Well, so much for that. DreamHost’s reign at the top was short lived indeed. HostGator has moved back up to number one (where it belongs in my opinion). That said, DreamHost didn’t exactly tumble. As they said in Picture Perfect, “Number 2 and that ain’t bad.”

On a more nostalgic note, we have a visit to the top five from an old friend. BlueHost has jumped back to number three after having been in the lower half of the list for some time. Back on my old site, BlueHost was number one for literally dozens of months in a row. It seemed unbeatable. But in the last year or so that just hasn’t been the case. BlueHost is still a solid host, but it just hasn’t been able to stand up to DreamHost and HostGator’s assault since they went to unlimited hosting.

The rest of the list is stuck in the summer doldrums, although to be fair summer is not prime hosting time. Go figure, people would rather be out in the sun than typing away at their keyboard building web sites. And that, my friends, is why the world now has laptops and wifi.

Happy Hosting!

There is a lot to hate about PHP, which most programmers will be more than happy to share with you. At length. In a heated voice. Possibly requiring a valium afterwards. The arguments about PHP’s suckiness are interesting and largely quite accurate, while at the same time almost completely academic given its pervasiveness. But that’s a subject for another less stressful day.

In addition to its many faults as a language, PHP is responsible for another injustice on the web: the general unavailability of WebDAV.

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We have only two changes of note here. The first and biggest change is that DreamHost has bumped HostGator out of the top spot. Both are decent hosts, although in my book HostGator’s reliability slightly edges DreamHost’s. In any case, at least for the moment, the king is dead; long live the king!

The other change is EasyCGI hopping up to the #3 slot from #9. I guess there is some life left in Windows hosting. That sounded more cynical than it should be. Sorry. There are some good tools for Windows web development, but I’m a Unix guy from way back and Windows just isn’t my bag. We’ll have to see how EasyCGI does this month.

Happy Hosting!

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