Web hosting recommendations?
Caveat: there follows a bit of a moan about some poor service - but if you can’t have an occasional moan on your own blog…. who know, maybe even the service I’m moaning about has people who monitor for this sort of thing!
I’ve been using the same web-hosting supplier, Site5, for a number of years. Site5 was a good fit for me as it offered a good range of development tools and more access (SSH/SFTP) to the server than was commonly allowed by web-hosts at the time. Over the years, Site5 has been pretty reliable, and has stayed very affordable, so I’ve been satisfied.
Lately however, I’ve begun to wonder if isn’t time for a change. First there was the much heralded support for Ruby on Rails. Site5 was proud of its early adoption of this platform. To this day, the deployment of a Rails application on Site5 is a labour of love. I just don’t happen to love the process of deploying applications - I want to create something and then get it deployed as quickly and easily as possible. I suspect there are others out there who feel the same!
Recently the availability of the various sites I have hosted on Site5 servers has less than ideal. Today, I discovered that visitors to this blog were receiving an “access forbidden” message. I logged a support call - nearly eleven hours later, and three hours after upgrading the priority of the call to ‘premium’ by paying a dollar I got fed up with waiting and added an ‘encouraging’ message to the ‘ticket’ I had raised. A couple of minutes after this I finally got a message to tell me that a minor directory-permissions problem had been fixed. I asked how a such a problem could have been introduced as I have done anything with file/directory permissions directly, or with .htaccess files, which as far as I can tell are the only ways I could have introduced such a problem myself. I got the electronic equivalent of a shrug.
Oh well. Maybe Site5 has had its day. There are plenty out there who think so now, from a cursory search.
So - can anyone recommend a good hosting package?
My criteria would be:
- modest diskspace and bandwidth requirements
- SSH access
- plenty of support for development (libraries for popular languages - Perl, PHP etc)
- good Ruby on Rails support
- email accounts, or at least forwarding
- MySQL database access
Any suggestions welcome!
October 29th, 2007 at 2:41 am
There are lots of hosts offering such services; you would better try to pre-select few hosts and then request for reviews in popular hosting forums.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:42 am
It sounds like you’re looking for a shared host where they install everything for you? Is that right?
October 29th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I think so. I have been attracted by the idea of a VPS-type of arrangement before, but realistically I don’t have the available time to manage my own server, however virtual.
I still do want some possibility for deployment of home-made software, and I am still rather keen to be able to deploy RoR projects.
Basically, I want the moon on a stick
October 29th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Someone has recommended Interhost which seems to give VPS with pre-installed OS and applications. So maybe I can have it both ways…. depends on the extent to which the hosting company picks up the burden of upgrading/patching/fixing I guess. Not cheap either.
October 29th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
The reason we pay Engineyard their price for our production stuff is having things done right. That and having good people on-tap does cost money.
If you’re just hosting a few simple Rails apps of your own there is, once you’re over the install hump, generally very little admin to do on a VPS. I host all my personal apps on SliceHost at the moment ($40/mth for a 512mb host). I’ve also heard good things about Rimu.
Installing a VPS the first time should only take an hour or so. I generally follow Ezmobius’ old recipe with a few updates for things like nginx and dropping all the postfix stuff.
I’ve done shared hosting & VPS hosting and I’d go VPS every time. YMMV.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:42 am
I’d recommend HostingRails.com for shared hosting with Mongrel. I switched to them from site5 over a year ago and had never looked back. Their rails-centric docs and support team are fantastic. Its still shared hosting though, VPS is clearly better, but finding managed VPS at a reasonable price is tough.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Thanks for all the advice - I appreciate the response. After a quick look I think Reuben’s recommendation, HostingRails.com, might be a good fit for what I have in mind. VPS is attractive, but the price is not, and I probably wouldn’t have time at present to really exploit the power/flexibility.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Best wordpress and other script hosting . Very good customer support too. 24/7 excellent service. Visit it >>> http://vorlehost.com
April 29th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Dreamhost is always a good idea. To give you a hand (if you’re paying monthly), here is a promo code that will give you one free domain/transfer and $50 off your order:-
WILLTNET3
It will also work with annual payments etc, giving you the $50 off - I’ve dropped it here and specified the monthly payments as they normally charge some outrageous setup fee!
Expect some downtime each month, but overall they manage well and my average is around 99.6%, which isn’t that bad.
July 6th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I also recommend Coupzilla.com They offer a coupon code for HostGator hosting giving you the hosting at only $0.01. Check it out and see for your self.
July 13th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I would go with HostGator. I have a few sites hosted with them and have never gotten any downtime. They also offer cheap prices.
July 14th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I just moved off Dreamhost because the downtime was unbearable. If my website wasn’t down, my email was. If not email, MySQL. Ugh.
SYNHosting is treating me well so far.
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:35 am
There are a ton of web hosts now that can handle your requirements but you should make sure to get a web host rebate so you can save money on hosting