By leobaby on

My experience switching from dreamhost to AN Hosting (midphase)

Dreamhost does not appear to want drupal sites.
My site is not a high traffic site, especially during the 6 month development phase, so taking 30 seconds to load a single page was completely unacceptable, to the point that basic site maintenance was impossible. My personal site is still at dreamhost but is a wordpress site, so it is much less taxing on the server. I cannot recommend dreamhost for anyone running drupal, no matter how much optimization or caching is in place. I wanted to like dreamhost. Everything seemed to be run professionally. My site was initially faster than my previous host (1&1) but as time went on, it just got worse, and worse. I guess they don't want drupal users as customers.

Moving to AN Hosting, AN appears to be owned by midphase.
Let me start by briefly describing the end result - my site runs extremely well. Anhosting offers hosting plans generally on par with dreamhost as far as storage, bandwidth, price, etc. Once drupal was installed properly the speed difference was immediately noticeable, even before enabling caching. I was able to get down to fixing problems that had been plaguing the site and again start adding content. I have a number of modules installed and enabled - views, image, location, gmap, analytics, sitemap, lightbox, adsense, voting, more. My site runs better than ever, I am now spreading links and submitting sitemaps.

Since I am growing the site and monitoring statistics I will not provide a link here, but I am happy to give you the link if you send me a message.

While the results are nice so far, there were a few quirks at first that make me nervous about my decision. I may just be a worrier; I have been able to reach support on the phone; I don't expect much from support when paying less than ten bucks a month but here's my experience signing up.

I'm not sure just how much trouble or how customary it actually is to provide a pre-propagation link to ftp and cpanel; but I've always had one in the past and it took a few emails in this case.

  • I signed up at 9 pm central and I immediately received an order confirmation. They use an automated telephone verification system which I completed.
  • By 9:30 the next day I still had not received any welcome message; so I emailed them.
  • Two hours later I receive a welcome email with a link to my cpanel http:///cpanel/ no login or pass
  • Called them and in minutes was speaking to someone who would email the links.
  • Email arrived, link broken.
  • Email them, got a proper welcome message with login and pass and ftp and all that stuff.
  • Nice cpanel, set up mysql and import all my data.

Another point that bothers me - they offer advertising credit for yahoo, google adsense, microsoft etc. But when you actually try to redeem the yahoo or microsoft advertising credit you get

We're Sorry! The offer you selected is currently out of stock. Certain Search Marketing Companies, typically Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter, are only able to offer a certain number of credits per week. Don't let this stop you! There are many other search engines....

I emailed them and received a code for google adwords, but nothing yet for yahoo. Microsoft already has a $50 offer anyways.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Krickey’s picture

Krickey commented

I haven't had a problem running Drupal on dreamhost except for the issues with upgrading 5.1, which I have yet to figure out.

My Drupal site loads faster than my wordpress site on my Dreamhost account. I've had it for about 2 months.

leobaby’s picture

leobaby commented

Mine was fast at first as well. But then I started getting emails that my site no longer worked; I would open the url and it would render some 30 seconds later. I'm thinking they filled up the server I am on, and then people continued to build their site and the server went to hell. Regardless they don't care how slow my site is.

I still have a site hosted at dreamhost (leobaby.com). I just tried opening it and 12 seconds to render. This is not a drupal site, this is a wordpress site which is lighter than drupal in every way. It's my personal site and I use so few resources and get maybe 2 hits a day, so that slow load is completely unacceptable.

I sent you an email with a link to my drupal site with lots of modules and three views on the front page, hosted at AN Hosting. Look how much faster it renders than my simple static page at dreamhost. I hope it lasts, but if it doesn't this forum will be the first to know.

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

I agree that Dreamhost is not the right place for Drupal sites. I was really disappointed with their performance.

I moved from Dreamhost to AN Hosting back in January, and the difference was incredible. I actually wrote an article documenting the performance increase. The article was featured on LinuxToday a while ago.

Over the months, AN Hosting has been consistently reliable. Downtime has been minimal, in fact the server hit something like 200 days uptime recently.

As far as advertising credits, I was able to get both Yahoo and Google credits.

I have heard that some people were not getting their sign-up emails. From what I understand, the problem is overzealous spamblock filters. I use gmail and received mine no problem.

--
John Forsythe
Blamcast - Custom theme design and more...

amstercad’s picture

amstercad
he, him
commented

Having signed up for an account with ANHosting.com to see the difference, as I've had all my Drupal stuff on slow-poke Dreamhost for some time, the first thing I noticed as missing, is that there is no way to use a shell to manage sites. Like, how does one copy or delete folders, let along use some kind of version-control system like CVS, Subversion, or maybe something for more modern like Bazaar?

I miss the Debian from the Dreamhost. Is anything like this at ANHosting? Because if it isn't, for my needs anyway, slow as it may be, then Dreamhost is still best. Without a command shell, FTP is comparatively grossly inefficient.

