stalling.

My prior hosting company was DreamHost and while a lot of people really seem to like them for the price, I experienced short bouts of downtime on at least a weekly basis (never any downtime with HostGator). I also had noticeably slower load times and they only have email support, no telephone or live chat. On the plus side, they let you create custom discount coupons and actually make profit by referring others to them. Other hosting companies typically have affiliate programs too although not as attractive ones as DreamHost. That said, if you decide to sign up with them, please use my affiliate link above (same for HostGator).

I’ve even spoken with busy site owners who have said they couldn’t run their current site on DreamHost shared hosting without upgrading to a VPS but can run the same site on HostGator shared hosting with no problem. DarkMirage.com is one such site.

Prior to DreamHost, I was hosted with EngineHosting for several months. They were really quite good-fast, great support, etc. But their control panel was very minimalistic for me. I wanted more control over my site/domain. Their storage and bandwidth for the price is also rather expensive.

Before this I was using IXWebhosting (so bad, I won’t even link to them). They absolutely totally sucked in every single respect. IXWebhosting really is one of the worst hosts! Do yourself a favor and avoid them.

For years (probably 10 years) before all of the above, I used Pair Networks. They were great in terms of uptime and seemed fairly fast although they were expensive for the needs of my new MySQL/PHP WordPress site and just couldn’t compete. When I just had a static site, they were fine.

Note-I’ve heard generally good things about BlueHost although I have not tried them and won’t because they are located in Utah. This means that they censor their customers and will close down your account if they deem any of your content ‘inappropriate’. I even checked with them and one of the pictures in my portraits gallery is not ‘appropriate’ according to them. I dislike the idea of this kind of hypocritical censorship (you can post pictures of people murdering others, but not of the natural human body for example), so I would simply avoid BlueHost or any other hosting company in Utah (ie. WestHost too).

If you have had any bad experiences with a particular hosting company (or positive ones), leave a comment to share your thoughts with others.

UPDATE (May 14th, 2009): BlueHost doesn’t like photographers.

UPDATE (April 2nd, 2010): Still very happy with HostGator, nearly 2 years later and there have been no issues or downtime.

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• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Installation Woes

Did you know that you can run Adobe Photoshop (CS3 / CS4 etc.) on two computers using the same serial number?

Actually, you can do this with any Adobe product. The Adobe software license states that you don’t need to buy a copy for each computer (up to two computers), if you have a desktop and a laptop for example.

If you install it on two computers but are getting a “Too many Activations” error, this probably means that you had it installed on a third computer and did not de-activate it from there previously.

This was a problem I had because I had installed it on an old computer and then when I got my new computer and wiped my old computer clean, I had not thought about first de-activating Photoshop.

So, as I learned today, if you have this issue, just contact Adobe and they will get it working for you over the phone or online by resetting things on their servers. I was pleasantly surprised that there was not a very long hold time on the phone and the first person I spoke to was able to help me in about 5 minutes total even though I could barely understand his English (I believe he was in India).

Now I can run Photoshop on both my MacPro and my Macbook Pro!

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