Rourke on Technology

You would be hard-pressed to find negative comments or blog posts about pair’s shared hosting. Most people report that pair’s service is expensive, but worh the price. I was a user of said service for about six months, and agree with that sentiment.

The least expensive plan that allows you to host a dynamic site is $17.95/month. That price puts pair among the more expensive shared hosting providers out there. You don’t get anything fancy for that, but you can host as many sites as you want. A $5 setup fee is charged whenever you add new domains to your account. There’s no extra recurring charge if you share a single IP address across all of your domains, and only an additional $1/month for each extra dedicated IP. this is the best option I’ve come across if you need an IP address for each domain you host.

pair is as reliable as people claim. During the three months ending 4/9/2007 my test Wordpress site experienced only 1h15m of downtime — that’s 99.84% uptime. Even better, the site was incredibly responsive. Most loads of the main page clocked in at under 500ms. If you look at the websitepulse.com graphs below, you’ll see that the page load performance was very stable, with almost no spikes or variations.

Over the course of the months that followed my formal test, page loads did slow down a bit as more users were added to my shared host. Things didn’t slow horribly, though, and things appear to remain stable at a speed around 700ms to load my (wp-cached) main page.

I left pair because of a single major incident. My website was inaccessible from my apartment for over 72 hours. I contacted both RCN (my cable modem provider) and pair, but they both pointed the other way. I was able to access pair.com from home and I was able to get to my website from work, but I don’t know who else might have been unable to reach the site.

From the standpoint of usability, pair is a good-but-not-great host. You can do most everything you need, but some things require that a little extra work. For example, scripts run as www/nobody by default. You can switch this so your scripts run as your login user, but requires mucking with some text files. Support is extremely helpful, but seems to take roughly a day to answer every request.

NOTE: Pair recently created the pairLite offering, which charges roughly $9.99/month for dynamic sites and claims to offer the same “PAIR” speed and reliability with lower bandwidth and storage limits. This service opened up as I left pair and I have no way of knowing whether the user to host density is similar to traditional PAIR hosting. Further, there’s no way to know if responsiveness to problems or failures will be as good since they’re marketing this offering to “hobbyists.”