I love me some freeware, this one is cool. It's called HTTrack Website Copier (http://www.httrack.com) and one of it's primary functions is to make copies of websites that can be stored on your local computer.

Why would you want this? In my case, I had several sites I wanted to take down from their current host while I set them up on another host. They were built using the host's proprietary tools (shopping cart included), so I didn't really have easy access to the source files.

If you have ever tried saving a web page from your browser's file menu, then you know it doesn't really save an accurate copy; links are often broken, pictures jacked up, etc. As far as I can tell, HTTrack provides all the options to pull down as much of a site as you want to your local drive, including images, even linked sites, etc. So what you end up with is a true local copy that is browseable and appears identically to its appearance on the day you saved it. Very nice.

Seriously, that's how I feel right now. I have used a lot of hosts over the years, many of them adequate, some not so much. The last two ISP's before I found Arvixe have been unbelievably frustrating. Care to guess? GoDaddy and 1and1.

In my opinion, GoDaddy SAAA-HU-CKS for shared hosting. Hurts, too, because otherwise they are pretty good and I really wanted it to work out. (Yes, it IS like breaking up with a chick.) GoDaddy's support and user interface were above par; it was nice to have everything consolidated. I did a mass migration earlier this year thinking I'd found home. One slight annoyance was that everything takes time. Change your database, wait…add a virtual directory, wait some more…you get the picture. But hey, that's the price you pay for interacting with a bunch of humans when you're a part of a community, right? Besides, isn't instant gratification a bad thing? I deemed the trade off acceptable because of the pro's mentioned above. Then I started wondering why almost every site I had on GoDaddy would frequently take at least 10-15 seconds to come up, sometimes over a minute. Peformance was horrible, trying to do stuff on a My Web Pages Starter Kit (MWSPK) CMS site was infuriating. After too many support calls (and I'm not lying, I was impressed with their support everytime I called, they just couldn't help with this particular issue), I inferred their servers are maxed out for their shared hosting, and they're not planning on doing anything about it. My empirical evidence? They said there wasn't a problem; diagnostics showed those servers were running fine, blah blah blah blah. But I had several different sites on several different servers, some under a completely different account number. They all sucked ass on GoDaddy's shared hosting but performed just fine on every other host I tried. I finally gave up with technical support and started looking for alternatives. Enter 1and1.

Project Peekaboo Site, took 10-60 seconds to load on GoDaddy, check it out on Arvixe…

I don't even know how 1and1 can purport to provide ASP.NET hosting. Their prices and features are attractive. It stops about there. I setup a couple hosting accounts and was surprised to find a few things right out of the gate. 1 – Only access to SQL Server is via their 3rd party tool, no matter how slick that little tool might be, there's no excuse for not allowing access through SQL Server Management Studio. See the connection? SQL Server Management Studio and a SQL Server database. Seems like they should go together, right? That's what I thought, too. Next big show stopper? No virtual directories. "What?!?!", you say? "How am I supposed to have my blog running at www.mydomain.com/myshittyblog when I can't create a virtual directory?" That's what I said. Well, I suppose I could work it out with subdomains…let me think. That was strike 2. I don't even remember what strike 3 was, but it was a big one (no pun intended). 1and1, YOU SUCK, improve your services before you say you provide ASP.NET/SQL Server hosting. Thanks for wasting a bunch of my time. (Oh, and I remember a few other things, no control over the default page at your root, lots of points where they don't want to give you any control, security concerns. Hey, I appreciate a host who cares about security, but they were ridiculous.)

MWSPK Site, moved to Arvixe late November. So slow at GoDaddy the CMS features were almost unuseable. Same exact site in Arvixe is fast.

Feeling desperate, without any fresh recommendations, I queried "best asp.net shared hosting" or something like that and came across Arvixe. Just like a rebound relationship, we became intimate quickly and it moved fast. Everything looked good on paper, unlimited this, unlimited that, unlimited sql 2008 with remote access, what the hell. For 5.00 a month (two-year committment, 8.00 a month for month to month) I didn't have much to lose at that price (except more time) so I went for it. It's hard to describe the elation that followed. Moving a site over went smoothly. Their interface is intuitive and changes are instantaneous. I won't spend a lot of time on this, but suffice it to say EVERYTHING I needed to do to set up my sites (all asp.net with virtual domains and sql server backends) was a breeze. I was repeatedly thinking, "wow, they thought of everything". Avrixe gets it. They understand their ASP.NET/IIS/SQL users. Their personal class pro and business class pro accounts allow unlimited web sites. Non-pro allow 6. That's amazing, no need to go anywhere else. I can put all my sites under one account, no need for more. The only negatives I can report (and they are slight) are that their help documentation is a little lacking (made up for by great chat/phone/email support) and I can't even remember the second one at the moment. Best part, I'm on their cheapest asp hosting account (Personal Class) and performance is awesome, site comes right up every time. None of my sites are generating lots of hits, but based on experience I'm confident they can take care of my needs going forward. It's a rebound that looks like it's going to work out.

Arvixe, best little ASP.NET shared host in the world…