Slashdot Mirror
Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company?
v1x writes "I have had an account with my current web hosting company for a few years, with 3 domains being hosted there (using Linux/PHP/MySQL). Recently, all three of these websites stopped functioning, and upon checking the site, all my directory structures were intact, whereas all of the files were gone. Upon contacting their technical support, I was given the run-around, and later informed by one of their administrators that none of the files could be restored. Needless to say that I am looking for a different web hosting company at this point, but I would like to make a more informed choice than I did with the current company. I have read a similar Slashdot article (from 2005) on the topic, but the questions posed there were slightly different."
Reader mrstrano has a similar question: "I am developing a web application and, after registering the domain, I am now looking for a suitable web hosting provider.
It should be cheap enough so I can start small, but should allow me to scale up if the web site is successful (as I hope).
The idea is simple enough so I do not need other investors to implement it. This also means that I don't have a lot of money to put on it
at the moment.
Users of the website will post their pictures (no, it's not going to be a porn website), so scalability might be an issue even with a moderately high
number of users.
I would like to find a good web hosting provider from day one, so I don't have to go through the pain of a data migration.
Which web host would you choose?"
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases, email accounts, FTP accounts - multiple user accounts I can lock down to one domain or folder for these because I might want to job out management for a domain or subdomain. Because I never know today what I'm going to be using it for, and this is a long term relationship that's challenging to get out of.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
I like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them but they've been making me happy for quite a while.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're going to run a *chan site..
100X better than simply web hosting... Linode
I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.
Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
I currently use 2 hosting companies for various things:
1st - BlueHost.com
I have the best things to say about BlueHost.com
No affiliation, other than very happy with the service and support.
2nd - Tech.coop
Unlimited!
The last one I want to mention is:
PriorityColo.com
http://prioritycolo.com/
Why? Because they have the balls to tell "big shot lawyer companies" to STFU when they send shaky take-down notices.
Hope that helps! =)
It probably doesn't apply to either of your projects, but if you're starting from scratch, Google App Engine might be a good candidate. Advantages: Starts out free, and it's by Google, so yes, it scales. When you have to start paying, it's pay-as-you-go like Amazon, but only for the cycles you actually use, since it's an entirely managed solution.
Like I said -- probably doesn't apply. It won't run PHP (that I know of), and mrstrano didn't specify what his shiny new app is being developed in. But if it's early enough, and if you're willing to trust Google...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I've moved around Web hosts a few times for similar reasons, most of which amount to general incompetence on the part of the hosts. Often the host would start out fine, seem great, and then after a while the outages, increased latency, and other problems would mount. By the time I found myself getting in touch with the host's tech support regularly, I would realize how bad it really was. Eventually I felt I had no choice but to go elsewhere, and I was back in the same boat as before. I've come to believe that's just life when you're not willing to pay a lot for Web hosting.
Breakfast served all day!
...so I use Hosting Matters. Been using them for years, they're cheap, provide MySQL and cpanel access, sftp, and ssh (if you ask). Their rates are reasonable, and -- bonus -- every time I've filed a help ticket, I've gotten a response in hours*, and it's always been knowledgeable.
*Once it took 12 hours (essentially overnight) and the support rep apologized for taking so long.
Personally, I have to look for a hosting company with active public forums and public conversations between users and the staff. This makes all of the difference in the world. You don't want a company that is trying to hide from you. The more public communication and discussion the better. IRC is always a plus. Other key points: Good contact information, good references on the web... and a good web site. After all a hosting company should be web savvy enough to not be using tables and HTML 4 frames.
That's it.
I've hosted PHP/MySQL based sites on godaddy.com, but found their admin interface (full of annoying flashy ads) too cumbersome. I shifted over to webhostingpad.com and love their hosting controls.
I have a very large blog, it's #2 on Google search for my niche. I used to use a small company that "was just starting" so their prices were great. That comapny, HostingZoom & ResellerZoom changed their ToS and stabbed me in the back. I ran to a hosting company that was run by a guy in the next city over who offered me a great price too and since he didn't mind what I was blogging about, and it was a man band, I knew it would never changed.
Whats more is whenever I had a question he was available on the phone, online, or via e-mail and never seemed to take a break. Like me he was up overnight and knew hosting distro's of Linux better then I did. I highly suggest UberHost.net
You'll never call somebody in Tech Support then them have to ask their "supervisor" and then never to call you back again. Your problem will be resolved then, and unlike other hosting companies, the Tech your talking to has Root access to all his own servers. He has a great Managed Dedicated Server program too!
I have since had to move on to a wholesale bandwidth provider becuase 2000 GB of bandwidth was just not enough for me anymore, but I'll always remember how helpful Uberhost.net was.
I have been VERY pleased with Webfaction. They are basically a bunch of geeks that make web hosting a pleasure for other geeks. Their servers have all the latest tools, dev packages, and they have an automated application install for over 20 different applications (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc etc). Their support system is fast and competent, and I've learned a ton on their community forums.
If they don't have a particular app that you want, it's not that difficult to download and install it yourself.
http://www.webfaction.com/
If you DO decide to join, don't be afraid to use me as your referrer: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=mantic
If all else fails, add another if.
I've been using virtual private servers with Slicehost for a couple years now and absolutely love them.
Because they have just gone down for the last 24 hours without any real notice as to why and are going to be down for the next 12.
LowEndBox is a great website that compares low-end virtual private server providers.
Your hosting company must offer 24x 7 telephone support. If they do not, go elsewhere.
They must offer full access via SSH. Obviously PHP, MySQL, unlimited email accounts and as much bandwith as possible is also required.
I'd also recommend you register your domain names with a registrar unrelated to your hosting provider, so you can quickly and easily swap hosts.
I use godaddy for domain names, and liquidweb for hosting. Both are large enough not to disappear overnight, and are very responsive to queries.
Great Windows SFTP Server!
Good thing you had back ups. Right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I have had a good experience with DreamHost. Their support is snappy and helpful, and the people who work there seem generally kind. They have a fine set of dreamhost-specific howtos maintained on their wiki, and a powerful but easy to use panel for administration.
They run linux boxes with the full complement of command line tools (with compilers and everything!), and the only restriction is no persistent processes. If you want to do that, you can buy their pricier private server option which gives you your own private server instance.
They have some great terms of use (as far as storage and bandwidth are concerned), and their prices are reasonable. I got a great deal a while back on two years of hosting, and now I'm hooked on the service.
Because I can't help it.
1. Keep a backup of your own files, never trust that your provider has backups. I hear about this happening every day, and it annoys me that you leave such an important responsibility to your host.
Now to the real topic,
1. Look for a host that is willing to work with you. Flexibility is useful later on.
2. Ignore SLA (Service Level Agreements) in general they give you a months fees back, which honestly is nothing compared to the damage you proboly incurred if you're willing to jump through the hoops to get it.
3. Support Support Support. Give your host a try, if they don't respond quickly, then they don't need your business.
4. Look into their history. I once put a server in a datacenter who said "We havn't had a power outage since 1995 unplanned or otherwise" who was so confident in their contractors that they let them flip the transfer switch during business hours instead of waiting for the outage period, which failed and powered the entire datacenter down. They immedaitely threw back to the switch, and quickly blew every breaker in the datacenter. Bad experience.
5. Plan for Failure, Always.
Good support. It seems obvious to me, but anyway....
I had two Movable Type sites hosted at two different companies At the first one suddenly my PHP includes broke. I went back and forth with them for a week with them denying any knowledge or problems, and ended up having to rewrite the includes. No matter how many times I explained to them that I'd made no changes, the answer was the same...
A couple of months later the same thing happened at the second one. Five minutes after emailing support they told me the default on allow_url_include had changed, and they reactivated it for my install.
The difference was astonishing. A one week argument versus a five minute fix.
(Yes, I generally try to avoid URL Includes these days, though I still like them because they make code portable..)
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Hoo boy, the stories I could tell. Actually, I can't, because the hosting provider threatened to sue us if we named them publicly.
OK, first, if there's more than a couple of servers involved, and your business depends on it, use two or more different providers. If you only have one provider, it puts them in a position to screw you. When we terminated our relationship with our provider, they held our data hostage until we paid them an additional $15,000 to put our servers on line again long enough for us to copy our data.
Which brings us to: DO YOUR OWN BACKUPS. Service providers either don't do them, or they don't do them right. The world is full of horror stories of customers paying the data center extra for backups, and then finding the backups were never actually done. And even if they do do backups, they maintain control of them, which puts them in a good position to extort you.
Remember, the practice of holding your data hostage goes back a long way. Happened to my father's company back in the 70's mainframe days. It still happens.
Most important of all: have a professional go over your data center contract with a fine-tooth comb. The default contract they'll give you (or at least the one they gave us) is highly abusive.
For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling. There is no early termination. If you so much as upgrade a single disk drive, the contract is automatically renewed for another 18 months.
Here's a doozy: our contract specified that if a server went down, they would either fix or replace it within two hours of determining the problem. The catch: they merely have to say that they haven't determined the problem yet, and then they don't have to replace anything. Our main server was kept off-line for a month this way.
1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.
2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/ http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)
3. I haven't found a good unmanaged dedicated host yet, though I hear http://www.softlayer.com/ is great. If you want a managed dedicated host, you can't go wrong with http://www.rackspace.com/ .
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
No matter which provider you choose, never depend on them for backups. Keep your originals locally and copy them to the webserver. Rsync is a great, effortless tool for this kind of synchronization. If you're maintaining SQL databases on the webserver, back them up at least daily with cron and download the backups. A few simple scripts will work wonders for your protection and your sanity.
I like slicehost for a number of reasons, but you have to be willing to use a command line because there is no GUI unless you install one (because you're getting a virtual server with full root access).
Though they do not offer cpanel or anything like that, they do have a minimal admin panel that you can use to configure DNS, MX and set up your server (as well as automate backups, which start at like 5 a month or so).
For 20 a month, you get a 256mb ram virtual slice and around a dozen linux distros you can select from with their admin panel for the slice. If you dont like any of the ones they provide (very unlikely) you can opt to install your own with a set of directions they provide on their wiki (the wiki is also very helpful when setting up your server for whatever you might want to do).
Whenever I need help with a server issue, they email fairly quick (same day) or they have a chat room with people who actually speak English as their first language (or know it well enough you would assume they do). Generally, the people helping you are the same ones who maintain their website or their servers as well, not outsourced help.
Some dont like that they dont have any sort of guaranteed uptime, but eh, I've never really had any servers I have go down for more than an hour or so and it's generally sometime at night if they do. The downtime is generally planned or even if its an emergency, they notify with enough time you can migrate files to another server.
For 20 a month and the freedom of having full server access to install what you want, I'd gladly pay. I still loath when I have some clients who only want to pay 3-5 or whatever a month at some lame shared hosting site and have to deal with cpanel or whatever else, because once you've used the command line and had full control on a remote server it's hard to go back to the panel interface, lol.
I've got a HostGator, dedicated server in Germany and a 1and1 developer account (for a few years now). I'm in the process of moving them all into VPS at slicehost.com. You can start the slices out cheap and work your way up to multiple slices with backnet and public interfaces. So if you need to grow you can do a load balancer on your primary IP and then have other slices doing the work. Their admin tools are pretty easy to deal with too. This option is best if you aren't afraid to administrate your own box though. They have Chat support, forums, articles etc to help people out who are fairly new to system administration with optional backup for your slices.
Midget Tosser
Things to avoid tend to be better indicators than things to go for. I'd avoid:
* Companies that aren't open about issues. If there isn't a public forum, status RSS feed, status twitter account, etc. BAD NEWS
* Companies that offer unlimited anything. By definition, unlimited means that they are overselling and while things may be great now, they'll suffer in the long run
* Linux hosts that don't give you SSH access. CPanel/Fantastico/Whatever do plenty of things, but there is no substitute for having shell access
* Anything at all that makes you feel funny. There are _plenty_ of options out there and if something doesn't feel right, you're better off going somewhere else.
* Companies that won't respond to you personally for pre-sales questions. When I was looking for colo space, this turned out to be the most important factor. The better they communicate with you before they have any of your money, the better off things will be in the long run.
* Anything that seems to be too good to be true. i.e. If you have a need for a lot of disk/bandwidth/cpu, and "unlimited" is $5/month, BAD NEWS
I run ithought dot org and host a reasonable number of sites, and try to adhere to all of the above. One thing you won't be able to find out easily with hosts is something I do: I won't accept customers that seem like they aren't a fit for the hardware I have. Shared hosting is what it is and if a customer is going to drive up the load on servers such that it affects other customers, but doesn't want to pay for dedicated hardware or a VM, their actions shouldn't hurt other shared hosting customers that are only using a very small amount of resources.
