Author Topic: Hosting options for new website (Read 21060 times)

40hz · « **on:** May 30, 2008, 12:31 PM »

I'm in the planning stages for a new tech website.

Searching for a host has been an eyeopener.

I was wondering if anybody had any (preferably experience-based

) opinions about various webhost providers. The planned site will primarily be text oriented and use one of the more popular CMS solutions (i.e. Drupal or Joomla). I'm not expecting any need for huge transfer quotas for the first year or two. This puppy will be self-funded, so pricing is also a factor. I'd like to stay somewhere in the $500/yr range for out-of-pocket.

For every one recommendation there's at least one matching horror story. Anybody have any raves or caveats?

Thankee!

justice · « **Reply #1 on:** May 30, 2008, 12:42 PM »

http://nethosted.co.uk/ gets a lot of recommendation and I can only agree. tickets get responses within 10-30 minutes and manages to keep that small family feel with a total professional commitment. It's in the UK and it's not the cheapest however i'm sure u'd stay under 500 dollars.

Look at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and you'll find good offers and discussion.

mediaguycouk · « **Reply #2 on:** May 30, 2008, 12:48 PM »

I'm from the UK but use USA based http://www.sbhostingsolutions.com/

Little business but the couple of guys there make a new definition for the term support. Fantastic.

Standard hosting @ $11.95/month = $143. And at US-UK conversion rate that's cheap as chips for us.

yotta · « **Reply #3 on:** May 30, 2008, 02:15 PM »

im in uk too but http://www.servage.net comes with my recommendation, £4.50 so about $9/month, its doesnt have to fastest load times (see http://nico.yottagames.net for an example), but comes with 510gb disk space and 5.01tb BW/month. it also comes with an optional auto-installer option for software like joomla.

ChalkTrauma · « **Reply #4 on:** May 30, 2008, 09:39 PM »

I recently moved my site to lunarpages.com, I have had no complaints and it beat the pants off my last host as far as features to price ratio.

I pay $94 for the year with unlimited domains.. I don't have a high traffic volume so I can't speak to that, but I'm pretty happy with the service and the public forums are very friendly, helpful, and support techs get involved in the discussion.

Shades · « **Reply #5 on:** May 30, 2008, 10:53 PM »

If you don't mind storing your site over the sea...The Dutch based http://www.hosting2go.nl is a very capable provider that has managed to put up several sites from me within 24 hours (incl. domain)...for the pricey sum of 40 euro's a year. They support the Joomla CMS, unlimited email, unlimited sub-domains, PHP, MySQL...all the basic are there.

This is their cheapest offer, so expect a lot more for spending a little more money. As you might or might not know, the internet infrastructure in Holland is extremely good (enough redundancy to guarantee a lot of uptime).

Silverchip · « **Reply #6 on:** May 30, 2008, 11:35 PM »

I doubt you would take my option but you might. I post in a forum 5 times a week to keep points up and I get free webhosting. I bought a domain and added it to my account and I been good for a year+ as well as happy. They do occasionally have an issue but it fixed pronto.

http://www.Frihost.com
Description
* 250 Mb of space for your entire collection of websites.
* 10 GB of traffic each and every month.
* 1 short free subdomain to be reachable in the whole world (you.frih.net).
* Php and Perl scripting languages to fulfill all your programming needs.
* The DirectAdmin control panel to manage your web hosting account.
* No forced advertisements. Your own ads like google adsense are allowed.
* Unlimited MySQL databases for all your data.
* Unlimited subdomains and ftp accounts of all your domains.
* Unlimited email accounts for your correspondence.
* Unlimited parked and addon domains for your whole portfolio of websites.
* Great community forums of over 500,000 posts and over 25,000 members to get support from.

! We only provide free php hosting to all active members of our forums. You need at least 5 quality posts before requesting a completely free web hosting account. Being active on our forums afterwards is also required in order to keep your hosting account.

Edited
Reason:
Forgot an essential piece of info, the webhost link

40hz · « **Reply #7 on:** May 31, 2008, 12:46 PM »

I doubt you would take my option but you might. I post in a forum 5 times a week to keep points up and I get free webhosting.
-Silverchip (May 30, 2008, 11:35 PM)

You're right, it's not an option I would use. But I gave a certain impoverished "artsy type" I know a copy of your post and it made her day! Wanna guess who's up there building quality points as we speak? Righteous frugality if ever I saw it. Gotta love it! Well done

tinjaw · « **Reply #8 on:** May 31, 2008, 01:34 PM »

I have been using one hosting service or another since about 1994. I am currently using DreamHost and I am very happy with them.

cthorpe · « **Reply #9 on:** May 31, 2008, 02:20 PM »

I would avoid 1and1 and godaddy for hosting.

