IBBoard

From May 2006 until 2015, IBBoard.co.uk and all other websites that I own and run (including Skins @ Hive World Terra, WarFoundry and BDStrike.co.uk) were all hosted with a company called A Small Orange. The following is a brief description of the hosting that we had with A Small Orange.

As of 2015 we moved away from ASO to UK-based providers. ASO have since been acquired and seem to have changed significantly. This information is here as a historical record.

Hosting at A Small Orange

The most important thing when we started was that A Small Orange didn't oversell their servers. Overselling is a practice that many hosts engage in and it involves selling more than you can provide in the hopes that no-one ever tries to use everything they bought. A good indicator is normally "too good to be true" pricing, or "unlimited" packages. These will always have hidden limits in the terms of service. A Small Orange gave more realistic (but still generous enough) packages at sensible prices and left enough space on their servers for their customers to expand, so you always got a fast and responsive server.

While my time at A Small Orange wasn't been entirely perfect, I've run websites for long enough to know that no shared host is entirely perfect. Although the host can't guarantee a perfectly smooth server - you're always at the mercy of other customers and their rogue scripts - the area where A Small Orange excelled was tech support.

Where as my previous host (Micfo) left me with a terrible experience, if there is even a slight problem on the ASO servers then I knew I could contact the Tech Support and get a quick, accurate and complete response. Even a minor enquiry was normally responded to quickly and it was rare that I waited over an hour for a response. Micfo, on the other hand, removed a half-hour response guarantee to "improve" their tech support, which just resulted in the same canned response and two hour waits or longer.

Discounts and affiliates

Initially, ASO didn't have an affiliate scheme. They didn't want people spamming their company everywhere for the money, and instead took a natural approach to growth. Eventually they introduced discount codes and then an affiliate scheme, which paid for a reasonable amount of our hosting. Over time, though, the payments got larger as ASO took a more conventional approach to hosting and customer acquisition. Due to changes in US and UK law, we eventually left the scheme and moved to UK-based hosts.