I'm a volunteer with a small UK charity (all volunteers, no staff) that is looking for some better hosting for our website. It is a busy website with forums and user created content and is only going to get busier:
Our website logs for Jan 2008:
Unique visitors: 3087
Visits: 6574
Page impressions: 465796
Hits: 719548
Bandwidth: 2.95 GB
I expect this to increase steadily as we near a number of big events in the summer with a peak use in the summer.
We outgrew a bluehost hosting account very quickly, and we moved to a UK vps solution (partly because they offered a 50% discount for registered charities). However, I've experienced continuous problems with server loads going crazy thanks to processes on other VPSs (oh yes!!!) and our site is offline for at least 30 mins a day, and I'm tired of the *&$% I keep getting fed by their support guys.
We are looking for a company that could offer us cost effective hosting:
1) Hosting for the main website that ensures reliability and server space that will grow as we grow. At the moment we only need round a gigabyte of storage, but I would expect this to rise over time. However, we do need a reasonably powerful machine to cope with Drupal. A VPS is a minimum so that I can configure the server to my liking.
2) Reseller options. We would like to continue to offer hosting to very low use sites for fundraisers on our events. We would therefore need a CPanel system.
3) We are looking for a UK host that would be happy have a more personal relationship and be interested in banner advertising for your hosting on our site and those of participants in our fundraising events.
If you have any queries, please don't hesitate to contact me through the feedback form. Thanks, Stephen
Comments
UK Charity website hosting
Hi!
I've been running http://enable-vcs.org on a Webfaction server for some time now without problems... they're not in the UK and it's not a VPS, but check out their offerings at http://www.webfaction.com/
Pete.
Pete.
http://adaptive.co.uk
Thanks for the feedback I've
Thanks for the feedback I've had from folks.
We're evaluating a very interesting hosting company and will report back in time. For the record, the hosting company we had used previously was www.webhosting.uk.com on one of their VPS accounts. I would strongly recommend against it and will post elsewhere a report on this. In short, good performance at the best of times (as you'd expect), but appaling reliability such that we'd have been better off staying on bluehost. Consistently blaming our drupal config, instead of admiting that their servers are poorly managed, is a bit weak given the same config had been running fine (albeit not at supersonic speeds) on bluehost with higher traffic and additionally email accounts that we never migrated to webhosting.uk.com...
My web partner and I moved a
My web partner and I moved a large number of sites (17 drupal sites) from Bluehost to a dedicated server on Iron Mountain, http://imountain.com. Most of the sites are not for profit and / or charity sites, and Iron Mountain offer special consideration to charity hosting. They have been the best for customer support. I am in the UK, my web partner is in the US and so are imountain, but I have had absolutely no problem with them and cant recommend them highly enough.
I've had a few direct
I've had a few direct enquiries about this, so I thought it appropriate to post an update.
We are now hosting http://www.charityrallies.org on Hot Drupal (see www.hotdrupal.com) and we have been nothing but impressed (amazed in fact) at the level of service. I would highly recommend them to anyone.
Their servers are very heavily optimised to Drupal, including very high performance disks. We've found performance is superb, even on our site with module bloat. Their pricing is very reasonable, especially given the standard of service. Their plans are flexible, so if you need more domains and less disk space, or less bandwidth more domains and so on, they're really flexible within the same price point.
As for service, they are always prompt and have even installed very particular modules on request including PHP libraries. Oh, and they moved our whole site (and others on the server) to a new physical server (which gave us *even* better performance) with a downtime of just 13 minutes! We received full advanced warning with full details of exactly what was upgraded, what to check in case software updates had caused any issues and so on. This really is hosting made easy.
The observant will spot that this isn't a VPS - don't be conned by the VPS resellers as we were, we're getting performance on a different planet compared to our old VPS.
What plan are you running on right now?
Are you still hosting http://www.charityrallies.org on hotdrupal.com? Which plan? This will give me a better idea of price/performance
Your website seems a somewhat slow but marginally acceptable.
Edwin M. Basye
http://sitesthatgrow.com
Edwin M. Basye
http://sitesthatgrow.com
hi, send in the details at
hi, send in the details at bejoy@technody.com
Regards,
Bejoy Thomas
Yes, we're still on there.
Yes, we're still on there. We've got a lot of modules (too many) so Steve has just migrated us to a newer server. The site is big, with a lot of JS so needs a quick link, the server side performance is excellent.
I'm not sure of the hosting package we are on, but Steve will scale the package to suit your needs so the plans are very flexible. The main thing is the standard of support - absolutely first class.
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