one of the more prevalent questions that come up regarding coldfusion is "where can i find a good cheap host"?

since "good" is a subjective term... i'm going to focus on "cheap" (or as i like to say... "inexpensive" since cheap sounds so... well, cheap).

a little under a year ago i'd heard about hostingatoz when someone inquired about them on the sitepoint coldfusion forums.  i was looking for a cheap inexpensive host since i just wanted to throw up a personal site.  downtime wasn't really too much of an issue (as long as it wasn't too frequent) since this wasn't a commercial site.  i don't get a lot of traffic, so even $15-$20 a month was a bit hard to justify.  but the problem was i wanted coldfusion.  i wanted sql server.  these are tools that i use daily, and i wanted to use them to build my personal site.  but coldfusion hosting (especially cfmx 7) with ms sql server generally has a relatively significant price tag attached.

so i checked out the prices on the various coldfusion plans at hostingatoz.  their most expensive package was $65 a year (that's a year... not a month), and included the following:

• coldfusion mx 7 (enterprise)
• microsoft sql server 2005
• unlimited subdomains
• HELM control panel

that all sounded pretty good to me.  my next concern was which tags/functions are disabled.  i mean, the price is right so far... but it's mostly useless if i can't use createObject().  turns out that upon request, they'll create you your own sandbox.  within the sandbox, only <cfexecute> and <cfregistry> are disabled as far as tags go, and only getProfileString() and setProfileString() are disabled as far as functions go.

long story short (or at least less long)... i ended up signing up.  i figured for $65, how bad could it be?  and the short answer is that, in my opinion, it's been well worth $65 a year.

has there been downtime?  yes.  it happens on any shared server.  but i've found that for the most part, support has been responsive (i know there are some other hostingatoz customers who have had different experiences there tho...). 

the big question is "how much downtime"?  honestly, i don't know.  i've mainly used my domain at hostingatoz to redirect to this blog.  http://charlie.griefer.com simply redirects here.  but i know that people are curious about the amount of downtime (and actually, so am i), so i set up a site monitor using http://www.siteuptime.com.  if you're curious, keep an eye on http://www.siteuptime.com/statistics.php?Id=54549&&UserId=69175.  it's only been running for 2 days as of this writing (pings the domain every half hour), but there's been no downtime yet, and the average response time has been roughly a half a second.

i should point out that i don't have any vested interest in the company.  i don't even participate in their affiliate program (i had considered it at one point, but given that their cheapest entry point into cfmx hosting with sql server is $35 a year... i realized i'd have to refer several million folks before it became worthwhile).  my only interest in letting people know about them is to make people aware that there are inexpensive options for coldfusion hosting.  if you're just looking for a place to put up a personal site... or to take coldfusion for a test drive and have a public playground... $35 a year gets you going.

i should further point out that they were very happy to offer free hosting for the inland empire coldfusion user's group (which is still in the process of taking off... but that's a story for another time). i appreciate the fact that they are willing to help support the coldfusion community itself.

any questions, feel free to leave a comment or ping me directly and i'll answer to the best of my ability :)