I used 1and1 because of a free offer they had a few years back. They were pretty good on the free account, but when that expired and I went to a paid account, it was too slow for any decent cms options. Their support is also problematic, and it is very hard to cancel your account and prevent them from auto-renewing and billing you.

GoDaddy also had a lot of problems when trying to use a cms that required a sql backend. After a week of dealing with support techs who insisted that everything worked on their end, and that it was a problem with my computer or isp, I finally got a manager on the phone who admitted that they were having difficulty accessing my site as well. He was unable to explain why the lower level techs lied about being able to access my site, and didn't give me any reason to stick with them for anything (even for domain registrations),.

I currently use hostgator.com and I am very pleased with the service. My sites are always accessible, they load quickly, and the tech support is average to above average. Their prices are reasonable as well.

tomos · « **Reply #10 on:** May 31, 2008, 04:06 PM »

! We only provide free php hosting to all active members of our forums. You need at least 5 quality posts before requesting a completely free web hosting account.
-Silverchip (May 30, 2008, 11:35 PM)

no shortage of forums there to post in

PPLandry · « **Reply #11 on:** May 31, 2008, 04:32 PM »

I have 1X and it is excellent for the price. Speed is very good and you get lots of databases (both SQL Server and MySQL). Main problem is downtime which is significant (since Jan, approx 4-8 hrs per week)

mouser · « **Reply #12 on:** May 31, 2008, 04:33 PM »

This isn't completely relevant, but let me take this opportunity to mention that Gothi[c] and I have finally bit the bullet and upgraded the Donationcoder (secondary) member server from a $60/month virtual private server, to a $150/month dedicated server. That's not quite in the same league as our main server, but a huge improvement from the current server we use to host member accounts and miscellaneous stuff.

This new member server is significantly beyond our current needs. The hope is that (assuming we can afford it), it will let us be much more generous about providing server space and functionality to donationcoder members and projects. Once it's all set up I'd encourage people to try to come up with proposals for projects.

Ehtyar · « **Reply #13 on:** May 31, 2008, 09:38 PM »

This new member server is significantly beyond our current needs. The hope is that (assuming we can afford it), it will let us be much more generous about providing server space and functionality to donationcoder members and projects. Once it's all set up I'd encourage people to try to come up with proposals for projects.
-mouser (May 31, 2008, 04:33 PM)

Sounds awesome mouse man

Until then, I'm a second for DreamHost. They have a bit of a reputation for being a bit unprofessional, but they certainly know what they're doing, and they do it very well.

Ehtyar.

a_lunatic · « **Reply #14 on:** June 01, 2008, 10:26 AM »

im in uk too but http://www.servage.net comes with my recommendation, £4.50 so about $9/month, its doesnt have to fastest load times (see http://nico.yottagames.net for an example), but comes with 510gb disk space and 5.01tb BW/month. it also comes with an optional auto-installer option for software like joomla.
-yotta (May 30, 2008, 02:15 PM)

Few problems with servage is there Clustered Servers setup doesn't like install scripts as installing SMF(there autoinstall script says SMF1.1.2) & then any mods will give errors as the server takes ownership of folders/files after a test which make it a pain to work with last install I did was on a WampServer on my computer to make sure it was good & them uploaded the SMF folder & database & changed the config & anything in the database to the path on server.

Plus there web stats is not the best if you want detailed user info.

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #15 on:** June 01, 2008, 12:45 PM »

That seems to be the problem with most of the PHP/MySQL package autoinstallers bundled into server packages (including those bundled CPanel). You inevitably get an out of date version (so the latest security updates aren't implemented) and because you didn't control the installation updates often don't work properly. My experience with CPanel was that it built MySQL databases and you needed to be a detective to find the database password generated by the system before you could even delete it again!

Renegade · « **Reply #16 on:** June 02, 2008, 09:47 AM »

Maybe not totally helpful, but I'll throw in a bit of what I know...

