History
BakaElite is my own online sanctuary, where my personal ponderings and creative works can flow free. My interest in webdesign, which culminated into this domain, started with the whole Xanga craze back in seventh grade, back in 2000. For a while, I was just happy that I had my own page to blog, and I began learning how to customize it from googling design tips and learning about html, css, and javascript. Initially, I just saved wallpaper from image galleries and cropped it in MS Paint. My friend gave me his Photoshop 5.0 cd, and I began making my first graphics. They were pretty bad, and my coding was a mess, but I started improving as my interest became a passion.
I was content for a while just having a blog. I used Geocities as a hotlink site for layout and css files, and Photobucket for my images. However, it was getting too much having so many different accounts to manage everything, and I realized having a blog page wasn’t enough. I started looking around for a free host. I was smart enough to register at FWS.net and browse other hosting directories to compare what hosts would be best. Thus I never had to deal with all the ads from Angelfire or the like. I went through a number of hosts, too many to list. Most either died because the owner couldn’t pay for his site, or they were putting up big ads. Some did not allow PHP and others did not have MySQL. It wasn’t until I went to Cybertoad Networks (was known as Clubhost, but Clubhost now holds their paid accounts, and Cybertoads hold the free sites) that I found a reliable, free site. I was given more space and bandwidth than most paid sites gave at the time, and I was hosted on fast servers that delivered exceptional loading and uptime. However, being on a free site meant certain restrictions that I did not want, and I wanted to have more control. That’s when I began playing with the idea of a paid service.
I bought the domain from Dreamhost when a friend asked if I wanted to split the bill for a web host. Dreamhost provided more than enough space for the both of us, with a very reasonable price. At first it was great, but months into being hosted I began to notice the sluggish loading times of my site. You know something is wrong when you’re on a cable connection and it takes twenty seconds to open your index page. I realized that Dreamhost’s MySQL servers were the cause. Because they were separated from the hosting server, it took a very long time for my site to load because it depended a lot on MySQL queries. In addition, Dreamhost is way too popular for its own good, and several of its service are clogged up with too many users. One was lucky if his account was on a non-cluttered server. I realized my site couldn’t grow if it would continue to keep getting slower and slower. However I left it alone for a while, going into an unannounced hiatus as I focused on other aspects of my life. It wasn’t until I graduated out of high school that I decided to breathe back some life in my poor site.
That’s when I decided to search for a new host, knowing that space and bandwidth aren’t the only criteria when looking. I read reviews about load times from each host, and settled on AN-Hosting. While my space and bandwidth are only half of what Dreamhost offers, it is more than enough. Also, its control panel is much easier to use because its the standard cPanel. Most importantly, my site loads at a much more reasonable rate. Currently, I’m quite happy with my choice and now I can focus on what is important: the growth of my site.