Horizons: Neosurge Web Host

by Mystery

Neosurge is one of the many small web hosts available today. It stands out among the pack with its affordable pricing and package combinations suitable for small websites. Of particular interest to the gaming community is the amount of space offered with the packages, nearly 4 times that of price comparable packages offered by other web hosts .

Also attractive are the pre-installed common community packages used by guild sites, fan sites, and other endeavors by the gaming community. Included are *Nuke, chat programs, guestbooks, and other typical tools used by gamers.

As a test of the system, I set up a guild site for my DAoC guild (an all-necromancer guild based on the Lancelot server): http://www.powerdrain.org. I registered the domain with GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com), and pointed the registration at the DNS specified during the Neosurge setup. Within 24 hours, the site was resolving.

Powerdrain.org is a default, no-frills installation of PHPNuke, as installed by the automated scripts that were provided with the Neosurge account. I spiced up a theme and added some graphics, but it didn't require any tweaking or code editing beyond what was available through the web control panels of the software.

If I had needed to edit the code, I could have gotten to it easily via the Telnet, SSH, or FTP access offered with the Neosurge package.

In all, it took me less than 3 hours to set up and get the site running, once the DNS had resolved. The site is a fully featured guild site: Forums, profile pages, content management, and everything else that comes along with the active PHPNuke community.

Throughout the process, a Neosurge representative was only an email away, ready to answer any and all of my questions. I even got to know him a little bit: Brian is from Chicago and is as much of a gadget geek as I am.

I've got a number of other sites that are currently hosted with other companies. With Neosurge's free setup and free domain parking, it's no cost to me to transfer the sites over to Neosurge and take advantage of the better rates. After my experience with the test site, I'm probably going to be doing this within the month.

<small> Price comparison and space comparison compared to Nocster (http://www.nocster.com) pricelist, AvaHost (http://www.avahost.com) pricelist, and AdGrafix's Hosting.com (http://www.hosting.com) pricelist as of 9/16/2003.</small>