Hosting?

oslick

I am wondering if anyone here has any recommendations for a reasonably priced hosting provider, that has good service. Ie.. Dream host is cheap but their servers are slow.

laserlight

If you want useful suggestions you should state your needs and the price range you prefer.

Anyway, why not ask this on a web hosting specific community like webhostingtalk.com?

oslick

Mostly I am concerned with mysql services. As most of our website is mysql driven. Price range is I hope around $10-20 a month. Our database is not huge. I asked here because I thought members would have experience and did not know of the other forum. Thank you for your suggestion.

NogDog

I do not have any specific suggestions, but I would recommend that you look for something that has reasonably recent versions of PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x. Besides the fact that you may need/want the enhanced capabilities, you really don't want to be stuck on a host that thinks, "PHP 4.1 with MySQL 4.0 has been good enough for the last few years, so why change now?" :rolleyes:

Horizon88

If you've got some experience in server administration, slicehost.com is the way to go. They give you root on a custom Xen virtualization slice that you can rebuild to whatever OS you want that they provide - Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, etc - and you can set it up however you want. I've got one that's 20 bucks a month. It's great if you don't need a bloated control panel and lots of pre-installed, out-of-date applications.

Also good because you can install whatever you want - PHP5, MySQL5, Apache2, Lighttpd, everything. 🙂

laserlight

If you've got some experience in server administration, slicehost.com is the way to go.

... assuming you have time to wait (months) for your account, or are willing to pre-pay a year.

Horizon88

We didn't have to wait more than a week, if I recall. There was a stink a while back about the wait times, but they were in the middle of a big upgrade. Lately there haven't been too many problems, though.

Elizabeth

I recently (as in maybe 8 months ago) switched over to Nexcess.net - I've been extremely happy with their service and they are a big php.net supporter, so they get even more bonus points from me.

jazz_snob

I've written some reviews based on my experiences. Short story: lunarpages or dreamhost, the deciding factor being price, reliability, speed and shell access. Lunarpages wins on reliability and speed; DH is cheap (after their giant setup fee) and offers shell access. You can read my reviews of some web hosting companies.

I have a cheap (pentium III) Linux box as a development server on my LAN w/ 3 or 4 virtual hosts, 4 mysql DBs and exim4 running and at idle (no visitors) its eating up almost all 512MB of RAM. Gives you some idea of what the demands can be like.

bpat1434

I personally use Servage (link in my sig). Can't really beat around $6 a month for yearly contracts. They may be "over sellers" by design, but I haven't had issues with them yet.

At the same time, I just finished helping beta test a unique system called a "Flex Server" from Flosoft.biz. It's essentially a hot-swappable computer. Your storage disks are SAN and shared; however, everything else (memory, CPU, etc.) is all a dedicated server. I think they're starting their pricing at $20 per month for a base unit (~1.8 GHz). Handles itself very very well. I was impressed.

Just two more options for you to think about.

stolzyboy

IMO, most, if not all "shared servers" are oversold, I mean, there is no way they can make money if everyone used all the space they are allotted. There is no way a place can allocate half a terabyte for 6-10/month for every user and make money doing it IF they all used their space.

They all have "hidden" limitation in their TOS's that you'll go over before you ever reach the disk space and bandwidth limitations.

rulian

all depends on what you are willing to pay.
Rackspace is awesome if you are looking to spend 200 bucks a month
if you are looking to pay 10 bucks a month you cant really expect a dedicated server and line with high traffic and storage

piersk

I spend about £15 a month for a 150 MB RAM, 10 GB virtual machine. Yes it means I have to do the admin stuff myself, but my needs are simple (I only use it as a LAMP server - no mail, no DNS etc) so it's not that hard.

bpat1434

This is true. And if you're really looking for enterprise-level customization, use LogicWorks. I have designed a few things with them (never purchased since I don't have a few grand to drop every month, but it's freakin' awesome to play around with.

piersk

bpat1434 wrote:
This is true. And if you're really looking for enterprise-level customization, use LogicWorks. I have designed a few things with them (never purchased since I don't have a few grand to drop every month, but it's freakin' awesome to play around with.

You sir are a genius! I was trying to find that site the other day! - How do you get to the geek's wet dream page where you can design the systems?

bpat1434

Hehe.... I keep them bookmarked in my head 🙂 When my business takes off, I'm either going to use them, or the GridLayer from Layered Tech.

pohopo

I recently switched to godaddy hosting and have been very impressed with the quality of service. You do not get as much control, but much less hassle if it is only for your own domains (and you are not trying to be a reseller).

bpat1434

piersk wrote:
How do you get to the geek's wet dream page where you can design the systems?

Here you go 😉 Have fun.

benracer

I use servage aswell, they are cheap - only had a few downtime issues but were always fixed within 5 Min, i think that this may have been due to "restarting" the server cluster.