Slashdot Mirror
Finding Trustworthy Webhosting Reviews?
Nylisk asks: "I've been searching for a new webhost for my site and upcoming sites. While searching for a host I find many webhost review sites that feel fake. They are primitive and limit themselves to a small amount of hosts to examine. They will display any where to around 30 hosts to 'review' but mostly I find sites that review only 5 or 6 hosts. When you look further you find no community on the site to provide further comment on those reviews. The site is done by a single publisher with minimal information, and most of it looks like an advertisement. There are only email links and basic submissions boxes. I was going to post example links, but why give them the publicity?
The more I snoop, the more webhosts I find that are connected. I can't say I am surprised, but to be honest its tough not to find these results from search engines. I can't seem to find anything real. Are there any websites run by a community of members who review webhosts?"
I think classic webhosting is thing of a past. Recently I almost exclusively use dedicated servers or virtual servers. You can get one quite cheap like $20/mo. (3GB space/50GB transfer) - what you get is dedicated Linux machine (or vserver that looks and feels like dedicated machine) on which you install your distro of choice, get root on it and do whatever you wish. Also there are offers of hosting dedicated to several popular solutions - like Drupal, eZ Publish, Mambo, Zen Cart etc. - they specialize in those apps and you get installation of these with support etc. - I think that is better aproach than simply just to get an account on server and put files via FTP on it - I mean you got more in control.
I think this is the future. First of all take a look at linode.com - you will get your *own* server with full access to everything. No more waiting for ISP admin to fix that one httpd option or some permissions.
You can usually find a number of recommendations by freelancers such as myself for hosting suggestions.
A Small Orange is really popular right now among devs. I'm setting a client up with them, myself. They apparently have superb service and reliability. Another popular one is Dreamhost. I'll be switching over to them in 6-9 months, more than likely.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
well, in the past 6 months i've had 2 different hosts, and i have (almost) nothing but good things to say about each.
the first host i went with was dailyrazor. they provide you with a private JVM for about $20 a month, give you 10 mysql/postgresql database, a decent amount of space, unlimited subdomains, bladiblah.
good: they have excellent support. i had trouble getting hibernate working, and they were actually googling with me trying to find out what was causing my problem (the database connections would get severred it seemed and wouldn't reestablish themselves; it eventually turned out to be that hibernate's connection pooling capabilities are crap and you need to use something like c3p0).
bad: they don't support RoR. at all. i emailed them and asked them to install ruby, and they had no problem doing it. they didn't want to install rails, and said i would have to do that myself. i ended up installing rails to my home directory and using that to generate applications, and then put them in my www directory and -bam- they worked. for some reason the host didn't like this, though, and he would chown my ruby executable to root:root, which broke my application. after they did this twice, with no warning either time, and no explanation that followed their actions, i decided it was time to find a new host.
now i'm with asmallorange and, though their java support isn't nearly as good as dailyrazor's (they use resin instead of tomcat, which is really only a problem for me because i don't know resin at all), they have excellent support for rails and fastcgi. i rewrote my weblog in rails because it was easier to do that than to figure out how to change my java-weblog to work with resin.
anyways, i'd recommend asmallorange because they're cheap, have lots of capabilities (php, rails, java, perl), don't put arbitrary limits on things (unlimited mysql databases, subdomains, etc), and have pretty good support 24/7. their support isn't as good as dailyrazor's, but it's pretty close.
feel free to email me (you can go to my website and use the email) if you have any questions about either of these hosts.
hope that helps!
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
I switched to nearlyfreespeech a couple months ago. Here's what I have to say about them.
Software Wars
I know it sounds like a /. cliche, a guy on slashdot saying you should see who supports open source, and go with that provider. But that's what I'm going to say.
Not so much because they support open source, but more because if an OSS project is hosted there, it's probably there because of the quality, not just because of the sponsorship. OSS projects are run by savvy people who know how to not stay stuck on a bad host.
If you look around at where various respected OSS sites are hosted, a few big names keep popping up. pair.com and he.net, for example. No referral links here.
But do your own research. I could not recommend the sites I use (the above two) to you without knowing your needs. If you need hand holding, go with someone else. If you want a nice clean toolbox, they are OK. If you want a company that answers the phone with a human on the third ring 24x7, he.net is good, if a little stingy with the disk space and transfer allocation.
Not really a review site but a good listing of personal colo sites. Personal Co-location Registry