Maybe someone can point me to what I'm not able to see? (I hope)

As a means to double-check, I tried this search-term in Google, but came up blank: "site:anhosting.com shell"

If there's no shell possibility, than I imagine I'll be in a position to follow-up this post with news of ANHosting's money-back guarantee.

...about an hour later... I received a reply from ANHosting with my query regarding a shell, and I'm now informed I have SSH access. Cool! I've got a few more months on Dreamhost left, which if things work out well, are perfect for a migration. Fingers crossed, my sites will run faster, and without my giving up too much, (I'm fond of their home-built management panel too; but not too fond of it.).
johnquillen’s picture

johnquillen commented

I signed up late December and went live with my church website a few weeks ago. So far, so good. I only looked for hosting companies that offered ssh. The reviews for AN Hosting all seem favorable - especially regarding drupal hosting. I've been very pleased so far.

zinasahib’s picture

zinasahib commented

Hi,
I am a new AnHosting client, and so far, the experience hasn't been that great, I've spent 5 hours 18 minutes today with their tech support (through their live chat), trying to upload and properly configure my drupal site to their host server.
The representatives I spoke too didn't seem to have experience working with drupal, but they sure tried hard to help. For example, I was really surprised when I was told 3 times today that I must email them my MySql databases (I have 2 since I have a multisite), to upload on my behalf since its a 'first timer' with a 1 business day turnaround, only to get the 4th representative telling me that I can do it from the file manager.
Is there a place you recommend / a link / or if you could provide a step by step guide on how to upload a drupal site? and properly configure it? I can't find it on midphase support page.
Any help is truly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.

zinasahib’s picture

zinasahib commented

Hello again,
So I finally managed to get the drupal site talk to the database on the host server, but now I can only see the homepage. Anything beyond that gets an Error 404, and asks me to contact tech support of the hosting company.
When I spoke to them, they said its not their problem, its a drupal issue and it goes beyond their support since my site is a custom drupal site.
Any ideas?

abbieonline’s picture

abbieonline commented

Sounds like an issue with your htaccess. Are you using drupal 6?

http://drupalbin.com/1974

zinasahib’s picture

zinasahib commented

Hi abbieonline,
Thanks a lot for your response.
I finally managed to solved my creating a new drupal installation on the host server and copy the files. Now the good thing is that with some configuration tweaks to the .htaccess and settings.php, I managed to get it up and running in time for our launch.
The bad thing is-
It was a nightmare trying to get the modules to work, since on my local server, I have 1 drupal installation for 2 sites, 2 different databases, where the french site reads the translation modules of the english site. But now on the server, I now have an english site (with an non functioning french site upload), and a new drupal installation for the french site, and a copy of all the modules being used.
Of course: the web hosting company is blaming Drupal for all this hassle, but I am quite positive their Apache setting is different than on my local server, which I don't have access too.
Regards....

swortis’s picture

swortis commented

For AN Hosting (midphase) Drupal sites in development (i.e. you have not switched the domain to An Hosting yet), you'll need to uncomment 'RewriteBase /' in the .htaccess file and then add the account name, like this:

RewriteBase /~example4

You'll need to comment this out when you switch over the DNS.

(There is no documentation on their site really.)

Other things to consider about AN Hosting:

  • Maximum limit of 32M for PHP memory
  • SSH available only by request
  • convoluted support system (imo).

One site – and four days of work – and I'm ambivalent about AN Hosting thus far..

zinasahib’s picture

zinasahib commented

Hi swortis,

Thanks for your feedback. I eventually did that and got it up and running. For more details about what I went through, I have it up at: http://drupal.org/node/600750

Let me know if you are running into any more issues with your setup, I've been there and know what its like.

Regards...

taiger’s picture

taiger commented

You can set php.ini to higher limits than this. However, ANhosting still sucks.

taiger’s picture

taiger commented

I have been with ANhosting for about a year and have had nothing but trouble.
My sites are slow. They are down often. Once they were mostly down for three days.
The worst: Drush doesn't work. Okay it kinda works but some essential commands like ubdatedb doesn't work. You cannot run commands across multiple sites.
I was using Hostmonster but Drush doesn't work one bit. If Hostmonster seems fast compared to ANhosting then something is wrong.

So, I bit the bullet and got a DV server from Media Temple. $50/month but I have enough clients now that it doesn't matter. If you do go with MT consider setting fast-cgi on the default accounts for clients. I do though I can see why you may not want to so research it yourself.

In summary, avoid shared hosting with Drupal. Try HotDrupal, MT DV or some kind of simple virtual server. You will save yourself a lot of stress down the road.

gagarine’s picture

gagarine commented

Never use anhosting. They provide a ok service for small drupal website...

BUT they auto renew your plan (for 3 years in my case!) and all the domain. They will send you an email to ask you to pay. At this moment if you want to cancel your account they are going to ask you 14$ for transferring your domain.

I don't like those kind of attitude. I like company than tell me before renewing my contract and give me the possibility to go away if I want.

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