Most of the cloud stuff is plenty nice if you want to manage it (S3, SliceHost, etc) but don't underestimate what is involved with keeping server OSs up to date, tuned, and monitored. If you're core competency isn't tweaking server software you should let someone else worry about that for you until it makes sense for you to hire an Operations person/team.
Domain names...make sure you can edit TTL's on the domain records. This way when you point the domain records to other resources you can undo mistakes quickly. Don't host the domain name at the host. Generally a bad practice. Host...I definitely recommend using a Linux server solution. Windows has problems with both security and file upload permissions depending on how good or bad the admin is. I have used quite a few LAMP hosts. LiquidWeb.com has been best so far. They say that they offer "legendary support" and I have found that to be true. Don't worry about moving the site later...it's not as big a deal as it seems. You will never find a host that offers everything. Find a package that fits for where you are now and move when you need to. Use strong passwords and change them every few months...one year tops. There have been exploits lately that take advantage of stupid passwords and passwords that have not been changed. Change the password when you start the account. Usually the pw is transmitted in a plain text email. Make sure you can install a SSL cert. You will likely want to have a backend that is password protected and secure. You may also want to have secure front end pages. Make sure you have control over backups of your site. You will likely NOT want to download the backups through your ISP connection...too slow. If you can do a backup from one computer to another at your host it will move quickly. I would personally stay away from the cloud. This is based on a bad experience with Media Temple. There may be some good cloud servers out there but I get a sense that they are generally a tad slow. I have more to say but that's all I should put here.
Amazon has some great cloud services. http://aws.amazon.com/products/ They are incredibly cheap (no minimum costs), and scale instantly.
I usually check out webhostingtalk.com to find reviews of web hosts, offers, and more. I would definitely suggest you check them out. I personally chose mddhosting.com for my website.
Some other things to keep in mind: you get what you pay for... So unlimited of something means they are skimping elseware. Also remember to always keep your own backups. Even if your host does keep them, which they probably don't, it is a pain to get files restored for you. It also is nice to be able to leave without begging for your files.
As for custom infrastructure and scaling... Chances are that most hosts put you on a typical shared cpanel box and anything special is going to require you to get a VPS or dedi server and set it up and manage everything yourself. It just isn't realistic to add features or special software for a single user. And that doesn't even get into having to support this new stuff, or deal with the security implications.
Scott Swezey
From experience I have learned even a great webhost can go downhill quickly. I was orignally with Globat for a number of years without issues then they started doing things like signing you up for addons that charged you more money if you did not opt out. Their customer support was worthless and barely could speak english. The worst was when I tried to cancel my subscription. They had a dedicated cancellation phone line only open for certain hours and when I called on three occations it was not staffed! After calling and letting it ring for half an hour someone finally picked up but by then my auto-renew charged me for another month. After two months of them saying I would get a refund I called my credit card and had them issue a charge back. For a few years now I have been with Hostgator but I have also heard good things about Bluehost as well.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
Yes, it's buzzworthy, but once you get the hang of Heroku for Ruby code, you'll never want to futz with root access on a server again.
On Heroku, you can get a Sinatra or Rails app *running in minutes* to test it out, and your code will work just fine on any VPS if you decide you don't like Heroku. You push code to the platform with Git, they store it in the cloud, and run it behind a fully managed webserver with a HTTP cache, a Postgres database, Memcache, and more goodies. The idea is to let the experts manage the iron and the cutting-edge and best practice services, so you can focus on your product and code. Also, it's free to use for simple apps, and offers really good granularity in pricing so you only pay for what you use.
Similarly, there's Google App Engine for Python. It's a great product but not as compelling to play around with since you need to learn new tricks since it's not a conventional POSIX stack, only uses BigTable for a database, etc. Basically the more of GAE you use, the less ability to run your code elsewhere in the future.
I've had a Linux server here at the house for upwards of 6 years, using DynDNS for a free name and a couple paid ones. Obvious potential issues off the top of my head:
How can they sue you if you name them publicly? Sounds like a scare tactic to me.
Bluehost is pretty awesome.
http://www.bluehost.com/track/testedbygeeks (Yes - that's my affiliate link)
Unlimited storage, transfer, and hosting of domains on one account. 100 mysql databases, etc. Great customer service that is competent and based in the US.
Pretty hard to beat at 6.95 per month.
Rarely do I go negative on the Internet. Things said on the internet stick with you forever, but maybe just a warning.
The company 1 and 1 seems to be using a collection agency to leverage money out of previous customers. While they may not be breaking any laws, but they are definitely taking advantage of their customers.
Google: "1 and 1" nco
There are pages of people who have fallen victim to this company.
A good narrative that describes almost exactly what happened to me...
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/1-amp-1-internet-inc-c161434.html
Sorry to post anonymously, I'm not really a coward, but with a company like this, you just cannot be too careful.
@Second question - if you expect to have to scale up, I'd start with at least a VPS and move up to a (managed) dedicated server when the time comes. Providers using shared hosting setup like apache + setuid fit up to thousands of accounts on to one machine, they won't like it when you're running anything more than a small blog. And on any app of decent complexity, having a ssh shell is a must have for debugging and management. Most shared hosts are quite restrictive on what you can run as well. Quite a few run outdated version of Python and Ruby, and installing extra packages is impossible, so for a web app, a VPS is almost always the minimum you need.
One vendor we considered was Media Temple, their VPS (not the grid service) aren't the cheapest, but their offering looks more polished than the others. The $50 for hosting is probably the cheapest part of the project and if you ever reach the limits of the VPS, there's still plenty of time to switch to a bigger package or another host. By then, you'll have a good idea what the computational requirements are of your site.
We didn't go with them tho - after benchmarking and testing, what we needed was a bit too expensive to rent. We went with 10u rackspace and enough hardware to fill most of it instead. Pro: can't beat the price and total freedom in choice of OS and software. Con: you have to manage everything yourself and pay upfront for all the hardware.
Cheap, no limits and not in America.
Low cost hosting providers rarely guarantee backup and restoration services as part of the low cost package. It is often a separate item entirely that must be paid for in addition to the standard account. Not only this, many of the shared/virtual private server type providers do not offer any guaranteed recovery period if the server you happen to be on goes down. If you are experiencing an outage due to another user sharing your hardware being compromised and they take the server offline, often times the provider will do nothing to get your site back up and running quickly even if you have the data prepared to slam back onto a new system; You just end up having to wait. (First hand recent experience with a one-and-one vps: The hardware had a drive controller failure. We have full backups of the VPS via bacula and if they were willing to give us a second vps on a new server at the same IP, we could have slammed the data back onto the server and been back up within the hour. They instead made my customer wait 48 hours while they worked on trying to make that original server work.)
Regardless of who you pay for hosting, your data is your responsibility. Their backups are worthless if you never actually prove they are usable yourself. Plan for disaster ahead of time and you'll be better off. Plan it at several different levels: what happens when the data is corrupt? What do you do if the server catches on fire? What do you do if the city/region experiences a catastrophe? What do you do when Joe Constructionworker is installing sprinklers next door and puts their backhoe through the datalines feeding the center? If your provider is offering to cover any one of these with a solution (like paying them to backup the data for your restoration) find out how you get the databack and what kind of SLA's they have. If they back it up, but it's a 24 hour process just to get to the point where you can restore things, that may not work for you. Understanding your recovery process before you need to put it in place is one of the biggest failings of many users/companies offering web based service delivery.
Now, one of the more interesting lower cost providers I've run into lately is Linode. You have a bit more flexibility in dealing with scaling and failover and you can move your virtual private server to bigger and beefier hardware as your site grows. They are working on an inhouse backup solution, but realistically if you care enough about your data, you'll regularly backup offsite with scripts or your favorite backup program (bacula anyone?). Linode is targetted more towards those who can admin their systems themselves rather than needing pre-setup solutions with GUI's (not that you couldn't use something like Plesk yourself on it). You can slowly scale your system hardwarewise to machines that have less and less shared users and you can even use multiple virtual servers with virtual load balancers in front of it (they have some interesting support for having a private lan between your virtuals that keeps the traffic 'local' and won't count against your bandwidth usage. You could use multiple virtual nic's to do load balancing with LVS type setups if you wanted).
For small LAMP sites (less than 10K visits per month)
Bluehost, ($7 per month)
For Medium LAMP sites (20K-50K visits per month
Media Temple Cloud ($20 or more per month)
For Bigger LAMP Sites (50k+ visits per month)
Rackspace Cloud ($150 per month)
The last two have their issues at times, but they are way better than managing your own server. If you like sysadmin work (and I don't) get a Rackspace cloud server or Media temple DV server, but I like the cloud and grid options. They scale automatically.
According to the Go Daddy commercials, that is.
I was a system admin for a while at a web hosting company, though I left in December for another company in a different sector. Quite frankly, the experience of the OP isn't that unusual. Hell, some of people on my team would accidentally nuke fully-dedicated servers and then tell the customer that it was "russian hackers" or a "raid failure" instead of just owning up to it. More often than not, I was the one getting stuck taking the call and trying to make things right, which is one of the reasons I got out of there.
We all know shit happens, and accidents can occur. That doesn't excuse not owning up to it when they do. In the case of the russian hacker excuse, the admin who came up with that gem tried to tell the senior admin that's what happened, too. When he found out that he was lied to, he pretty much went ballistic.
That said, check the following stuff:
1) if they are advertising "unlimited bandwidth," what's the actual throughput that they're allowing -- especially if they phrase the actual offer as "unlimited data transfer." Bandwidth usage is tied to memory usage, especially in the monitoring tools that come on cPanel-enabled servers, and so if you're pushing a lot of data it can spike your memory usage and
2) if they'd advertising "unlimited disk space," what are the limits at which their backups stop, if any? whats the amount of disk space? if you're doing shared hosting, which hopefully you're not, then that affects whether or not your account ends up getting moved, at least where I worked, a lot of the job on overnight rotations was moving accounts for disk space management.
3) what are their resource policies? On shared servers, we'd kick people for using more than 1% of CPU, generally. On a VPS, it could get a little higher.
4) if you're looking for a VPS, check what platform they're using for hosting, whether its Xen, VZ, etc. VZ doesn't track memory internal to the container, or really allow for swap space, etc. So, if you were buying a 256M plan from us, you'd really get 1024M memory segmentation which was the "burstable," but memcached would leak out and suck up RAM from the whole server if it weren't installed right (and a lot of people in my department didn't know this or didn't care). If you plan on using something like memcached, you'll want a hardware dedicated server, or a sufficiently large Xen container.
5) super-double check backup policy. We wouldn't back up dedicated servers, for instance. Backups could be configured to push to our array for a fee, or we could turn on local cpanel backups on the server, but if the disks really did go bad then you'd still be fucked if you weren't snapping copies back to yourself via FTP and keeping them local. If you're looking for a VPS or shared hosting, then make sure you know the backup rules -- how much data, and how it gets backed up. For instance, our setup used rsync over an NFS mount, which meant that we'd have a copy of the latest of everything that was there when the backup ran, but if something was corrupted before the backup, we'd have a backup of a broken file.
Some recommendations of companies other than the one I worked for, which I've used for various things and liked well enough are Slicehost and RootBSD. They're both Xen-based, allow a really high level of autonomy, etc. Slicehost pretty much lets you do everything yourself. You can go from no server to vps with root in about 5 minutes with no human interaction. RootBSD takes a bit longer to get set up, but their support people were always really helpful to me, and the added benefit of not being Linux-based, but using FreeBSD though OpenBSD is also a custom option as well.
... unless you know you're going to be using them to operate a website that isn't ever going to see real traffic and will never have critical uptime needs.
Here's why: DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. That's right, they oversell. On purpose. They know it, and they admit it, and they have their little rationale as to why it isn't a problem, but it is.
Here's an example: their "unlimited" storage offer. They make this kind of offer betting that most people can't even come up with a use for half that (or, more accurate, courting the segment of the market that won't). They're right in that the vast majority of websites will never have more than tens of gigabytes of contents, and they *say* they're willing to put up with the hassle of the few that do.
