When I started working for myself I made a conscious decision to trust my gut. If it was the opposite of what other people were doing but my gut gave approval, then I’d do it.

For the most part that’s worked out great. I love owning a profitable business. All my options are open and that’s because I built it without investors or debt. Around here everyone is taking investment, going into debt, or building products with no revenue. Not all of those people end up happy.

One gut decision that didn’t turn out well was choosing a hosting company for CrowdVine. Everyone told me to go with ServerBeach but I chased some minor cost savings at CalPop and ServerAxis.

CalPop was awful the first month with lots of downtime. Lately they’ve just been a little disorganized but basically functional. I still host RateMyDanceMoves there but couldn’t trust them for professional work. Then I tried ServerAxis because they had a cheap VPS with 4GB of RAM and the underlying server was on RAID giving my data an extra dose of protection. A month later their hard drives crashed and they lost everything (I only lost a little bit of work). It took me five emails to get the complete story. Thankfully I never had a chance to host CrowdVine there.

Now CrowdVine is hosted with ServerBeach. I love them. I wish I’d made this decision a year ago. (BTW, you save $100 and I get $250 if you sign up with this code: U7S59BJ6R3)

Here’s the difference between the two decisions. A lot of people complain about taking investment or about dealing with debt. I haven’t heard anyone complain about ServerBeach. From now on I resolve to take glowing recommendations more seriously, even if my gut says otherwise.