Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

Well, I moved all of my domains this weekend. I ended up getting a reseller plan; it was cheaper to host all of my domains and Rob’s with a reseller plan than via a regular account. I decided to use CRI Hosting because I had a really positive experience with their support when we moved the Hermit Crab Association.

I went with the Bronze reseller plan. While I don’t have any desire to resell domain space, it actually ends up being about $15 cheaper to host all of my domains per month. With this plan I have Web Host Manager (WHM – Gives me the ability to setup new hosting packages/domain accounts and do account management), CPanel which allows me to manage individual domains (mail, site statistics, subdomains, MySQL, manage files, and much, much more), and Fantastico which allows me to do one click installations of most of the popular open source web programs.

The support at CRI has been excellent. As I mentioned in previous posts and in class, moving the Hermit Crab Association was a huge project. CRI moved the database for us and ensured that the site worked. Their setup fees (if you want them to move your site for you) are just $25, well worth it in our case. I had CRI move all of the MySQL databases that I use to manage my various sites and I moved the individual files. All went well for the most part, the only hitch that I had was with my Movable Type recipe blog – this required a fresh install. CRI checked in with me throughout the weekend to ensure that the move was going well and to see if they could be of support. I was quite pleased.

CRI Hosting offers an educational plan that you all qualify for. You will need to put in a referral code, which I will give you in class, to activate the plan. While this plan only offers 10MB of space, the plan will give you an opportunity to check out CPanel and you can also use this plan with a domain name. Pretty cool! It costs $20.00 to setup the plan, but the site is yours for a year.

If you take a look at CRI’s regular hosting plans you will see that they are very affordable (the cheapest plan is $4.95/mo). Once you’re working and ready to upgrade your account to a paid hosting account it will be easy to do. These “educational” plans will work for one year from sign-up.