But the problem is, if you offer a service, eventually, some significant number of people will find a way to use it. I noticed, for example, that their storage offer (a mere 200GB three years ago) essentially made them the cheapest game in town for backing up a lot of data to a remote location, as well as being a pretty good web hosting deal, so I decided to move some of my hosting over, and take advantage of the space for backup. Gradually other people noticed this to, and so over time, people were actually starting to use what DreamHost sold them. When you oversell, this obviously becomes a problem.
So, what did they do? They imposed new rules: you had to pay extra (3-4 times extra) to use that amount of space if the files stored weren't part of a website. That's right: different prices for different bits on the same disk.
Since I found the distinction pretty arbitrary and annoying, I decided to see what would happen if I did a bit of coding and essentially produced a simple web interface for what became a personal backup website. I'd pretty clearly met the letter of the law. DreamHost didn't agree, and said it didn't matter whether or not I had because my intent was clearly just to get around their restriction. They didn't back down; I paid their additional fees, but after a few months, found it irksome enough that I left.
I'm fairly lucky, because I had plenty of time to take my ball and go home. There are some people out there who have found their accounts suspended and even deactivated because of spiking demand -- not even demand that actually saturates a pipe or otherwise exceeds any of the limits they tell you about when they're selling, mostly just enough demand on shared boxes that causes Apache to crash or lock up. These people have essentially had to suddenly migrate under conditions where their access had been cut off.
And this is all before you get to general uptime and systems health. I don't know what it is, but they had a lot of hiccups in the time that I was with them. Some of the explanations really did sound like things beyond their control, and if I hadn't experienced better, I would assume that this just happens sometimes. Their connectivity got cut off, their email servers fail, they change their subdomain host naming system without telling you... no, uptime and predictability were not their strong points.
But the bottom line for me comes back to the first thing I said. Because they oversell, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to. If you cross the later line -- even well before you get to the former -- it's pretty clear they will not only accept your departure but in some cases they will actively throw you over the side of the boat. This is an annoying but possibly acceptable state of affairs for a limited hobby website, but if you count on someone like this for a business or client website, I think it's likely that you or the client will eventually regret it rather strongly.
If you want someone rock solid reliable, I've had an account with Hurricane Electric for 12 years. They e
Tweet, tweet.
Also ignore promises of "100% uptime". Absolutely unrealistic. Something will happen that will cause some kind of outage. There's probably a list of exclusions on what doesn't count against the "100% uptime", like DoS attacks or scheduled maintenance. Guess what? That's still downtime that impacts the customer, so don't promise it. How it's handled is what's important.
When you're going to get a new host, and it's not a name company (hostgator, dreamhost, etc.) do your research. There are a ton of resellers selling stuff from other resellers. It's like the Amway of the Internet. Look at the whois for your new host. If it's hidden behind one of those obfuscation services, it's a red flag. Look at the name servers. If it's the same as the host (ns1.host.com) it's a plus. If it's something else, go look at the website of the name service...you'll probably find it's where they're re-reselling hostspace. Try to get upline as much as possible, since if one of those people forgets to pay the bill, you're screwed with no (worthwhile) recourse.
I would suggest not going with IXWebhosting. They've been hit with injection attacks for over two years on an almost daily basis. I was with them for years until they were compromised. They will also blame you, saying your website was insecure...except I had fifteen domains that were parked with a single HTML page that just said "go away" hacked.
Make sure they're available 24/7, and that they answer the phones. My current VPS host (InMotionHosting) answered the phone at 1am and placed my order.
Watch out for all the "review" sites. Do a whois and you'll find many are owned by the hosts that get top billing. At the very least, every host review should have some negative hits from a disgruntled webmaster. Look for the ones that lay it all out, warts and all.
Never ever expect your host to back up your website. If it's not in your possession, it doesn't exist, unless you're lucky. Cron jobs are nice for dumping databases to a backup.
I personally like dedicated IPs. Since it seems you're multi-hosting, see if shared or individual IPs are available. Also, check to see if wildcard or sub-domains (space.host.com) are available.
Best of luck to you.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Start small. Shared hosting is probably fine unless you need the features of a dedicated Virtual Private Server. Some things that used to require dedicated VPS can now be outsourced to services like Amazon S3 and MySQL hosting. Shared Hosting: I like Dreamhost.com for all my PHP/MySQL related sites. They offer SSH accounts, unlimited number of domains for a shared hosting account, IMAP and preconfigured webmail, cron and a bunch of other goodies. Support is decent but not great. Using the promo code "JMK" will get you $50 off if you sign up. They are already very cost effective for what you get, with or without the promo code. VPS: Don't go with dedicated hardware, choose a VPS. I really like the service provided by MediaTemple.net. Their knowledgebase and support staff are top notch and their prices are reasonable. If and when you grow to need multiple servers they can set you up with your own private network. They do not charge for traffic between these machines which can save you alot of money. Do not go this route unless you are comfortable with linux administration. You will be responsible for maintaince of the machine. General Tips: Use a different registrar than your hosting company. This ensures that they don't give you the run around if you ever need to switch hosts. I foolishly used Network Solutions several years ago and when I went to change hosts that continually hung up on me on the phone, didn't answer my emails, and eventually let me domain name expire, at which point they said they could get it back for around $200 instead of the already inflated normal price of $25 to renew. Use a version control system for you code and keep your own regular backup of your site. You can setup a cron job to run daily / weekly backups of important data and have them sent to another hosting provider or online storage. Check them occasionally and make sure they contain all the right data.
I've used many hosting companies and in test enviroments I'll use whoever is cheapest but for small stuff, with rock solid performance linode.com is the only contender.
Most web hosting companies don't backup uploaded content. Too resource and time consuming. We have always backed up customer data as well as config. We also host on real servers using real hardware raid. Backups are stored offsite and offline (tape). Not as cheap as some but then you get what you pay for. Your three domains would cost around $20 per month.
http://www.cyberstreet.com/
We have been using Hostgator for the past year plus and have been extremely satisfied. Tech support is always on the ball, they answer questions almost immediately. Very inexpensive!
Don't use BlueHost.
They're a terrible company that requires you to send them a photo government ID in order to get shell access. When I first asked why they required this they tried playing me for a fool and telling me that some ICAAN regulation required them to do this.
Dreamhost was pretty good for most of the time I used them (~5 years) and I liked some of the extras they provided, like XMPP hosting for your domains. I wasn't as happy with the excessive Google integration toward the end of my use, but it was optional, so it was not a deal breaker. Unscheduled downtimes happened occasionally but were dealt with promptly. SSH access was nice, and they didn't mind http-related cron jobs (if I remember correctly).
However, be wary of their referral program. I got a few referral kickbacks and the support quality seemed to degrade, ending with mistaken termination of service and a tech support brick wall when I tried to resolve it. Either they frown upon you actually using the referral kickbacks they offer, or I had horrible luck; I'd guess the former. They do everything via email and support tickets, so there's no telephone contact; if you do have a problem with support, you're going to have trouble getting around it.
In summary: pretty good hosting and value, but think twice about using the referrals and make sure you keep frequent backups in case things go sour.
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Sorry I'm posting this AC; I haven't logged in to Slashdot in many years and I can't remember my password. I should probably make a new account (don't have the same email address, so password recovery is not an option), but I'm not ready to give up on my 90k ID just yet.
For not having backups. Mostly shared hosting does not include backups, and if they do it's very clearly stated and emphasized. Doing backups on that scale is very expensive.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
1. Back up your own damn site. Unless you're explicitly paying for backup and restoration services, be prepared to recover your own site if necessary. 2. Anyone offering "unlimited" bandwidth or disk is lying to you. If you dig around in the fine print they'll usually clarify that "unlimited" means something like "as appropriate for a small business growing at a reasonable rate" or similar bullshit. You'll never get a concrete number out of them. The real number is, "If you cease to be profitable, they'll kick you off." Pay a bit more and go with a web host who will tell you what the limits are.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
OCS Solutions, Inc.: http://www.ocssolutions.com/
I am a customer, and have been for several years. I have no financial interest in this company. I am not an expert. I am happy.
OCS is a small company, dead reliable, no tricks, reasonably priced, and superbly responsive in the rare case when I do have a problem.
Get a vps and host yourself. I've been a very happy customer of linode.com for years... had one issue when their central routers were caught in the crossfire of a DDOS attempt... Great support, quick on help if needed, and the "machine" specs keep going up with no increase in fees...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
mrstrano: use Google App Engine. Either Java or Python, doesn't matter. FREE to start, great value when the website takes off and scales beyond what you'll likely need.
One of the worst things your can do is search for web hosts on google. Every rating system puts whomever pays the most at the top. You'll never get a good company that way. So last time I went looking for a host, I went looking for a user generated web host list. What I found is this:
http://www.webhostingjury.com/
I started at the top of the list looking through the web hosts. I went till I found one that was easy to set up and had a very high rating. I ended up with Lunar Pages. That was 2 years ago now and they were #3 or #4 on the list then. They are still in the top 10 but it looks like one or two others have come up in ranking or have been created since. Hopefully that will help.
The one company that I recommend to everyone when it comes to shared hosting is ICDSOFT.com It will be extremely hard for you to find a bad review on the Internet, simply because their service is impecable...
I've used them for a year until I switched to a dedicated server and each time I had a question their tech support answered within 5 minutes with precise answers.
The main think about them is that they're not oversold - each account can hold only one website, you get only about 100-500 GB of bandwidth, 10-50 GB of disk space and several databases and free webmail/pop3/smtp with limited number of email accounts, and each server had their own RAID 5 setup. When I had the website hosted there my server had about 120 websites hosted on it.
This is actually great especially when you start your website as you'll know the server won't be overloaded, you won't have 10.000 websites on the server with all files being retrieved from a NAS (as Dreamhost does) and you won't have the accounts of 400-1000 people who abuse the "unlimited bandwidth and space" feature and stream music to their office from the hosting account or basically people that have Youtube clones on shared hosting accounts (as it happens on Dreamhost)
Most people when they see they get only a few hundred GB of bandwidth they go on looking for hosting companies with unlimited bandwidth, but in reality for a startup website on a sharing account even 100 GB of bandwidth is enough. If your website becomes popular enough to go over 100 GB of bandwidth used, you'll afford to get a 60$ a month server with 2 TB of bandwidth and 200 GB of disk space.
I've also used Dreamhost.com and Site5.com for a while, between ICDSoft and my own dedicated server, mainly because it was a good deal - used coupons to get one year for something like 10$. Site5.com was just slow, the control panel sucked....
Dreamhost was slowish, overloaded (the server I was on had about 12000 websites on it), the quality of the websites is lower (blogs which are not optimized therefore abusing PHP and MySQL servers) and the NAS where this web server was retrieving from was shared between about 5-6 web servers so you can imagine a 1gbps link from a NAS was used by about 100.000 websites. Also, their servers and hardware have issues all the time - there's no single day where one of their NAS would not crash, or one of their websites would die or the email server shared between 20-30 web servers would fail and so on... you can check dreamhoststatus.com to see how often they fail.
I had the same issue with The Planet back when it was Rackshack. Someone hacked our server and used it for a DDoS attack. They unplugged it and refused to give us our data unless we paid them some insane amount of money via cashiers check.
This is why having a colocated server or a VPS (virtual private server) is so important; you can create backup scripts and run them via crond, and use scp to pull down your backups regularly. That way, if your hosting provider does go under or fudges up in a major way, you can have your sites back up and running in a matter of a couple of hours on a new host. Depending on how you configure your own custom backup scripts, worst case you might lose a few hours' worth of data (and possibly the server, but the value of that is nil compared to the data) rather than losing everything.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
A great ISP in Santa Rosa, CA with truly great customer service and unbelievable professionalism.
back up your data elsewhere, no?
If not, you won't solve your problem (a lack of due diligence with respect to your own data) by switching hosts.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Tip #1: Don't have your domain registered with the same people who do your hosting. If you have some type of dispute with them, you're gonna be _especially_ screwed.
Tip #2: Just say 'no' to GoDaddy, for either of the two above mentioned services.
Tip #3: I've had good luck with Dotster for domain registration, but have had better luck with name.com recently, and moved all my domain registrations over to them.
Tip #4: Dreamhost for the hosting, though I honestly don't have any experience with them for high-volume hosting. There's a difference, though, between inexpensive hosting and high-volume hosting, and you'd best just learn that right now. You're not going to find cheap $11/mo hosting that scales. If you want scalability, you should at least _start_ with VPS hosting, and move up from there. That's a different class of hosting than shared hosting, and those two train tracks don't end up in the same town, ya dig? I _really_ like all of Dreamhosts's custom management stuff. One-click install 'Goodies', etc = a LOT of time saved. Way easier than CPanel, etc. I've been using Dreamhost for very low-volume sites for around a decade or so, and have had no major issues, and few enough minor issues to count on two hands (that's with a decade of service). YMMV, of course.
