A couple of days ago I had the deniable pleasure to look through the hosting features of one of Austria’s most commonly used hosting companies: World4You. I had to deal with one of their offerings a couple of years ago and their backend immediate made me remember site management interfaces around the turn of the century.
This time, another blast from the past hit me right in the face: FTP. Yes, they seem to only allow you to transfer files from and to their server using , old FTP. If you look through their various hosting plans, you will notice that this amazing “feature” (i.e. limitation) is not only available for their lowest priced tier (at € 4.90 per month) but also for their mid-level plan at € 6.90. If you want to have modern transfer methods (i.e. SFTP/SSH) you have to shell out at least € 14.90 per month.
Unless you’re really deep into nostalgia please pick uberspace.de or something similar instead! For € 5 you get pretty much everything you will probably ever need but without a colourful UI. Instead, you will have to spend a day or two learning your way around a terminal shell. While this might sound awful, if you want to run your site yourself, this is the way to go. If you don’t want to run your site yourself, pick a managed service like wordpress.com. Just please get away from hosts that want to sell you the same tech as if it’s 1999.
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