Kualo – new host :)

so razorshine.com has a new host 🙂 Kualo to be precise. It was getting irritating hosting it on my machine – mainly because Telewest are rather tight with their upload allowance (128K rather than the more usual 256K). Anyhow, having browsed the various blogs/boards, Kualo came up as a good host and good value for money – especially as they have a great offer on right now called the Superplan. They have different pricing for in the UK compared to in the States but you can choose where you want to host and so get access to the US rates if you want to.

So whats the verdict?

Well wordpress installation was a one step process – brilliant – though there was a minor hiccup because they do not say anywhere that you have to delete the placeholder html file in the root first if you want to install to the root folder. Didn’t take me too long to figure out though 🙂 The default install didnt have me needing to worry about mySQL databases which was nice. There were a decent selection of major module addons for WordPress but having already built my not so different theme to use Gallery2 (rather than Gallery), I opted to install Gallery2 from scratch rather than the easier Gallery install. You have full control of WordPress so you can choose to go with the wizard based addons or just download and install as normal.

As for the host – well I am still waiting for a decent statistics solution for my blog – ie one that is tailored to blogs. Kualo give you AwStats, Webalizer and Analog as well as being able to see a quick breakdown of your latest visitors so you get a good selection – none of them are ideal for blogs though. There is simple backup system as well so no worries about losing data. Overall feature wise I am more than happy 🙂 – there is SpamAssasin for email, 3 options for webmail interfaces (none as usual a patch on Outlook Web Access). The one thing it does not seem to do well is DNS management – I cannot add SPF records for example – though subdomains and mx records are perfectly well catered for 🙂

Performance – well I think its not that much faster than my home grown solution – I might be wrong here – as I have not tested it in a quantitative fashion – and I am used to fast connections but compared to other sites it just felt slower. They claim 8.5Gbps connectivity so maybe its just been a slow week.. anyhow its not so bad I want to move – after all it was less than £50 a year 🙂

Riaz Kanani

Founder of Radiate B2B, which helps companies target advertising at specific companies usually as part of an account based marketing programme.

I have spent almost two decades building startups or expanding fast growth companies in a variety of functions - from tech to operations to marketing, with a little corp dev on the side.

Always up for a discussion on building tech businesses and the latest tech trends. Tweet me.