And no, I have no affiliation with any of the above-mentioned companies.
Another to avoid: Matrosity (rhymes with atrocity for a reason).
To answer this question, it's best to understand some of how the webhosting world works. There are many tiers of them.
At the bottom, where it sounds like you want to be, are the aggressive, overselling bulk hosters. They make only basic efforts to keep things running, offer little or no support, but if you know what you're doing you'll get good value... until something goes wrong or you reach their invisible limits.
These guys are really cheap but the chances are you will have problems or have to change away some time. Example: bluehost, dreamhost etc. They tend to have boom-bust cycles.
Next up is the semi-professional companies. For more money than most individuals would want to pay (like US$50-100 per month) they make a serious effort to provide a good service, will offer some personal support, and overall have a professional operation. Example: servint, other VPS providers.
Above that are the serious hosters, like rackspace, who provide a full service with dedicated servers. Most people and small companies won't justify this unless they are doing transactions or webb apps. You pay appropriately.
The point is, at the bottom, there is no sensible reason to choose between the budget hosting services. Whatever they say in their marketing, they are trying to offer a rock-bottom service with no support and limited capabilities; taking a punt that most customers won't use the claimed abilities.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Linux with your own BIN, PHP5, MySQL5, lots of bundled subdomains, high (or no) bandwidth caps, lots of email accounts and aliases, 24/7 support, guarantied 99.99% uptime, nightly backups, etc.
Yeah, yeah. Obvious, right? ...
What most people forget to look for are a security certificate so you can securely check your web-mail and SFTP/SSH in to your site; secure email and IMAP. ...
Oh, and they should have a status page showing ongoing maintenance. That saves a lot of headaches.
Been using Dreamhost for several years now. On the plus side, the shared hosting is dirt cheap. By and large, the servers stay up and available on the Internet. There have been hiccups, but between support and customer service, I'm mostly satisfied.
Down side: shared hosting is shared hosting. My instance is on an old server, and they're trying to incentivize people to move off of it by not upgrading certain software (i.e. Rails is stuck at version 2.2.2). I could move to a newer server, but my client's also using DH and is on an old server. If I move, and they upgrade Rails again without telling me, it'll either break my integration server or it'll break the client's production server. Not fun, trust me. I've had the unwanted upgrades that broke the app happen twice now.
In the end, my cheap side is winning out over my quality side. I've not seen a VPS solution that'll handle Rails well for $10/month, so for now, I'm not moving. If you keep the problems of shared hosting in mind, DH is a good place.
bluehost.com - I've had no problems.
My hosting company (for about 4 years now) has had excellent reliability and tech support guys were always timely and helpful.
Considering the level of service I have received from them so far, they are not really even that expensive.
I host about 75 domains on a single virtual server for about $55 / month and the performance is more than I need.
I went with the virtual server because I wanted root access and cPanel which allows me to host as many domains as I want and I can configure/secure the server how I see fit.
Oh, and the few times I accidentally deleted a file or two and did not have recent backups (I know, I know... turn in my geek card) they were able to restore the files for me quickly which was nice.
No affiliation to them, just a satisfied customer.
So many buzzwords. What's wrong with just putting up a Geocities page like everyone else?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
If he reached some form of settlement with them, or made some other valid form of agreement not to badmouth them, they might have a case.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
1) Failures will happen. Design for them. Have at least two hosts, in significantly different physical locations. If a host gets hacked, if their backups were silently failing, if they go out of business without warning like RedONE did, if they get hit by natural disaster, et cetera; there just isn't anything you can do to isolate from that. Redundancy is key.
2) Ask hosts about their backup policy and strategy, as well as their redundant disk setup, before you get started. It's not a perfect answer, but it gives you a decent sense of how on the ball they are - if they're spending for the extra disk space, then they're probably not cheaping out other places either.
3) A week or two in, request a backup restore. You don't have to make up a failure or anything; just say you've had problems with hosts lying about backups in the past, and you want to make sure you're on good ground. Make some changes to your setup beforehand every 10 minutes on a cron, so you know how old the backup is when it's restored.
4) Ask about gotcha policies like how they handle over-bandwidth (free day, shutoff, charge per unit, etc) and so forth. That'll give you a sense of how they'll behave if/when problems happen.
5) Expect problems to happen. The engineering overhead of replication isn't that big these days, and the cost of not having it is immense. Furthermore, in addition to replication, which secures against failure, also have backup, which secures against attack. Backup can be by FTP to one of those cheapo shared hosts that don't care about disk space, but it needs to be at a distinct third location.
Basically, don't try to find a host that won't have problems. You'll find Santa Claus sooner. Parts fail, people make errors, people do shady things, attacks are made, natural disasters and backhoes happen, et cetera.
Just have a contingency plan in place. If you can handle a failure, it's no longer a critical problem. It's usually cheaper to have three normal hosts than one super duper bullet proof host. Leverage economy. The internet is designed for handling the failure of cheap parts through massive redundancy.
Leverage that. It's the smartest thing in network history.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Tell your stories as anonymous coward. The company can't prove it was you. And besides, if what you're saying is true, then they can't sue you for libel. If you could be sued for printing the truth, more reporters and news channels would be in courts.
I hate companies that are incompetent and try to cover it up with lawsuit threats.
It will help all of us to get honest feedback from customers.
Ditto. We rely on Pair Networks for our primary system, but we do have a back up with a different provider and we do our own back ups just in case. The secondary system is not as powerful, but we rsync nightly and run Bucardo to do DB syncing every 15 minutes.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I've gone with four hosting companies in the last 15 years. I'm currently with Hostgator, using a virtual host package, and my only complaint is the 500 emails/hr limit. I have the need to randomly distribute a few thousand emails and hate that it must be throttled over several hours. Other than that, I've had good results with no complaints from my clients or myself. Hostgator offers both virtual and dedicated packages. Like any vendor, they aren't perfect - they can't read my mind and know what my experience level and skills are. I've worked with both virtual and dedicated servers and have generally been satisfied. The Hostgator virtual packages are bandwidth/storage based, so you can upgrade/downgrade based upon bandwidth and storage rather than number of domains. No, I have no affiliation with the company and will not gain a darn thing for this endorsement or any customers they might get.
For a good ASP.NET host, DiscountASP.net has really served me well. They have little downtime, always actively upgrade to the latest that Microsoft has to offer, have reasonably responsive support, and their prices are reasonable (but not rock bottom). Their current SQL Server 2008 deal is pretty good: $10/mo for 500MB of SQL Server space. Finally, I find their accounting of space and bandwidth to be honest and accurate.
I use HostGator to host Headphone Reviews, which gets 1M+ hits a month, 300K+ of those require 2-3 MySQL hits to create the page. I host another dozen or so domains too, total monthly hits 2M+, for about $10. Uptime's great, performance is great, and the technical support is amazing - their tech support knows far far more than me, which is fairly impressive.
I'm so going to get flamed for this, but, Godaddy.com I have used them for years and have had no issues with them at all. Price is awesome [I do asp/MsSQL but they have Linux/MySQL too]. For a normal site, 75 bucks a year, and gets you a lot of nice perks. 150 GBSpace | 1,500 GB Transfer is not bad for this price either. I did run afoul recently with my latest site though. Found out more people still like "XBMC" for "Xbox" from "nightly" svn builds then I had anticipated. I had a little idea to slather the site in Google ads. Split the money made from those Google ads giving 1/2 back to the users of the site. 40% goes to a charity they elect and vote on, the other 60% goes out to a person or persons as a free gift that is sent to them for nada. I'm not done with the site yet and I already went over that nice 1.5TB of bandwidth and was forced to up my plan to an unlimited one [more on this in a sec] which is slightly more than the 75 bucks for the premium plan. Double to be precise :(. Even still in the 1st 3weeks I have had this site up it has generated enough to pay for the year of hosting and allow me to give away a Crystal HD card and give a little somethin somethin to a good cause. Now the part about "Unlimited" well it isn't. I was told that I am fine as long as I keep it under about 3-4TB per month. That is a far cry from Unlimited but still a BOAT load of bandwidth :) Support wait times are typically 3-5 minutes. The few times I had to call they were able to show me that it was really my fault each time and not make me feel like a total ass while doing it. So yah. Godaddy
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Wait, you mean there are other ways you can host your site other than using Freewebs, Angelfire and Tripod?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I've had great luck with Dreamhost after I switched to them from 1 and 1 (god they sucked)
Dreamhost is based in Southern California and even better, their tech support is based in Southern California. They're also an employee owned company.
They offer a pretty wide range of services from shared hosting on up to your own servers. Their tech support is fantastic... once when I had a problem with my shared hosting account, their tech support person emailed me back about the problem BEFORE I received the automated "someone from tech support will get back to you as soon as possible" email. (the automated email came about 15 minutes after I submitted the ticket.)
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
I've been with them for years, and they do a pretty decent job.
* Their support is responsive, knowledgeable and long-term (when I've needed to put in support tickets I generally get quick response and quick action, frequently from the same folks I've been seeing for years and sometimes from the owner),
* they'll move accounts off of servers as needed (e.g. if a domain is being attacked or possibly slashdotted, or if you need something that hasn't been rolled out to older servers),
* they have customer forums that are readable by anyone (though they're less active now than they were a few years back),
* When something goes wrong, they'll update with more information and what's being done to address the problem. This really cropped up a few years back when someone working in the Peak 10 (peak10.com) Jacksonville data center yanked a few drives out of some of their servers, back when they weren't using much space and didn't actually have a cage (now they have at least two locked cages, I believe).
* They do run backups, though I've never needed to contact them about that. My evidence, from October, 2009: "Merritt has apparently suffered a primary drive failure. The good news is the backups run in the wee hours this morning are complete so we'll be putting new drives in the box and restoring everyone from backup. As always, if you have any questions, hit us up at the helpdesk."
* They don't oversell - the accounts have limitations, but are more than adequate. The pricing is not the cheapest out there, but is certainly far from expensive.
fencepost
just a little off
If you want to manage the box and pay as little as possible, I'd recommend hosting it yourself. Otherwise, if you want something reliable, I'd go with one of the smaller(albeit pricier) firms that have proven themselves, like tilted.com.
p.s. They're based in Chicago, so you don't have to worry about earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards or the like taking their data center down. And they seem to have a small close knit staff, so you shouldn't have to worry about some newbie admin screwing your data.
Nearlyfreespeech is not for everybody. I used to recommend them, but not anymore.
Here are the advantages:
* low cost, especially for tiny sites
* SSH included, no bullshit regarding that
Disadvantages:
* php and mysql performance is very slow. the servers are overloaded
* ssh is very slow. there is lag between every command. This is especially noticeable when using sshfs
* sometimes there is lag for simple page loads
* no cron, no https, several little things you may have come to expect from a host are not provided by NFSN
* reliability: a couple of times a year, NFSN will make some arbitrary change that may cause your sites to go down. The first time, the permissions on all of my files changed in such a way that the web server could not access them, and I had to manually change them back. The last time, symlinks stopped working, and I had to find every one, delete it, and recreate it.
* reliability: I don't think NFSN even has 2 9's. (ie less than 99% uptime). When NFSN is down, they still charge you for storage, but not bandwidth. This is fine for them, but might not be for you.
* NFSN is a one-man LLC, named Jeffrey Wheelhouse. If you ever need to deal with support, you will notice that this guy is a self-righteous asshole. Just look at the forums, and his responses. I wouldn't usually consider this a problem, but because NFSN is so buggy, you will have to deal with this man eventually.
The parent makes a great point. Don't have your host as your domain registrar. What if something goes wrong with your host, such as a dispute over billing? They have your domain. Use a separate registrar service. I personally have been using GKG.net (no interest in the company, just a happy customer) and I have at least one host I use with the "free" domain service, but I don't use it. Go ahead and pay the $10ish a year for the independence, even though it isn't a necessary expense. The peace of mind alone is worth the less than a dollar a month to me.
HostGator is surprisingly good for modest sites. There are some undocumented headaches; for example, any MySQL transaction that runs more than a few seconds is killed. Somewhat to my surprise, they're willing to host Downside, which has a MySQL database of all SEC filings back to 2000, updated every night by a cron job. They lost the database once, and they reloaded it from their backups. It took a day, but it worked.