WebHost4Life --- AVOID THEM!!!! They suck! Badly. Horror upon horror! EVIL!

LayeredTech --- AVOID!!! Incompetent beyond human comprehension. They managed to lose all data from RAID 1 mirrored drives on me! You cannot possibly screw up worse than that. That's on top of 2 weeks of downtime that was entirely their fault. Serious moron working there. (It only gets worse.)

The Planet --- Excellent. I have zero downtime and have had no problems with them. Very good and recommended.

If you're going to go for $500, would it be a stretch to $1,000 or so? If you can, I'd honestly strongly recommend going with a dedicated server. There's just NO comparison with any kind of hosted account to virtual server. They just aren't in the same universe much less the same ballpark.

I can tell you from personal experience with different hosting accounts that I'd rather shoot myself in the face than ever use a hosted account ever again.

The difference between $500 and $1,000 isn't that big once you figure in the massive costs of the downtime and truckloads of Tylenol that you'll need to deal with the BS of a shared server.

40hz · « **Reply #17 on:** June 02, 2008, 12:59 PM »

If you're going to go for $500, would it be a stretch to $1,000 or so? If you can, I'd honestly strongly recommend going with a dedicated server. There's just NO comparison with any kind of hosted account to virtual server. They just aren't in the same universe much less the same ballpark.

It would be a bit of a stretch (almost a car payment to be exact

) but from what I'm hearing in other places, a dedicated server is definitely something I'll have to consider. Thanks for bringing it up.

40hz · « **Reply #18 on:** June 02, 2008, 01:05 PM »

I would avoid 1and1 and godaddy for hosting.

I used 1and1 because of a free offer they had a few years back. They were pretty good on the free account, but when that expired and I went to a paid account, it was too slow for any decent cms options. Their support is also problematic, and it is very hard to cancel your account and prevent them from auto-renewing and billing you.
-cthorpe (May 31, 2008, 02:20 PM)

Yeah. Been there with 1&1 a few years back so I feel your pain. Mega-hassles. That's one of the reasons why I came here to get input.

Renegade · « **Reply #19 on:** June 02, 2008, 01:23 PM »

If you're going to go for $500, would it be a stretch to $1,000 or so? If you can, I'd honestly strongly recommend going with a dedicated server. There's just NO comparison with any kind of hosted account to virtual server. They just aren't in the same universe much less the same ballpark.

It would be a bit of a stretch (almost a car payment to be exact ) but from what I'm hearing in other places, a dedicated server is definitely something I'll have to consider. Thanks for bringing it up.
-40hz (June 02, 2008, 12:59 PM)

Think about it this way...

How much is your time worth? Do you want the pain and hassles of dealing with support staff that are total morons and should probably have been flunked out of kindergarten?

How much is downtime worth? How much will it cost to get things up again?

Can you afford for some other jerk on a server to hog all the resources with a crappy script?

On my own personal server I have had ZERO downtime because I control everything and make sure things work. (OS reboots excepted...

)

But you can still get dedicated Linux servers for under $50 a month (I can't speak to the reliability there). But there are cheap ones out there. There are lots available for $80~90 a month too that will do a fantastic job.

However, you need to administer them yourself for best results.

Years ago I used only dedicated servers and had no problems. Then for some smaller sites I went with hosting... I very soon learned that hosting doesn't work for sites that grow.

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #20 on:** June 04, 2008, 06:20 AM »

My site is fairly low traffic, so hosting it myself isn't an issue. I have however dealt with www.LunarPages.com several times in the past and found them to be an excellent host.

Good prices, no unscheduled downtime, informed about internal changes that will impact the site before they happen, repairs/changes/updates stay on schedule, etc.

40hz · « **Reply #21 on:** June 06, 2008, 11:22 AM »

Its a wrap!

Looks like I have enough input to start making some decisions. Just wanted to thank everybody who took the time to reply. Your responses were very helpful.

Thanks again!

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #22 on:** June 06, 2008, 01:02 PM »

Just spotted this UK hosting site: http://www.ukhost4u.com/

Actually it was recommended on the WordPress.org website.

Looks good. Lots of facilities and reasonably large allocation of space and bandwidth for a reasonable price.

Anyone actually used them that can give a heads up ?

DjiXas · « **Reply #23 on:** June 06, 2008, 04:29 PM »

There are lots of hosting companies, I am using http://www.lotosus.com

Works fine for me :-)