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Secure, Shared Hosting?
skrysakj asks: "I have been searching high and low for a hosting company that can provide SSL encrypted POP3 or IMAP at an affordable price. I'd like something that is shared, not dedicated, to keep costs down. I believe that pghoster.com is a good option, since they offer a personal SSL certificate, a dedicated IP address, and more. Has anyone else found another viable and cost effective solution? Other features, such as SPAM filters, control panels, PHP, MySQL are all 'standard' but I just can't seem to find a company that offers that extra mile for paranoid security freaks such as myself."
I have been searching high and low for a way to advertise my hosting service. I'd like somewhere that is visited by many people in the tech community, but is still free to post my adverts.
I think he's found the ideal place. Shame on the editors for allowing this to get through the net.
For a dedicated server, look at Server Beach for a cheap (about $100/mo) server. The only support you get is rebooting and reinstalling, the ToS are no-nonsense strict, but the box is yours, the price is wonderful, and the bandwidth is mind-blowing.
For a cheap virtual dedicated server, I absolutely cannot speak highly enough of JVDS.com. They use User Mode Linux to host whichever Linux distribution you like. Uptime is excellent, Rus (the guy running it) is very attentive to security, and you can choose from several locations if you have a geographic preference for the server. Most of the machines are hosted with Jipes or Cogent-class bandwidth providers which has sometimes meant brief outages in the past. I haven't had recent problems, but it's been a few minutes every couple of weeks in the past. For $20.00/mo for root, that's easily forgiven.
The down side to both is that neither are paying me for their goddamned licenses, so I'm going to sue all the customers blind as soon as I figure out how to go after JVDS' FreeBSD users too.
~Darl
What about the shared hosting we do is via User Mode Linux we offer root access on a shared host, but everyone is totally seperate at a lot lower cost than dedicated.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I've had great luck with Dreamhost. They offer both SSL POP3 and SSL IMAP. I can't rave enough about their hosting. I did a lot of research into hosting companies, and they consistently came up as one of the top companies in the business.
Link to learn more
Fair disclosure: If you use that link and end up buying from them, I get a small "referral" credit on my own hosting bill. However, I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't think they were absolutely the best.
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
Thumbs up for EV1.NET.
~Darl
I think running it yourself is the way to go. You can get dedicated boxes in the $50 to $60 range.. like at managed.com ...
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'm sure that I am in the minority here but I don't like hosting providers that force a spam filter on me (although the option of using one is a nice feature). I want to receive everything sent to me.
Let me decide what is spam.
(Unless, of course, its own personal 'net connection is compromised, but then it has bigger problems.)
HostNexus offers several shared hosting plans as well as monthly promos in which any monthly promo can be used at any time. I am not sure about the dedicated IP, but you can always ask about it on their forum, which is for socializing as well as customer support. You can also email them for support or use their trouble ticket system. The forum is convenient for most issues. HostNexus uses Plesk and offers CPanel as well. Take a look at their services and feel free to post on the forum. By the way, I am not affiliated with HostNexus other than being one happy customer. Other features, such as SPAM filters, control panels, PHP, MySQL are all 'standard' but I just can't seem to find a company that offers that extra mile for paranoid security freaks such as myself."
If you're religishitty, KILL YOURSELF!
JVDS sounds like it would be a good option for skrysakj, since his main reason for avoiding dedicated hosting is the expense. He assumes that a non-dedicated solution means he has to take what the provider gives him. But a UML provider lets the customer have it both ways -- the cost structure is like a a shared provider, but the level of flexibility is like a dedicated provider. Which should appeal to a lot of people.
On the other hand, cost is not always the crucial issue. Even if you can afford a dedicated box, you may not want the hassle of administering such a system. Even if the provider delivers a nice turnkey solution (as you do), the whole point of having a dedicated system is being able to install your own stuff. But if you do that, you better be prepared, skillwise and timewise, to maintain that stuff. And not all of us are.
I personally would much prefer to have a provider that does all the donkey work for me. The problem with that is the provider always seems to have priorities that are not quite compatible with mine.
The closest I've come to an ideal shared provider is DreamHost, where I currently host my web site. The big points: even low-end accounts get shell access (often an expensive extra, if it's available at all), IMAP (most providers consider POP sufficient), and being CGI friendly (maybe a little too friendly). But:
- They insist that users keep their mailboxes small to avoid overburdening the mail server. This is enforced by a script that moves old messages from the mailbox to a regular file. Makes sense costwise, but it also defeats the main purpose of using IMAP -- having a central mail repository that you can easily access from multiple clients and systems.
- They support SSH and encourage people not to use telnet or ftp. But their web console doesn't include any key generation utility. So you have to do it on the command line. Which, since I don't do it very often, I have to study up on each time. A real pain.
-
They're still on Perl 5.6.1, which has a lot of libraries that aren't taint-safe. They currently have no plans to upgrade to 5.8, citing massive version dependencies in their own software. Less of an issue, as I've learned more about writing secure CGIs, but it bothers me that their Perl is 3 years old.
-
A lot of their docs suck. Plus it's all on SSL pages, which can be darned inconvenient.
I'm sure people can point me to other providers that do better than this on one or more points. I've found a few myself. (Love Google!) But taken as a whole, I've never found anybody who does even as well as Dreamhost. They solve some of the above problems but not others. They charge too much. They don't do IMAP. CGI support is iffy.I'm pretty impressed with SourceForge. But they don't do web hosting except as a part of their overall service.
Oh well.
Try here
We provide VServer based virtual servers and by default we provison them with IMAP and POP SSL-enabled only.
As a side note - I've been using SSL for IMAP since 1997 or so and I cannot believe there still are people using unencrypted POP/IMAP, but there are. If you ever happen to be sitting with a laptop at a corporate meeting, one where everyone plugs into an old ethernet hub in the middle of the table, it is always a lot of fun to fire up a sniffer to get all the passwords from the non-technical people at the table checking their e-mail (probably using Outlook too). Then you blurb out the password in the middle of a conversation and whatch the person's reaction. (Be careful - what may be interpreted as a harmless joke in the late nineties, these days will probably get you fired!)
Has SSL POP3/IMAP email services. Excellent.
Marc