I dumped EZpublishing and Aplus for HostGator, and it seems to be working out OK.
Shared hosting is like like living in a small house with fifty strangers. All of you have a job that requires you to go in and out all the time. And there is only one door.
Go for a cheap dedicated and unmanaged server and carefully manage your own backups. Watch out for 95% billing if you have any real traffic needs. Look for reviews in forums like webhostingtalk, not review sites. As recommended by an earlier commenter, look at the nameservers and make sure you are buying from the actual provider and not a reseller. Look at the upstream providers of your selected server provider, tier-1 ISPs are good, as well as lots of bandwidth between your chosen ISP and the internet, and a good SLA. Avoid "shared 100mbps". Look for extra costs you may have to pay before actually making a contract - For example, many providers will charge ridiculous amounts of money for extra IP addresses or extra domains in some stupid exclusive control panel (*cough*Plesk*cough*). A good domain name registrar is name.com. A bad domain name registrar is godaddy. Buying your domain name from your server host is unthinkably stupid.
Long story short - If the data is critical - trust no-one - use multiple different sources which you control for the data!
A bit of additional detail: They run what I assume is a fairly stock CPanel setup, though they may have some tweaks. I have a reseller account with them which gets me simple access to the control panels for my resold customers, I pay Hosting Matters at half the normal price for each plan, then bill my customers however much I've agreed to with them (generally quite a bit more than that base price, but I do handholding as part of it).
I decided on Hosting Matters back during one of the election years - either 2000 or 2004 - in large part because they were hosting multiple politically-oriented sites from both left and right, and handling the headaches of high traffic and occasional attacks in a manner that impressed me. I figured that if they were doing that well hosting several of the top 25 political discussion sites during a hot election season, I was willing to run with them.
fencepost
just a little off
Another vote for Webfaction. I was so impressed after getting a first account that I bought two more for other projects. They don't overfill their servers like Godaddy, Dreamhost (both of which I also use for basic, throwaway sites) or other hosts. They're extremely Python-friendly (just try to find a Python package they don't support, let alone allow you to install). Of course they also support PHP, if you're forced to use it...
I highly recommend Webfaction.
And I won't post a spammy referral link.
Lawsuits cost money, even if you're in the right.
Used them for the last 7 years, for a number of different sites. I've never had any technical problems that weren't solved with a quick phone call. And they have knowledgeable people answering the phones. I've moved sites from simple low, volume shared server all the way up to dedicated server, added ram and disk space, and transitions have always been smooth.
Currently running a drupal installation with 20 web sites on it. They host something like 100K web sites. Systems are FreeBSD and, depending on the level of service, you get ssh, ssl, sftp, separate ftp logins to specific difectories, good indexed pop/imap/webmail system. Easy to manage custom DNS. You can set up multiple web sites on a single shared IP with having to pay anything significant. You can manage any number of sites, with separate or shared IPs on one account.
The big deal for me has been stellar reliability and great tech support when needed.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
Most incompetent idiots on the planet. You cant even talk to any admins/engineers. We had problems with the SQL server being slow.
Had no conformation from anyone. The only thing the tech support did was made sure it was up and that was it. Once that was done, they said "its up" and nothing else.
Suddenly it would be back to normal
Other problems experienced were similar to the above experience.
If you cant get an admin or anyone with knowledge on the phone, ditch em. Getting the run around or support loop from a company is a deciding factor for me.
Too bad for them Im smart enough to know whats going on and in charge of my purchases.
I actually recommend godaddy.com right now. Technical, smart people answer the phone. I was even inexperienced with SSLs and they helped me out with applying an SSL to my own site locally hosted.
Of course I could have looked it up but they were willing to spend the time with me. Also, their call center is located in the Arizona, thats right... the USA.
This is an unsolicited recommendation by a very satisfied customer; there are no referral links here, and the hosting provider doesn't have a clue who I am based on my /. nick.
suso.org is a great hosting company to work with. A full F/OSS shop...the owner frequents /., stays out of your way if you know what you're doing (and doesn't hesitate to help lend a hand if you get in over your head), and is very responsive to issues. Tech support is handled in-house by the same folks that set up your server. In fact, it's not uncommon to have your tech support question handled by the owner. But don't take my word for it. Check out their website and do your own research.
Does anyone have experience with A2 Hosting? They seem more technically capable that most hosts, who want the customers who get 5 hits per week.
A2Hosting offers PostgreSQL 8.4.x, Shell Access (SSH), SQLite 3.x, Cron Jobs, and Version Control: CVS, Subversion, Git (over SSH), and Mercurial.
I'm not completely happy with Powweb.com, and am looking for another provider.
For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling.
Yeah, watch out for this one for any vendor. I've seen it happen where someone requires a 1-month advanced notice to cancel your contract or it auto-renews for a year. Then, when you try to cancel 2 months in advance, they tell you that they can't enter it into the system until you're closer to the cancellation date. Effectively this company had a window of a couple days where they'd let you cancel your account-- call too soon, they tell you to call back later; call too late, and you're auto-renewed for a year. I don't know if it was legal, but I'd generally prefer to stay away from a company that behaves this way.
Hosting is particularly annoying to shop for. Google for reviews, and you'll find advertisements pretending to be reviews. Visit most hosting companys' websites and you'll find an ugly and annoying page filled with smiling people wearing headsets. It seems like nobody takes shared hosting seriously anyway. The assumption tends to be that if your site were important, you'd have a dedicated host. With lots of hosting packages going for under $5/month for "unlimited" everything, it's not hard to see why.
Just go to www.webhostingtalk.com and read the reviews and select whichever host suits your need.
You get what you pay for. If you want total control, man up and take it! Get a VPS from Linode or Slicehost and configure the server exactly how you want. They offer similar service for similar prices. To get you started, Linode has a LAMP StackScript available that can have you up and running in about 2 minutes. From there, configure Apache for multiple vhosts and you're all set.
The downside is that ultimately, yo're responsible. The upside is that they don't touch your stuff and are expandable nearly instantly
Web hosts
Bluehost, 1 and 1, dreamhost, and other oversellers: don't use those. unless you're really really cheap. I've tried quite a few and while 90% of customers will be happy, you don't want to be in the 10% that suffer. It'll be painful, they'll either wipe your data, blackmail you to upgrade, or just kill your processes.
Pair networks: their web hosting is on the expensive side, but is of fairly high quality. Be careful though that they do not like cpu-time consuming scripts and will disable those, though they are not in any way as brutal as previous cited hosts. All in all recommended if you want good service
VPS
That is my recommendation for a small to mid website, if you can actually manage a server.
I have so far have a very good experience with both tektonic and knownhost, both of which have provided a pretty good service.
Slicehost has become of more variable quality to me lately, so I would not recommend them.
Oh and I would not recommend at all amazon ec2 unless you have a lot of money and rather large distributed system, at which point you will want to do it yourself anyway.
I second that. It was not that they intentionally fubarred them, but rather there were some configuration misunderstandings/differences that got in the way. And switch off mySql's auto-key reuse setting.
Table-ized A.I.
Sounds like something AffordableColo / DTI would do when I worked for them (by them I mean him, the one guy who ran it and would _unplug_ servers just to reap fees for "rebooting crashed servers".) I quit after less than two months working for Mr. Charles Baker, and I've offered to testify in the class-action, should it come to fruition. Search webhostingtalk.com for cbaker17 if you really want to see how many customers he abused this way before the company folded.
Always research your hosting company before you do business with them. Always.
That being said, I'm hosting on Slicehost and have loved it since day one.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy?
For the last three years or so, I've been using Hostmonster for my web hosting needs.
TBH, I just use it as a file dump currently to distribute a couple of FOSS projects I've written, but when pulling files from them, I've usually maxed out my connection. 200GB/2T transfer, but they don't cut you off if you exceed limits.
$5/month when paid by the year. Typical Linux/Apache/PHP setup, but I think it's Postgre's instead of MySQL.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Lawsuits cost money, even if you're in the right.
You say that again, and I will sue you.
I DEFINITELY recommend linode.com which gives you root and your own distro. They have kept expanding your hard disk etc. for free periodically for years, and keep developing new things for its users. You ssh in and can install anything you want, and can organize disk images, reboots and dns from dashboard.
However you wouldn't want to host a simple very high volume site there, so I have hostgator as well. I haven't pushed it, but their baby account seems quite good. It is the opposite of linode, being high capacity and lower functionality but even then it has quite a lot of good stuff. Cpanel based but with ssh too.
I was in the same shoes after my web host (for several years) got their server hacked by some script kiddies. When I ran a security scan (using Acutenix) I found that pretty much all the server software was out of date: Apache, MySQL, Php, etc. I sent a report outlining the results of the scan to the web host, and they told me that they would "investigate". Needless to say I started looking for another host immediately, and settled for HostGator. They passed several of my requirements:
1) Security: A scan showed that the server was up to date, patches had applied, no serious vulnerabilities, etc.
2) Customer Service: Friendly, helpful and available after hours.
3) Price: Very cheap for shared hosting. The higher tier, such as VPS, were also very reasonably priced
4) Bandwidth & Storage: They advertise unlimited, which I've always been wary of, but their CEO posted an explanation for marketing unlimited which I found reasonable. After several months with around 100GB of traffic, I've run into no problems. The only real limitation they claim is limiting you to the number of files to around 250K.
5) Reliability: They advertise a SLA of 99.9% which is still a couple of hours every year, but I haven't run into any downtime yet in the few months I've used them.
I've used many web hosts, and they all do _something_ that annoys you eventually. As a result, I have finally found what has been the best host I've ever used: esecuredata.com. You get a dedicated machine for as little as $59/mo. (I use a G5Jr for $79/mo). The rest is up to you. They'll install whatever free os you want (using default install), provide you the root password, and the rest you do yourself. The G5 Jr server I use has 2 core Intel CPU, 2 GB RAM, 400GB hard disk, and bandwidth isn't limited (I use 1 TB - 2 TB/mo). I run more than 12 domains from it, as well as a small MySQL instance and a decent size PostgreSQL instance without any issues. I've been with the for about 4 years now, and there has been 2 unplanned outages - both beyond their control, but they implemented work arounds so neither can happen again - and 1 planned downtime when they moved into a newly built data center (the move happened without any issues, something I can't say for 2 of the other hosts I've used). I literally can't say enough good about them. Well, I do have 1 complaint: Why didn't they exist 10 or 12 years ago...
I upgraded my DH account to virtual PS. Its interesiting seeing the performance and resource graphs. You slide your RAM allocation slider to just under your avg usage. This is the guaranteed allocation with twice that for bursts. It works well, if your site is popular you, slide your slider. Everyone wins, they dont get bogged down, and your site remains responsive. If your site is small with little traffic slide it down to as little as 150mb RAM. The one nag for me is no POSTGRESQL support. MYSQL it is for now.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Are excellent, though I have no idea how big they'll scale.
Their support is literally incredible: they replied to my question (before joining) within 7 minutes.
Also, see the article 'Finding The Best Web Site Hosts The Googalistic Way'---'s awesome.
I did a super budget prototype web site with self-hosting.
The factor that got me to do self hosting is the low power consumption of the WindPC. It consumes only 36 watts, which works out to around $6 per month. The system was strictly a prototype and I had no traffic during the trial period.
Self hosting didn't work as smoothly as I hoped. I had to set a fixed IP number in the home router to make the no-ip redirection work. So the WindPC served web pages. But the same change canceled the ability of the WindPC to do dns lookups and I ran out of energy relearning tcp-ip. A small but annoying project glitch. Another limit is I could not figure out how to make the WindPC run multiple web sites at the same time. Multi-homing it is called.
The system had these parts: A WindPC with 2 gigs of memory and 160 mb disk (on loan from a friend, I had to buy the memory), free dns service from no-ip.com, CentOs 5.0, and the Rails application was the substruct open source ruby on rails. I copied the application or files between a development machine and the production box with SSH.
------------ I looked at Google AppEngine and I wrote a review of the O'Reilly book on the subject.
But the hard part about GoogleAppEngine is you can start a site for free. The hard thing about "free" is it drags the entire design and hosting solution towards GoogleAppEngine if you don't have any other choice criterion than out of pocket hobbyist cost.
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/UsingGoogleAppEngine
Try www.colocation-center.com if you are also running an e-commerce you'll benefit from local tax advantages.
