Web hosting advice

[ReNo]

Hey guys, hoping you can offer me some advice. My Haiku colleagues and I are looking to get a new web host for our company website and project specific websites. Currently we are using one guy's personal account on fasthosts to host our only website (http://www.avaglide.com), but want to move to one for the company itself and figured we should do a little research first.

Anybody got any good advice on who to go with? Or conversely, who NOT to go with? I use 1&1 for my personal website and it's always been good enough for that, but you don't get quite as much for your money as some other places seem to offer, and as a little portfolio site it's never exactly been tested with big loads or many visitors.

In terms of what we require, we'd like Linux hosting with PHP/MySQL support, preferably allowing for multiple databases but we could make do with one. Ideally we'd like unlimited usage, and probably around 10Gb+ of space. We'd also like Ruby/RoR support, or at least the option to upgrade to that if we need it in the future.

Anything come to mind? Or anybody had any horror stories to share? Looking up reviews online, half of them read like company shills, so it's hard to know what to trust.

[Warby]

everytime a webhosting thread pops up somewhere i peak in full of interest and immediately realize that the entire discussion on the internet is pointless because its a completely NONE international discussion isp are totally region specific an i have never even heard of 99% of the isps that people mention and i than disappear out of the threads never to come back usually this happens on polycount

... so basically no i have no recommendation for you ... what so ever because

i dont even know the names of your options in i assume ... "scottland" ?!

and i assume 90% of the mapcore folks wont know either !

ok so that was a pretty "general" rant and not specific to this thread and i apologize for that

... and i also realize that webhosting and isp can be two different things even though here in germany they are often the same for us

/me i am being hosted by a friend !

[Thrik]

If you're in the UK you'll probably be good with UK2. Their offering is very much in line with what US hosts typically offer, rather than the Windows-centric overpriced bollocks you get from most UK hosts. The disk space and bandwidth should be more than adequate, and although I only tested them briefly their performance and uptime seemed stellar. If you're after something more serious and robust (as in it's mission-critical) I can probably suggest others, but you're looking at more money and less bandwidth as the cash goes on server reliability/redundancy and other things instead.

If you're open to US hosts there're many more options, although I would say stay away from Dreamhost. I've extensive experience with them and while their features are great on paper, they're let down by stuffing too many people onto each server which means you can (but not necessarily) end up with a slow-as-mud site and awful uptime. In fact this is something that most web hosts offering crazily high allowances do — particularly those that ever use the word 'unlimited' — so be careful if your site must stay up even if hit by surges of traffic. You usually don't get much breathing room on the hosts that do this, meaning a shitload of traffic from say Kotaku may very well knock you offline.

[Serenius]

Dreamhost prices are insanely good for the bandwidth and storage you get, but as Thrik mentioned, the site speeds can be pretty terrible, and there's no real predictable pattern to it at all. Haven't had any issues with up time through them though.

[ReNo]

I'm not really sure I agree that it's a question there's no point raising, Warby. There's a lot of people here with portfolios (or more!) and presumably most of those are on their own hosting. Just looking for some info on who has been good, who has been bad, and anything anybody has to share on the big names in web hosting. There's certainly a ludicrous amount of choice in the market these days, and yeah a lot of that is region specific so hard to people to comment on, but there's a fair UK contingent on Mapcore so hoped to get at least a little insight. Beyond that, we're happy to look beyond UK offerings, though probably only US based to avoid any language barriers with support issues.

Anyhow, thanks for the heads up so far guys. UK2 certainly look good, probably the best UK offering I've seen in terms of an all round package that isn't blatantly "too good to be true" as some of those "unlimited" offerings you mention are. We're not going to be handling huge amounts of traffic and right now at least we won't be relying on the hosting as "mission critical", so we're loathe to spend more than £5-10 a month on it. Their low level business package is therefore a good match for our requirements. My only concern is a lot of negative reviews I stumbled upon, but as I mentioned before, a lot of those sites come across suspicious and potentially faked, so it's hard to judge.

At the moment we're really tempted by WebFaction. It's a US based hosting company, but we've had a few recommendations from them elsewhere and the bulk of chat about them online seems positive. Anybody know of them or used them before?

[Skjalg]

if you have a steady fiber connection, then you should look up on how to host it yourself

[-HP-]

Host it yourself is a lot of work and hassle.

I always avoid going for a small hosting company. For anything else, I would say otherwise, it's good to let small companies a chance to grow. But It's really fucked up when a small hosting company goes bankrupt and needs to close and you may loose everything.

[ReNo]

Sadly not got a good enough connection for hosting myself. Got a fairly decent ADSL setup through Sky for 3 of us to share for personal usage, but I wouldn't wanna try hosting anything on it; only got 512k upload I think. Sadly Virgin - the standard fibre optic provider in the UK - isn't available in my area just now. Not sure I'd have the knowledge or desire to deal with maintaining it either, as HP said.

I think WebFaction are a fairly large provider, so I'm not too worried about them going under. They've been around 6 years, and they've got a 60 day money back guarantee if, for any reason, you choose to leave 'em, so I figure it's worth a crack.

Thanks for the advice folks, much appreciated

[BaRRaKID]

I find that for most companies self hosting is the cheaper and most viable option, if you've the resources to do so.

What you should do is first estimate how many users visit you site daily, there are many tools that can do that for you (like google analytics for example). Next you should estimate what's the average size of your website pages, if it's mostly text and images (without heavy graphics, scripts, animations or videos) they should have less than 1Mb in size, which means that your 512K upload speed could easily handle around 3000 daily visits, thats two simultaneous users per minute, which is far less traffic than most companies websites usually have (the company i work for, for example, has around 200 visits per month).

[Thrik]

I wouldn't ever recommend hosting your own site really. Web hosting companies are specialists and not only are their connections generally rock solid, but they have an infrastructure designed to provide redundancy if machines fail, connections fail, software updates fail, etc. Plus a web server needs updating practically weekly to be secure, there's a lot of technical knowledge needed to get things like PHP and MySQL working (which need to be on a UNIX/Linux server really), and of course if things go wrong outside of business hours there needs to be people around to deal with it. Not to mention the electricity costs of running a server 24/7.

I mean if it's just a small local business and it doesn't really matter if the site goes down for an entire evening, fair enough. But for companies that need to be operating all day every day, this is an area you just shouldn't skimp on. Any business that won't fork out £10–£50 for reliable hosting wants its proverbial head looking at.

[Tisky]

My brother just started a webhosting company, i don´t know if im allowed to do this, but meh.

Add him on MSN: zeus_@worldonline.se . Tell him his brother Tommy promised you a good deal, and he can get you a good offer i think, since he is in need of new clients.

It´s worth a try.

[Corwin]

I've personally been using 1&1 for years and never had any problem with it. When I worked in an advertisement agency we did some website design and that's what we used too, seems to be a good compromise between price and quality. I guess this is true for most hosting companies these days but there's a good amount of online tools available to manage your website(s).

[Ginger Lord]

I've been using GoDaddy's Unlimited hosting packages for a while now, no complaints and quick responses to any questions or queries I have. They were quite good value at the time but I haven't shopped around as other people pay for it now and its just a no profit favour to a few people.