One of the bad habbits I have picked up from working in Local Government is reviewing your options, regularly. As I approach my renewal for this site’s web hosting, I decided to revaluate the market.

(Short version, I’m with Mythic-Beasts for another year)

Currently, I have the site hosted with Mythic-Beasts. They are pretty cool folks, unfortantely one of there DC had a power cut recently – ok, only a few hours and I pay peanuts so I don’t expect much in terms of reduancy or fancy SLAs, but it did make me look at my options for a bit longer then normal.

Recently, I discovered Project Nami, a fork of WordPress that replaces the MySQL database with MS-SQL (which I quite like). As you would expect, its bundled really nice for Azure. I setup a quick test site on Azure and had a play, it worked a exceedingly well, but the lack of IPv6 left me with a bitter taste. Why hasn’t Microsoft added support for IPv6! This would mean I would have to use CloudFlare, which isn’t exactly a problem. The summary outcome was Azure was overly complex, I’m not saying Microsoft hasn’t done a excellent job making it simple to setup and use, its just its overly complex for what I want, my content is static. Again, Project Nami is excellent, its just, an extra complexity. CloudFlare, I’m still 50/50 on. I have another site using CloudFlare and I’ve had no problem, its just, again, its overly complex solution to simple problem. Lots of bells and whistles.

Going the other way, I looked at WordPress.com. This would the similest solution, but that comes at a price, at nearly 3x times the cost per year and alot more restrictions – no PowerBI iframes (well they haven’t added support… yet)*

So, now I’m back to Mythic-Beasts, they have IPv6 support, are UK based, have excellent support, good value for money. They’ve also added support for LetsEncrypt. So HTTPS is free and only a few clicks – something that you can do with Azure, but with a £45 or above package. Sigh.

If nothing else this “forced” me to look at Project Nami and look deeper into Azure. Azure is a pretty big beast thats getting bigger by the day. I’ve also reconfigured a few bits on my websites on Mythic-Beasts (I still have a few things left to do!), so as always, it was worth reviewing the market.

  • Yes, I am aware I haven’t published any public PowerBI reports… yet!