Ive had good luck with http://www.realitychecknetwork.com
I'm not sure what your hardware requirements are, but if they are fairly light you can easily build up a 1u atom machine for around $350 which should only use about half an amp of power. Build two of those up, check out webhostingtalk.com for any colo's with decent carriers (internap, level 3, savvis), avoid COGENT like the plague and perform your own off-site backups. Assuming your not going to be pushing a ton of bandwidth for a while you should be able to easily get away paying ~$60-80/month for 6-10mbit 95% 100mbit burstable at a reputable colo in Dallas and Chicago.
Look at the history of the company and try to find reliable reviews online. A good place to look for hosting companies is www.webhostingtalk.com. Other way around is to check for the testimonials in their website and see if those people in testimonials actually exist. If the website looks like a ready template it can give a hint that the provider is quite new in the business or a reseller.
While many hosts take backups I would always recommend to take your own backups as well. You can simply never have too many backups. In my company we backup our shared hosting servers every six hours and still recommend customers to have their own backups.
In most cases you will get what you pay for - don't expect high levels of redundancy for $3 per month. If they say something is unlimited, well, check the Terms of Service. Most of the time there is a limit, one way or the other.
If your site is likely to grow quickly and you don't like swapping providers, look for someone who can provide a good level of service with your current budget and also offers an easy way to upgrade. What we have done is that we run cPanel on shared hosting servers, virtual servers and dedicated servers and provide easy upgrades and downgrades between all these three options.
Good luck in your search of a new provider!
Mikko Kivinen
Scene Group
www.scenegroup.net
Finally, do your research and educate yourself! There are a lot of good review websites out there. Web Hosting Talk for instance...
SERVAGE is a really good host... They run a clouded service with redundant-everything... I'm really happy as a customer... except that they once deleted a lot of music I had backed up there... Storage space is unlimited and transfer is unlimited ~
* storage
* transfer rates
* browser around in forums / google the company name and see if you can find any bad customer reviews and so on
* linux host (best for you, in terms of flexibility)
* database engines
* ssh login?
www.servage.net
I was a customer for about a year, mostly just hobby stuff. Started a small business site, not high traffic by any means. Maybe an order about once a week. I then started a friends company site as well. Again, no high traffic nothing really to order but we switched their mail over through them. About the year mark there were outages that were never warned about or explained. Then one day all my sites went black. For 5 days, nothing, no warning before and for 3 of those 5 days even their home site was down and all emails were kicked back. When things started working again they said it was a DNS move and that everyone was sent an email about the switch. Nope, never got one. I lost the one business site because you just can't go down for 5 days with no warning. I canceled my service because of that outage and they said no problem, then proceeded to bill me for an extra two months then said they refunded it when they never did. Then after I switched, everything was moved and service was no longer, well my sites were dead and they never answered tickets or emails, a month later I started getting invoices, 3 at a time. I filed a complaint with BBB and IC3 and of course nothing was every heard from either complaint. There is no real justice that can be had, unless you lose or are robbed for thousands and thousands, then I suppose someone might lift a finger. Now with ANY service I am going to buy, they have to have proper contact info and I call them FIRST.
One problem I have had is the load average on my (web) server sometimes spikes enormously. I have been telling support this for years but they give me the runaround. They switched off my ability to see others processes, so who or what is spiking the processor is a mystery to me. Sometimes it slows my web site to a crawl. Multiple complaints for years only gets ridiculous answers. I don't think the people answering know what load average means. Worse yet, they think they know more than me and act like I'm an idiot talking about something I don't know about.
One problem with a lot of these hosts is they don't offer Tomcat or java application servers and they prefer people use PHP (or Perl, or RoR). Some do, but you have to pay. Others do it cheap but have other problems. If the good major ones offered Tomcat, that would be nice.
(no, it's not going to be a porn website)
Your project is doomed from the start.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
At one end of extremes, we have VPS / Cloud providers, Collocation.
At the other extreme we have providers who design your site and handle all the administration for you, editing, domain registration, e-mail servers, DNS management, Backups, etc.
Full service with control panel for everything VS administer-it-yourself using standard OS tools, Linux command line, etc.
Shared VS Virtually-Dedicated VS Dedicated.
You should expect to pay a good bit for every single service that you want done well and that you care about.
If you are paying $10/month and expect your hosting provider to do everything for you perfectly, then we have a problem of ridiculously high expectations.
$10/month shared hosting is just great for a personal web site. Hosting an e-commerce site on such a host, I regard as lunacy.
You should expect to pay for:
[For $10/month, probably it is reasonable to expect UPS protection on a shared server, not much more than that]
Security cannot be understated. If your web site exists on a shared server, you are at greater risk. Your site will be more secure if a dedicated server is used, and physical safeguards are required to gain access to the rack your server is hosted in.
1) Keep a backup of ALL files, on your own computer/hard drive, in the event such a thing like this occurs.
Mind if I recommend something like Dixiesys? I been with them since August and it seems pretty good for small personal sites.
Check out Linode.com - they are very good if you know what you are doing. It's a small outfit that has grown rapidly. It's Xen-based hosting and linux-based. Very good value for money and great service. One downside is that the backup program is still in beta, which makes me nervous as hell. For a little bit more money there's Slicehost, who I think are now owned by Rackspace. The price/performance isn't as good as Linode, but they have proper backups. I'm reluctantly looking to move over there. I'd only recommend one of those two if you are happy with command-line administration of a server / installation of packages etc. Cheers
We offer centralized storage to faculty, staff and students. It is highly fast and reliable. We've got a couple of NetApp 2020s that have multiple disk redundancy, will e-mail NetApp to have a disk overnighted if one fails, and take snapshots every couple hours. That is then backed up to a tape library nightly, which has its tapes rotated out to an offsite location. The idea being we can survive some heavy shit and get your data, including you doing something like deleting it (hence the snapshots).
However, we run in to problems with research groups and such who want a ton of space. We are happy to give it to them, for a price. Well they go and look at a harddrive on Newegg and say "But a 1TB harddrive is only $90! I shouldn't have to pay any more than that!" They can't seem to understand the idea of reliability in storage. Of course then when information stored only on a cheap desktop drive fails, they come crying about how critical it is and how we have to recover it for them.
I just wish everyone would remember that when you store data on a single, consumer drive, you are counting on luck to keep it from going away. You may well get lucky, and not have a failure. Many people are lucky in that regard. However it is purely luck. If the drive fails, you are SOL in many cases. If your data really matters, you'll have it backed up. The more important the data, the more aggressive the backup system.
Yes, this is going to cost more. Deal with it. The idea is more or less to say "Even if X happens, I still want my data, and I want access to it on a certain timeline." You determine what X is, and what timeline you need, and then design a solution that'll work.
I look for colocation with a my own access card.
I also quiz the support staff I come into contact with basic network questions.
That the good ones have higher prices. Yes, Pair is expensive. You can literally find companies that'll give you a year of hosting for what they charge for a month... Think there might be a reason for that?
I've also used them for a long time, and there's a reason I keep paying their prices. They are solid, fast, and they don't get hacked. Getting hacked is something many people don't think about but I've had problems on other hosts. A site gets owned because the hosting company didn't keep their servers up to date.
In my case, Pair actually did have an outage. The server I was on had a hardware failure... Site was back up in less than 20 minutes. That is a real measure of good support. When a problem does happen, they have a system in place to fix it fast.
At any rate, hosting is like so many things in life in that you get what you pay for. If you look for a "unlimited" plan (which are never truly unlimited) for bottom dollar, you'll get bottom quality. If you are willing to pay more, you get better quality. Pair is my favourite, but there are other quality choices too. Just be aware that they are going to cost money.
Hunt for the highest dreamhost discount coupon and you can get the first year for about 10 dollars. I'm then moving to stablehost.com who have 50% off coupons everywere so about $30 a year. Neither is top of the line but for just home stuff like mine it works perfectly adequately.
Always register you domains separately with someone else. Both the above hosts let you have multiple domains/websites on one account. Best I've found for a budget for those who have simple needs.
This depends a lot on what you want to do. For my experimental/root needs, I use slicehost, because they are solid and I have full root access. For my one-click-install maintained services and servers, I use dreamhost. Dreamhost is a bit slow from Europe (because of the distance and RTT), but it works fine for me. If you want a service that gives you both, you're looking at higher prices from someone like rackspace.
All the above have decent support that answer within reasonable time and have a clue, which I find is very important. I'm done wasting time with support where different people give different answers, didn't understand the question or didn't actually even bother to read the question.
What's your budget ?
How many sites do you plan to host ?
How significant are they to you ?
Personal site ? Professional one ?
Do you remember the average monthly traffic you used to have ?
How much disk-space you need ?
If the service is stable (meaning there is no downtime) would you be able to handle the sites yourself or you will need to communicate with the tech support a lot ?
Answer those questions and based on the answers start looking for a provider.
Webhostingtalk is a great place to start since there is a lot of feedback from customers.
If I personally had to recommend a provider that would be icdsoft.com - in terms of price/uptime/customer support they are the choice.
Personally I would not recommend to go with a big provider like say hostway.com - yes, they are big but they make money out of the Enterprise and a single user
does not mean much to them. Another alternative I would recommend are hostdime.com.
I'm in the market for a dedicated server or virtual private server, but I don't want to deal with any of the backend stuff, I just want to be able to run my site reliably. I've looked at Media Temple, but I've heard mixed reviews for them as of late. Dreamhost is another possiblity. Some of the sites mentioned in this thread seem interesting but might require more backend work than I'm comfortable with. Any recommendations?
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
1 - make sure they have daily backups.
2 - make sure you get exactly what you asked for. (lamp etc).
3 - stay away from 1&1
4 - read reviews for hosting companies by doing searches in community review sites like webhostingtalk.com (its the biggest). chances are that if the company you are checking out is shitty, they would have screwed over more than 1 person who was angry enough to come and post there.
5 - stay away from 1&1
Read radical news here
I can talk out of experience ...
I've got in touch with all four problems in 11 years time; NEVER consider Raid (rendundant storage) as backup or fail miserable when your machine dies!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
3ix are cheap and have mysql, php, linux and in their expert package (which allows you 5 sites) also ssh. Sounded great to me so I signed up.
Turns out you have to hand over your firstborn (well okay, ID info) to get ssh access "because people have been abusing it". Good, fair enough.
Also, LivePerson support seems nice but only works if it is not manned by stupid gits. It took 45 minutes to explaining to them that if an invoice is wrong, canceled by them and replaced by a new invoice, you should not need to pay the canceled invoice anymore. I found out because they took the site down for nonpayment of said canceled invoice. (For those interested, I still have a transcript of that chat.) Not acceptable to me; I can't recommend their service.
If I had my little way, I'd go for a service that just gives me a (virtual) machine, just charges me for the bandwidth and lets me do all administration myself. Strangely enough, although this gives the provider the least possible amount of work, I haven't seen any such services at "household-affordable" rates.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I have used hostgator for four years for reseller hosting. I am a very happy customer. Great packages and very friendly support which helped me when I was "green".
For some customers that grew out of it I migrated them to a root/dedicated server from Hetzner.de. There is however always a small worry that having a vps would be better when it comes to bringing up sites in case of a crash.
Head to AdamColwell Interactive AdamColwell.com I have been with them for about 7 years and have found them to be very helpfull and willing to move my packages up or down which I have at one point 5 sites with them.
If the host doesn't provide ssh access on shared accounts, they're not a professional operation.
A few years ago, the industry moved away from SSH accounts due to a fad on the tech circuit which claimed they were more hassle than they were worth. The VPS factor was also involved, with virtualisation allowing companies to offer "vitual" servers with SSH access for double or triple the price of their shared accounts. End result: shared account holders got shafted as SSH access was dropped. From experience I can say it's like losing a limb. The utility of the account drops dramatically.
The real proof of this pudding is in how the larger hosting providers still provide SSH on shared accounts. It's clear that mass SSH access can be feasible, secure and affordable when companies actually make the effort. Unfortunately, most don't. I live in Ireland and out of the about 30 or so hosting providers, only one provides SSH on shared accounts; and none provide SSH on entry level shared accounts. Meanwhile, Hostgator charges $5 a month for virtually the works, including SSH. So much for buying local.
And for all those who say you should just upgrade to VPS (which is just another shared machine anyway), screw that. Not only does it cost treble or quadruple what a shared account will, you also have to administrate the server yourself, with all the headaches that will involve. Say what you like about shared hosting, but it provides a usable, maintained and feature rich environment right out of the box; no mess, no fuss. I just want to host a simple website and have a place online to log into and store my files; I don't want to pay for the privilege of another server to babysit.
