Personally Chosen

I’m terribly stingy when it comes to hiring a car. Whenever I can, I spend the time to go through all the car hire companies operating in the airport that I’m flying to because their deals change at different times.

Yet, every single time that I’ve done that recently I’ve ended up with Holiday Autos.

They’re not really a “proper” car rental firm in that you won’t find a sign in the airport saying “Holiday Autos desk” and that’s what keeps their prices low. Whereas Hertz, Avis, Europcar and the rest are paying for people to staff their offices (and each one has thousands of offices) and to buy enough cars to be able to offer you things like a guarantee of having a car, all that Holiday Autos do is negotiate a bulk hire rate and pass the savings on to you. I say “all” but, of course, that’s hard enough I’m sure.

One of the interesting things I found is that although Europcar are normally the outfit that supplies their cars around Europe, it costs more to hire the same car directly from Europcar and the terms of the rental aren’t as good either. For example, I wanted to do a one way drop off once: the Holiday Autos price was 30€/day for the car whilst the Europcar rate was 50€/day AND there was a 100€ dropoff charge from Europcar vs none from Holiday Autos.

Anyway, save yourself both time and money and just book with Holiday Autos. Just be sure to book well in advance as they do sell out of the very best offers quite early.

It seems appropriate that we start of these reviews with the review of the site that hosts this blog.

So why did we choose Hostgator? Well, we’ve been shopping around and have tried out quite a number of other hosts that seemed to be capable of meeting our needs but none of them really matched up to their promises.

Our first criteria was that we needed a host that would let us host a reasonable number of domains within a single account. Many hosts limit you to one which sounds fine when you’re starting out but when you need to add a second domain that means more charges for hosting which soon mounts up. HostGator don’t put a limit on the number of domains you can host so each additional domain just costs you the domain registration fee ($10/year or so).

Secondly, we needed around 1GB of storage. That sounds like a lot but when you’ve a lot of photographs on your sites as we do it doesn’t take long to use up a lot of space. Many hosts limit you to under 100MB whereas HostGator has a 600GB “limit”. They’ve got the bandwidth to go with that too which many hosting services don’t (photographs really eat up bandwidth).

Our next key criteria was reliablity. When you monitor how your host is performing, you often find that they fall well short of the 99.9% uptime that many of them talk about. This isn’t something to be complacent about and though HostGator has been well above that figure for us we’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Money back guarantee. Initially we figured that this wasn’t important but it turned out that it was with some hosts that we tried. HostGator have one of the longer money back periods at 45 days which is more than enough to see if they work for you.

We needed PHP and MySQL. That’s offered by a lot of services these days but HostGator add RoR which we may be using in the future. However, watch limitations on the number of MySQL databases as some places limit you to as little as one; there’s no limit on HostGator. Likewise there’s no limit on the number of POP accounts with HostGator.

24/7 support that’s actually there 24/7 is ironically not so important with a good service like HostGator but it’s nice to know that it’s there if you need it.

Cpanel wasn’t one of our initial short-listing criteria but turned out to be more important than we thought it was as some services that do their own thing in terms of front-ends to your account are quite difficult to settle in to. A small thing is that you can choose your own account name with HostGator which means that you don’t need to type in long e-mail addresses when logging in as you do with many services. It’s also rather handy if you’re using more than one hosting service as you can get away with the same configuration files for the MySQL access if you’re mirroring sites.

They’ve loads of features that we don’t need right now but may do at some point such as quite extensive support for e-commerce.

The server speed seems really good too. We were able to import our database in less time than it took one hosting service to delete the files related to it. That’s something that both you and your users will appreciate and it’s also quite important for SEO reasons as well: fast sites tend to get indexed better.

The only thing I don’t like is that their $7.95 ticket price actually only applies if you pay for three years in advance which most people probably don’t. Therefore the real price is $9.95. Yes, that’s about $3/month higher than a lot of services but then you’re getting much more than a $3 value for it. However, they run discounts all the time and you should be able to get a 20% discount on the headline price using the links here bringing the price down to $7.96.