Bargain Blog now has a new domain under a new hosting provider. Woohoo!

New Domain

First of all, I think it is no longer appropriate to attach Bargain Blog to FOCUSer.net, which hosts individual blogsites for FOCUS members. Thus I bought a name — ozbargainblog.com — from NameCheap (which is my current favourite registrar). Here we are, a new domain.

New Host

The ‘oz’ in the domain stands for Australia, as Bargain Blog is really targeting the Aussies. Over the past few days I have also been trying to get my home server back into shape so I can host this site in Australia as well. Well, that did not work out. My home server is slow (7 year old 450Mhz Pentium III), and I might need to turn it on and off once a while to fix up various issues. The obvious choice for me now is — find a cheap Aussie host.

Then comes Jumba and their very well priced AU personal hosting.

I have previously looked at their free US-based hosting last year. It was a nice free hosting plan backed by a reputable company, no string attached. Jumba then released their AU free hosting plan this month, which would have provided sufficient storage and bandwidth for this blog. However just to be on the same side I decided to join their AU-P2 plan with 500Mb space and 5Gb monthly traffic for merely $2.95 per month (pay annually) with free setup.

And the best thing is, this website is only about 5 hops away from my home ADSL connection, with ping time of 11ms average. It just feels like working on a local site.

Jumba uses cPanel X, and provides many tools to get newbie web masters started, though it feels like many separated products glued together than an integrated product. Personally I still prefer DreamHost‘s own control panel. However I think I’ll spend little time in web-based control panels. Jumba also provides SSH access on request, and you’ll get shell in a jailed environment. Just feel like home again :)

So, new domain, new host. Let the bargain hunting continues.