I have been using GoDaddy.com for a few weeks now and I am quickly realizing that you get what you pay for. They have a lot to offer for a small price, but this causes shortfalls in some undesirable areas. The biggest one for me is backing up databases. GoDaddy doesn’t allow any external connections to their databases (a little fact not mentioned in pre-sales info), and do not give you the ability to create .bak files (mssql). The only way to back up data and schema’s is though text files, and frankly that just sucks. I have read a post here and there that there are tools which can purchased which will automate the task a little bit more, but it just doesn’t seem right.

Since I write my code in .NET I went with a Windows host, and have been checking out DotNetNuke, a pretty neat portal application. I would like to use this for my website, but am very hessetent because I don’t know how to get a solid backup of the app. I don’t want to spend hours configuring a portal to have something crash and loose all my work. What if I want to move it to a new host, I will not be able to that either (which I am sure is attentional on GoDaddy’s part).

So I am in search of a new web host, and it hasn’t been very easy, there are just so many of them out there. Another issue, is I really don’t want to pay more then $10 a month (I know, you get what you pay for). Well I am not looking for mass amounts of space or bandwidth, just a place to host my self-built apps and a family web site.