SSH is the acid test. If the company doesn't offer it, they're not worth your time.
May the Maths Be with you!
Hi,
From my experience I would really recommend http://www.vidahost.com/ .
They do both dedicated Linux and dedicated windows servers so whatever you want they can sort it out.
However thye two main things that make me want to recommend them is their price and reliability and just attitude.
Looking around they are cheaper than others I looked at and do good deals if you sign up for two years or so.
Also their help support is second to none.
Whenever Ive had a problem they have responded to my email within minutes, which is great. And whenever I have rung they pick up, none of that waiting in a que rubbish.
They have even been willing to help me with problems that aren't really in their remit which really impressed me.
The also Back up their servers on a more than daily basis so if there ever was a problem like the one you had htye can restore it to how it was the previous day no hassle.
Sorry I know I'm sort of plugging them but Ive had a really good experience with them and think others should check them out if they have had problems with their hosting.
Hope you find a good provider in the end,
Brendan
Does anybody know of a company providing Mac OS X VPSs? I presume this would be expensive, but I've been idly looking around for this for the last couple weeks and haven't even found one company.
I'd just like to know if there's anyone selling virtual private servers running Mac OS X Server.
www.clarke.ca
I'm a hosting newb -- been running my own servers since last century -- but finally had a situation (wife decreed that company website needed updating, so I got into drupal) where hosting made sense. When it came time to move the site from testing using MAMP to hosting, I did the research and went with HotDrupal.com, which is a part of Holistic Solutions.
http://www.hotdrupal.com/plans.html
They seem to be doing things right. They don't overload their servers, they use fast hard drives, they make backups (though of course, I keep my own shadow!), and so on.
But here's the kicker: their tech support is absolutely superb. I mean, as a hosting newb I needed some handholding, especially since there were some unusual configuration issues due to legacy stuff I had to support.
Without a doubt, these guys gave me the best tech support I've ever received in over 35 years in the business. When he's not doing other things, the big kahuna himself, Steve, does frontline tech support.
You know how when you put in a ticket, you keep thinking about the problem, and then the solution comes to you, and then tech support gets back to you a few hours/days later with the same answer? Well, in this case, I was coming up with the answer, logging on, and finding that they'd beaten me to it.
The only ticket they failed to answer to my satisfaction was the one that asked "Where can I send you guys some beer and pizza money as a thankyou?"
Absolutely a no-brainer if you'd doing anything Drupal or LAMP/MAMP/WAMP-related.
"World Domination - a fun, family activity"
Count a +1 for pair networks. Reliable, solid, and not annoying. Their plan offerings were simple and easy to choose among, last I looked. (I picked one 11 years ago and haven't had to change.)
I have had interactions with them exactly twice, and once was them offering a constructive suggestion as to spam handling. That's the kind of provider I like, all walk and no talk.
You'll need to figure out what the progression path is - and what happens when you do get spikes in traffic.
My site recently got a big spike for a week or so. The hosting company's response was to put my site on the 'jail server' where it got even less resources, so became even more bogged down. I was very happy to pay them extra money for some more performance for a few weeks - but the only option they had was to leap to a fully dedicated server on a permanent basis.
I'm sure I'm not the first person who needs a temporary boost - I was unimpressed that they didn't have some program to deal with that (and in fact, their program was to cut my performance down to the level below the level I was currently paying for).
--
On ease of use; I don't want to be an expert linux administrator - so I want a hosting company that will manage my machine/vps and deal with linux patching/configuration issues. There are companies that do this for not too much extra.
Of course, if you already know everything about being a sysadmin, then you'll want a host that just lets you be root and do your own thing.
--
On support - how do you contact them? My current host does a great job here with 24hr live chat support to fairly competent technicians.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
My current choice of provider is HostGator. They've been pretty on-the-spot with most things and haven't let me down yet. RackSpace is also nice, albeit more expensive -- but has more enterprise and redundancy features. If your looking to do (or eventually) do hosting of enterprise applications (i.e. Line of Business) such as:
Stay away from Microsoft Live and small Mom-and-Pop type outfits. Their implementations are generally not well thought out or secured, and the up time somewhat depressing. Stick with the big guys (such as RackSpace), and make sure you have things spelled out in your service agreement as to access, up time, overage charges, bandwidth control, etc.
Just my $0.02.
Well, this is a pretty easy algorithm:
1) Pick a company, any company.
2) Is their name "Hurricane Electric" aka "he.net"?
3) If not, goto step 1 and try again. If so, send yer money and open an account.
Reasonable and honest specifications, experienced, large scale company, professional, responsive, reliable, extremely technically skilled, fair price, gift economy. Really can't do better.
What I mean by gift economy is they give back to the community in terms of free IPv6 tunnel brokers, free BGP looking glass, etc. You get the feeling that your money is, at least in a small part, doing something useful for the community, not just making some MBA richer. Although they are so highly respected, I figure they're absolutely hauling down cash anyway.
I have no connection with them other than having been a customer for many years, until I needed to do something so weird I needed a virtual host at linode.com (as opposed to a webhost).
Note that with web hosting, like any other service, you're worth what you're paying them per month and/or whatever their cost of sales is for your account, minus the headaches you cause them. If you need $50K/mo worth of service, and you're paying $10/mo, you will end up unhappy.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Site5.com is a good host. Despite offering low-cost hosting they have very good support and are very knowledgeable.
Yeah, watch out for this one for any vendor. I've seen it happen where someone requires a 1-month advanced notice to cancel your contract or it auto-renews for a year. Then, when you try to cancel 2 months in advance, they tell you that they can't enter it into the system until you're closer to the cancellation date. Effectively this company had a window of a couple days where they'd let you cancel your account-- call too soon, they tell you to call back later; call too late, and you're auto-renewed for a year. I don't know if it was legal, but I'd generally prefer to stay away from a company that behaves this way.
*cough* 1&1.
Since we're rolling out fiber to the home all over the place, I would like my upload bandwidth to match my download bandwidth. I don't want my two-way IP connection to simply become the next generation of cable television (With phone included! How progressive!). I don't need a co-lo, and I certainly don't want someone managing my server for me, all I want is a usable connection to the internet. Simple as that.
Personally I can highly recommend http://www.strato.com/ if you are in europe. I have a dedicated server with full root access, and I am usually very satisfied with their support.
Their prices are very reasonable as well.
I started making a gaming related website(a homepage for a gaming clan).It is my first (ever) attempt.I have some dilemmas on this: 1)I want to use MySQL but i only know JSP for the time being (i will take PHP on the next semester).Should i wait for PHP or start writing Beans? 2)If i choose JSP ,will it be a problem in finding a webhost?Does Java support costs more?(As you can imagine,i need a really cheap host service.).Consider that i have never "managed" a website so i have no idea about these but i am interested in learning whatever is needed.Thanks in advance.
A friend turned me on to webfaction.com. $8 a month for their basic service and you get a virtual host on which you can login and install lots of stuff. I run django and a wiki on my hobby site.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
I've been hosting at Jagaur PC for a long time. Their shared plans have unlimited storage and I've been hard pressed to find better VPS deals Jaguar PC
The old company I was with sux. But this new company is the shit. You should use it. And here's a link. In serious, I was hoping to gain more insight into the world of web hosting. Which I did and that is nearly everyone is trying to resell to everyone else. And you really need to know what is important to you because the spectrum of services are from a basic service to enterprise level services. Other than that, pick one and go with it until the suck and then find another.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
If you need to host several domains, I use Dreamhost: They dont just slice up servers and run the entire LAMP stack on them, they use clusters for their file storage and their MySQL servers. For $9-11/mo (depending on how much you prepay) you can host as many domains as you want under a SINGLE account They have their own control panel that works very well, I like it better than cPanel or Plesk. They constantly update their features and give you plenty of bang for your buck with friendly support. You can upgrade to Dreamhost PS which lets you scale your processor and memory dynamically whenever you want. As for Application hosting, I am currently switching to Linode, my old VPS was slow, had bad support, very limited features. Linode is like a breath of fresh air, it's very affordable, scalable, and the management tools they offer are simple to use but very robust. I am very angry that I didn't choose them years ago. Both these companies seem to live and breath Linux and Internet, They both give you the feeling that their staff truly enjoys running and maintaining their respective networks. Before choosing Linode, be sure you know what you are doing and plan to maintain and upgrade the server yourself, otherwise use Dreamhost.
I had a shared hosting account with them. One day, my domains stopped working (server not found errors) so I called their 'tech support' line which is apparently in the Philippines. I had to wait about an hour to actually talk to someone.
;-)
When I finally got someone on the line, he read through his tech support script and then told me that the server was working. When I asked him if he actually checked that the server was working he told me he had not but there were no tickets from the engineers that any servers were down. 'Well,' I said, 'my server seems to be down.' He then repeated what he just said.
I asked to be bumped up to the next tier of support. After hemming and hawing for a few, he put me on hold to bump me up to the next level. After about a half hour, the same guy got back on the line and started the whole script all over again.
Eventually, after about 2 1/2 hours, I got bumped up to the next level of 'support' to be told that the 'engineers were aware of the problem and were working on it.' I asked for an ETA and the guy just kept repeating the same thing.
About 36 hours later, the server finally came back up. 12 hours later the server goes back down. Call tech support, repeat the same experience as before with some guy in the Philippines.
Two days later, the server comes back up. 8 hours later the server is down.
This went on for about two weeks with them refusing to acknowledge there was a problem and refusing to offer any sort of refund or credit to the account for the incredible amount of downtime.
Now, I'll admit up until that time, I hadn't had much of a problem with 1 and 1 as, like you, my hosting needs aren't very demanding but when the service went down, it went really down and trying to rectify it was a tremendous pain in the butt.
YMMV, but that was my experience with them and it was far too painful to stay with them. Dreamhost has been good for me thus far and I've been really happy that their tech support's first language is English.
Web hosting that doesn't suck!Dreamhost
Whatever you do DON'T use GoDaddy as they have the stupidest people on earth working for them. Not to mention their unethical bait and switch tactics. They have crappy bandwidth, and anything but their dedicated hosting solutions are worthless since you can't look at logs or write any files to YOUR home directory. And the dedicated solutions are way overpriced. Take a look at slicehost.com.
I've been using BlueHost for a few years, ever since Scottsdale Hosting fell off the face of the earth. They run $10ish a month and have had, in my experience, very good uptime. I've only had one problem with them that required a restore, and they were very quick about it.
For domain reg, I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I also use their privacy service, which I have found no negative press for (in terms of them rolling over like GoDaddy has done in the past).
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I don't think there's a single-host solution. For reliability: go with http://pair.net/. For control: get a virtual server. I use http://prgmr.com/ and am extremely satisfied - they're cheap, responsive, and the technical support is excellent. They're also nice, honest people. See http://lowendbox.com/ for more options. For storage, backups, and data transfer: go with someplace like http://dreamhost.com/. If you need more than one of the above, go with more than one host. For example, start with Prgmr.com (or Pair) and your site there, and when you need more disk space or bandwidth get a Dreamhost account. Then store your images and site backups at Dh while keeping your code and frontend at Prgmr.
For Dedicated Servers, I suggest ServerBeach (a pier1 company). When it comes to dedicated servers, they are the most reliable and one of the cheapest out there. Most other hosting companies buy their bandwidth from Pier1.
For the price they are amazing especially for starting businesses. They offer EVERYTHING from linux boxes of a varying number of flavors to Windows servers. The biggest thing is they do VPS (Virtual Private Servers) which is a cheaper method of having your own box and complete control over it. No shared environments, no stupid rules with their apache setups etc.
I pay $39/month and get 2TB bandwith per year.
Just do it yourself most of the hosting companies i have worked for in the UK just want you stuck with them on a monthly tariff, i can run 6 domains from my bethere.co.uk pro adsl service which gives me 21 meg down and 2 meg upload, i use 123-reg for registering any domains at £.2.99 for 2 yrs i have my own backup power plus the servers i run raise the temperature of my own house by about 1 degree meaning i dont have to feel guilty about the carbon tax as i offset against my own fuel usage. honestly look at running redhat, webmin, virtualmin then forward all mail to google mail and you will not need AV or antispam services. along with that being able to work live on the server via shared drives or direct to screen saves you a lot of time. also if you get stuck doing something just use your favourite serch engine, its a lot better than paying someone you dont know for services you can easily pick up yourself.
Really good experience with eboundhost had a shared account then moved to vps.
who want's to run lots of google pages that only earn money from adwords.
