By loyukfai on

My current subscription for a personal (50MB excluding backups) and low traffic (80MB/month) site running on Drupal 6.x is going to expire in September, and I'm considering to switch to another host.

The site is currently hosted on an over-seller ("unlimited" storage, bandwidth...) The service and support is acceptable for its price (IMO). But its pricing, if not subscribed yearly, is not very competitive and that's probably the major reason why I'm considering to change - To a host with a more flexible (e.g. monthly or bi-monthly) subscription scheme.

Requirements:

• 99% or plus uptime
• USD<10 per month
• Flexible pricing scheme - Competitive monthly subscription price with discount for yearly subscription
• Everything that needs to run Drupal: PHP 5, MySQL 5, Linux, mod_rewrite...
• SSH access
• "Reasonable" service and support
• Dedicated IP + SSL
• Customizable php.ini
• Customizable .htaccess
• Customizable cron jobs
• Email forwarding
• Single domain
• May host a photo gallery in future (e.g. http://gallery.menalto.com/)

I'm currently drawn to Future Quest (http://www.futurequest.net/Services/Packages/Visionary.php) based on a recommendation from thesitewizard.com (http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/webhosting.shtml), I've been looking around to find other perspective hosts but it's really been difficult for me to sort out the useful signals from the noise.

Your valuable comments will be appreciated.

Comments

itsallhell’s picture

itsallhell commented

Look through the forums for shared hosting. There are plenty of options available which are excellent for your budget.

www.medialayer.com (really fast servers - $10/month and excellent customer service)
www.downtownhost.com ( around $5/month - fast servers and cheap price and good customer service)

Read reviews for both on the forum and decide yourself.

HTH

loyukfai’s picture

loyukfai commented

Thanks for the information.

Been to Web Hosting Talk (which BTW, was just restored last week or so...) and it's an information over-load to me. I understand one has to do his research but, the signal-to-noise ratio of that site (and many others...) is too high if you ask me. Let alone the question of the truthfulness of all those "reviews" and "reviewers". This could be a complicated and tricky issue indeed.

Anyway, I've checked out both hosts you mentioned. Downtown's pricing is not very attractive unless one pre-pays for at least 6-month, which is something I prefer not to. You can get the $5 rate only if you use the "3-year annual plan". On a monthly basis, it costs $15.95. Furthermore, a dedicated IP costs $2/month.

Its storage (5GB) and bandwidth (100GB) limits are relative generous through. Although I don't think I need that much for the foreseeable future. So it's discarded for consideration for now.

MediaLayer, OTOH, has an even lower bandwidth limit than Future Quest (FQ) for the $9.95 plan (10GB versus 15GB). Extra bandwidth is cheaper through ($1.5/GB versus $4.1/GB). A dedicated IP costs $10 but it's an one-time fee only, and setting up private SSL certificate is free so it seems. Overall I have the impression that it's more flexible, money-wise, than FQ (FQ charges for a lot of things.)

The company website seems to be relative scarce of information through (which is not necessarily a bad thing per se...) However, it utilizes LiteSpeed instead of Apache, I don't know much about it but its compatibility would be a concern to me.

Thanks again and it would be great if you can provide further insight into this topic.

itsallhell’s picture

itsallhell commented

You can browse through Medialayer's forums and there any plenty of people who are running drupal on their servers. If you still want to confirm, you can always ask them before signing up.

You are right about Downtownhost pricing, I forgot to mention that in my original post. Based on my reading on WHT, there are couple of more hosts worth looking into.

Asmallorange and hawkhost comes to mind.

Advantage with medialayer is their backup and fast servers as well as fast customer support.

loyukfai’s picture

loyukfai commented

I have little doubt that LiteSpeed will run Drupal just fine, if we're talking about the basics. But when problems or complicated setups come up, I expect it will be more difficult to get support for, than the other web server which has >50% market share most of the time.

This is not a show-stopper through.

asmallorange.com: Good base price ($5 for 400MB/10GB, $10 for 1000MB/25GB), dedicated IP costs $2/month through. Extra bandwidth costs $0.5/GB. Some posts from discontent customers both on her own forums and Web Hosting Talk.

hawkhost.com: Just $3.95 (3-month plan) for 3GB/30GB. Dedicated IP for $2/month. Feedback looks fairly positive.

Right now, MediaLayer is on the top of my list...