To those posting about Quality Hosts. "Thank You
I've now got something to think about should I decide to get a host for my domain other then Google Docs/Apps
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Per the parent's discussion, I have great experience with PI Host. http://www.pihost.com/ They aren't the cheapest, but service is excellent with a very reliable infrastructure.
Some of us here have lived the consequences of going cheap. 'All that money saved' becomes inconsequential when vague service/reliability promises made to the Exec's don't quite pan out.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Hi Folks, Since I moved my Drupal Aegir (fully-rooted Debian) VPS to www.panix.com, I've been extremely pleased with the uptime, price, and configuration. The control panel is not for linux n00bs, (Dreamhost is waaaay more feature complete). But I'm runnin' a server dammit. I really like Panix in NY.
FWIW, I pay for support, (from a 3rd party) and they introduced me to Panix. In other words, the technical folks I pay to cover my back, choose Panix.
I've been on Linode for a bit more than five years and have been very happy with it. Very rarely have I needed to contact customer support, but when I did they were responsive and got the incident resolved and closed very quickly.
As others have indicated you do have to spend some time settings things up the way you want because you basically start out with a new unconfigured Linux distro. But I like that because you get most of the same flexibility you'd want out of self-hosting or colocating, but without having to deal with hardware, connectivity, etc.
If you are not already comfortable editing server config files yourself (or at the very least installing stuff with apt and configuring using Webmin) you should go with a simpler service like Dreamhost. But if that prospect doesn't scare you, I really couldn't be any more positive about Linode. It's a great service.
Rosehosting.com. I have a VPS with them. They charge the market rates, which seem to be pretty well defined. Everything has been excellent for the several years I've been using them: uptime, very rapid response to email, etc. I'm not very high volume, so don't know how that would be.
Convert your site to python/big table and use Google App Engine. Great up time, free (besides dev time) to get started and cheap to scale. You could do java also but I like python much better.
PS: Of course there will be people who will tell you GAE is a bad idea, every solution has negatives, you never will find a perfect one. It is better to know the weaknesses than be surprised later. I've done site with LAMP and GAE, I like GAE better. The best thing about it is you spend a much higher percentage of you time on your web app code and less on hosting, provisioning, load projections, deployment, scaling issues, server config, extension updating, etc.
Believe me, you can be sued for telling the truth. I've been sued for telling the truth. Read the first few entries of http://thespamdiaries.blogspot.com/ for the whole miserable story.
The only thing the truth does for you is help you win if you have good lawyers, the money to pay them, and an unbiased judge.
I was lucky in that I had all three so it only cost me a year's salary. My co-defendant wasn't so lucky.
However, we run in to problems with research groups and such who want a ton of space. We are happy to give it to them, for a price. Well they go and look at a harddrive on Newegg and say "But a 1TB harddrive is only $90! I shouldn't have to pay any more than that!" They can't seem to understand the idea of reliability in storage. Of course then when information stored only on a cheap desktop drive fails, they come crying about how critical it is and how we have to recover it for them.
They're right, storage is cheap. However, redundancy, IOPs, and backups are not. Neither is a 4 hour response time from the vendor.
Fast, good, cheap: pick two.
Wow, no mention of fluidhosting.com? These guys are the best, in my opinion. No overselling (UNLIMITED HARD DRIVE SPACE!!!11), no BS, no waiting around for days for an answer on a support ticket. Great service, great hardware, fast network. Been with them for several years.
Stop Searching -
Laughing Squid Web Hosting:
http://laughingsquid.us/
http://laughingsquid.net/
Real Geeks in San Francisco, CA
~hylas
Been with pair Networks (pair.com) for over ten years. They're probably not the cheapest, as other folks have been saying, but they are rock solid, and they provide great customer service. I met some of the pair guys when they were at YAPC in Toronto in 2003. Very nice.
No, the servers don't run Linux, they use FreeBSD, but it's absolutely solid, and they're progressive about upgrading their machines and their network. Highly recommended.
First of all, there is no excuse for your not having backup copies of your web site. Backing up is easy. It's fun. Do it regularly. Keep local copies.
I use as reseller account WHM/CPanel to host my and my family domains.
... you may be doing it wrong.
Even the best servers are going to die in the long term. Designing a system which will let you easily move between hosts is a lot less work now, then when you eventually need to use it.
Do NOT under any circumstance go with Siteground. They offer a very competitive package on first glance but they are a HUGE scam. I started a website with them for an introductory price and decided to upgrade my package a little bit. When I got the confirmation email they had charged my account almost $300 when I had actually approved only about $9!!! When I called them I was given the runaround and told that I had signed up for the $300 package and the money was non-refundable. I argued that I definitely didn't. They then agreed to refund all but a $20 account upgrade fee even though I was canceling the upgrade only minutes later. 2 weeks went by and I didn't receive the refund. Another round of calls and emails with lots of promises for the refund. It still didn't happen. I then filed a frauf claim with my bank who refunded the money. I contacted Siteground and told them that Bank of America would be contacting them. I got an email stating that they shut my website down due to "Terms of Service" violations! Not 1 person I then talked to would give me a straight answer as to exactly what TOS violations I had committed on my website. DoFollow Blog
http://stock-background-texture.com/
webfaction.com
I currently use Servage.net
It's based in a modified version of Linux, the company had some security problems in the past (my own account was attacked, nothing disappeared but some one create two ftp account at that time) and they had to made some security improvements in order for accounts stay safe, and since then no new security problems arise.
They have 750 GB for all contents (web site, e-mail, you can even use the account to backup your stuff), 250 GB of traffic per day(!), 1000 MySQL Databases v4 and 5, PHP v 4.4 & 5.2, Unlimited FTP Accounts, Host Unlimited Websites and much much more.
About that problem of losing files... if it's a server problem no problem... in servage Servers are in Redundant Setup, means that when you upload something you are sending to (in this case) 3 different servers... but if you delete something using the control panel or ftp, it's deleted from the 3 servers! Their isn't nothing they can do in that case.
FTP access can be made using secure ftp... so no one can easily intercept the username and password and enter in your ftp server (or even see the files being sent).
Email access (pop / smtp) can be made completely by SSL/TLS connection (including from e-mail programs).
How much per month? I live in Europe and pay 105,79 for 14 months, for 29 months would be in Europe 213,96, or for 6 months 53,55. Maybe outside of Europe you don't pay the 19% of VAT... I don't know.
As the old saying goes,
Pick any two:
- Good
- Fast
- Cheap
Good hosting is not cheap; cheap hosting comes with sacrifices. Most people can live with cheap hosting (does your site REALLY require 99.999% uptime?) and the choices are endless for decent, affordable hosting. If you need more than that, you are going to have to spend for it.
Bandwidth, disk, redundant power, CPU cycles - those things are all finite and all still cost money.
Along those lines, you know what else is like Google App Engine for Rubyists? Google App Engine (using JRuby.)
FWIW, I spent a few good months compiling data from the 'wisom of the masses' - i.e. along searching for quotes such as "I love host x", or "I hate host x". It sounds as though it could be open to spam, but I managed to filter out these kind of comments (as well as affiliate based incentives). Here are my findings (including fully open and reproducible results and full technique):
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/host.html
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I've heard that justhost uses naughty practices in their advertising. Can anyone shed some light on what kind of underhanded marketing practices are being used by justhost, so that we can watch out for other hosting providers which might do the same nefarious things?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Surprised that no one mentioned http://cartikahosting.com/
seem to be the best kept secret...
Seconded. I started using Gandi after reading recommendations here. Their slogan is actually "no bullshit."
Anyway, you remain in much better control if you keep your domain name registration separate from your host.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Been using Superb for four yrs., had about two days' total downtime, and no data loss. Good support, inexpensive, supports linux/php/mysql.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
My point was not that the storage really is that cheap - of course it costs four times what I said if you want geographically diverse replication and that's how I would do it. If you want fiber channel with proactive support, go ahead and multiply the cost 40x or more. And yes, there's no such thing as an infinite resource. That's why I said effectively unlimited, as in it doesn't matter that there's not an shoreless sea of pasta salad behind the "all you can eat" claims at the buffet - if there's more than I can or will eat, we're good.
But the many who use little subsidize the few who use much, and your storage needs are very different from those of a shared hosting provider. I don't have much insight into BlueHost's operations, but they claim 1.9 million hosted domains and over 525,000 paying customers. Look closer at those numbers and you'll see that they have less than 1000 servers, and so they're running over 2,000 domains per server. It's a good bet that the vast majority of those customers aren't trying to store terabytes of data or open the new ebay on a $10/month hosting plan, so the many pay for the few because at BlueHost there's only one plan and only one price. They're not going to try and ding me with unexpected charges because my bandwidth or storage went over my limit one month, because there's not any limit to go over. For some people like me and the people in the article who posed the question saying they have little money, that's comforting. Bluehost claims to only have 20Gbps of aggregate bandwidth to the Internet - I have individual servers with more bandwidth to the intranet than that and you probably do too - and if anything that's where their bottleneck is. But my hosted sites come up just fine, so I don't worry about it.
When you operate at that scale, you get economies of that scale. You don't buy your storage from NetApp, HP, EMC or Hitachi. You don't pay $3K/TB for bare 450GB FC drives and another $3K for the software licensing and hardware and support to run it. You build it yourself from stuff like BackBlaze does it, out of commodity hardware that delivers the storage and IOPs through systems engineering, and redundancy through software. You self-warranty by buying hot and cold spares. You buy 24/7/365 15 second response support by hiring rotating shifts of people whose livelihood depends on showing up at work on time. You step up and be responsible for your own systems engineering when you get that big and if you blow it you're toast, so you take good care. You use open-source technologies like openfiler (has those snapshots you like) and Lustre. And for God's sake you're not doing anything so retro as trying to spool all that stuff to tape. Really: Tape? Still? Google and Amazon and others do it in analogous ways.
These guys know that commercial SANs are not made from magical parts - they're servers and drives and software, crafted with engineering that can be bested cheaply and reliably if you know what you're doing. If you can't meet the engineering and service requirements, you're better off buying the SAN. Even if you can meet the requirements, for most people the SAN is a better deal because their needs don't support the time and effort and so roll-your-own solutions, though cheaper up front, offer poor net ROI over the equipment lifecycle. I have heard it said that the SAN also gives you a throat to choke when things go horribly wrong, but I know guys who think like that and I don't like them and I don't respect them.
Of course shared hosting and BlueHost isn't for everybody, nor is roll-your-own servers, storage and networking. Some h
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've been a happy phpwebhosting.com customer for a while now. They quota you to 1 GB initially but they'll raise that quota upon request as needed.
For me, I was having problems with webcams I have setup to overlook a beach getting too popular and taxing the server, so the host kept changing the file permissions on it to not display.. breaking my feed. so, literally, a single image sent me looking for a new host. If you are able to run your apps on a LAMP stack, I suggest looking into grid based hosting. Detaches you from the problems of a single server overload... which is how most shared hosts are set. I ended up at media temple and have my cam back online and the site is snappy. Support has been very good, although it does take them 20-24 hours in most cases.. so not the fastest but so far they have been very good in their replies and I am a happy customer. If your interested.. check this coupon, 20% off their plans for the life of the plan. worked for me like 2 weeks ago, should show you the discount price before you checkout as well.. so you can see. I ended up prepaying for a year on their grid services. http://www.retailmenot.com/view/mediatemple.net best of luck finding a new host.
looking for.
To get an idea try:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/02/02/most_reliable_hosting_company_sites_in_january_2010.html
SankaCoffeee
I was in a similar situation 7 years ago -- looking for webhosting company that was linux-based and had good customer service. There happened to be one located just across town, so I gave them a try. A little over two years ago, I joined them as a sysadmin. I see a lot of comments about 'unlimited' and we agree that it is a bogus concept. This year we introduced Yep. We don't set arbitrary and misleading resource limits -- just use what you need for hosting websites (not for backing up your desktop music/video collection). http:///www.modwest.com/yep
http://www.rochenhost.com/
I have been with GoDaddy for 4 months and the service is ok. I just became aware that many competitors offer unlimited domains(not domain aliases or sub domains) for one reasonable monthly charge of 7 or 8 bucks a month. Godaddy does not offer this option.Therefore, I will probably switch out soon. I am between Dream host and Blue host, with an inclination to BlueHost.reason- good phone call with them and based on my cursory review of their site and a google search. Notwithstanding, from this site, I learned that Dreamhost is company owned, thats a salient point