2006 hosting providers evaluations

By kae on 27 Jan 2006 at 15:16 UTC

Hi, let's start a new thread for evaluating hosting providers. The 2005 was getting too long to scroll through. This thread is continuing from
http://drupal.org/node/19674#comment-87655 (copied below)

I use opensourcehost. they install everything. will upgrade for free. replies to my emails usually within 5 to 60 minutes. will donate 10% to drupal. one apparent drawback is that servers are only in 1 city (dallas) as far as i can see on their website.
in general they've been great and I really recommend them.

highlandhosting.com, your site sounds great! it's got moodle, noah's classifieds, oscommerce. I'm going to check it out. oddly, drupal was not listed under cms. for others, i think highland could be a great place to test software. highland has the best collection i've seen.

i've been thinking about trying about bluehost. they have toll-free 800 support.

do not use interland. the tech support person does not know what ssh or sftp is.
ae2005

Comments

Dreamhost

jtravs commented 27 January 2006 at 16:43

I've been using Dreamhost for about 6 months. I'm very impressed. Not only are their prices amazing:

unlimited domains, unlimited subdomains, 20 GB disk, 1 TB Transfer,
600 mailboxes, 75 Shell/FTP Users etc. etc. for $8 a month

but they have very good support too, responding to my two queries within a few hours.

There is no default drupal install, but with shell access to a fairly complete linux machine it is easy to install. They also have a complete custom web panel much better than cpanel.

I haven't hosted drupal anywhere else, so no other benchmark, but I'd recommend these guys.

Yes Dreamhost

willistg commented 27 January 2006 at 17:14

Same here, happy dreamhost customer. I'm used to a lot less capabilities for the price. Dreamhost exceeds what I would expect to get, and they keep increasing my disk space. :D

I feel like the only way I would move somewhere else is if someone gave me a hosted server for the same price. That probably won't happen.

Thomas G. Willis

skeptical but still interested

freyquency commented 28 January 2006 at 00:34

Even though I haven't gotten a response from sales yet about a couple simple questions I had I'm still considering them. It's all those big numbers I suppose.

I'm skeptical, due to some complaints of slowness of Drupal on their servers.

Does anyone know the refund policy? I can't seem to find it anywhere on their site.

To answer my own question

freyquency commented 29 January 2006 at 17:58

To answer my own question, it's a 97 day money back guarantee, but only if paid by credit card.

mySQL?

seaneffel commented 11 February 2006 at 16:02

It is not clearly listed that Dreamhost supports online database apps, specifically mySQL. Anyone?

Sean
Cambridge Community Television
http://www.cctvcambridge.org

Yes

willistg commented 13 February 2006 at 01:03

If you mean database apps like drupal, wordpress, gallery2 rails apps etc. Yes.

http://www.dreamhost.com/shared/comparison.html

"MySQL Databases Unlimited" across the board.

Thomas G. Willis

DreamHost coupons

benthere commented 27 May 2006 at 03:54

Here's the coupons that I mentioned below (can't edit the post)

DH02SETUP - Free setup fee for monthly plans (instead of $50 setup)
DH75OFF - $75 off yearly plans (~$45/year for L1)

Plan comparision

Also DH works great for all those scripts. They also have automatic installs of these:

WordPress Weblog (v2.0.2) - wordpress.org
phpBB Forum (v2.0.20) - phpbb.com
Advanced Poll (v2.03) - proxy2.de
ZenCart Store (v1.3.0.1) - zencart.com
MediaWiki Wiki (v1.6.6) - wikipedia.sourceforge.net
Joomla (Mambo) CMS (v1.0.8) - joomla.org
Gallery Image Album (v2.1) - gallery.menalto.com
WebCalendar Calendar (v1.0.3) - k5n.us

And with unlimited subdomains and domains, you can do multi-site Drupal setups or install several different scripts on each subdomain.

-- Ben // profilefx.com

More coupons

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 03:27

DH60PERCENT -60% off yearly L1
DH990MO - $9.90/mo
--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

Thanks, 200 GB are not bad

chess2u.com commented 8 November 2006 at 12:56

Thanks, 200 GB are not bad !
------
DruChess
WinDict
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Yes DreamHost works great for Drupal

benthere commented 14 March 2006 at 14:30

I signed up with them 7 months or so ago with a coupon for $30-40/year instead of the usual $110. I didn't expect much for that price but they give you more control than any other host I've used in that price range. It has ssh access, unlimited DBs, unlimited domains/subdomains, and you can install your own versions of php-cgi and other (processor-friendly) apps. You can also switch between php4 and php5 with a checkbox, takes 10 seconds. It's cool not feeling restricted.

If you sign up with them, be sure to ask one of their current customers for a coupon so you can both get a better deal.

Godaddy's the worst for hosting, but fine for domains. ASmallOrange is very reliable (great reviews on many sites and good personal experience with them) and comparable to DreamHost, but their deals aren't even close to the same disk/BW.

-- Ben // profilefx.com

GoDaddy hosting - should I switch to another?

Walt Esquivel commented 22 March 2006 at 18:07

Hi benthere,

I've had GoDaddy for years for domain names and I really like them for that product and service. Last week, I switched to them for a LAMP shared hosting account when my account with another web host was about to expire.

I'm slowly coming to the realization that GoDaddy takea a REALLLY long time to respond to my emails, and their autoresponder emails state, "Your question has been received. You should expect a response within 24 hours." That's too long, in my opinion.

But worse than that, it seems their tech support is very limited in terms of LAMP knowledge, although I could be wrong. That's just the initial impression I get, and it didn't help that when I told one of the tech support guys on their tech support phone line earlier this week that I used CuteFTP Pro, he mentioned that he didn't use a Mac but would still try to help me. Huh??? Gee, I don't use a Mac either, "but what's a Mac got to do with file transfer?", I asked him. I felt bad because I think he was very embarassed, but not using a Mac when discussing CuteFTP is not the type of response I would expect from tech support. It just made me wonder about the type of training they have received...or not received.

I also asked GoDaddy why it was taking so long (about 10 minutes) for me to access a newly created database or to delete a database as well as even longer (about 30 minutes) for a database password change to take effect, and they told me it was because "...the database is located on a remote server for security as opposed to locally on the same server as the site." For a newbie like me, is having the database on a different server an issue? I noticed that in at least one spot, the

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/database';

line in the settings.php file I will need to insert the correct database server location in place of "localhost". Are there other Drupal files (core and/or contributed modules) that I'll need to worry about in terms of inserting the correct database server location in place of "localhost"?

So, benthere, what else have you found with GoDaddy? I need to make a decision on hosting and I'd rather know more about what I'm dealing with sooner rather than later. So lay out the pros and cons of your experience with GoDaddy hosting.

Oh and by the way, you mentioned about asking a current DreamHost customer for a coupon in order for both the current customer (you, in this case) and me to get a better deal. Can I get a coupon from you? You can contact me via my Drupal user name's contact form. Looks like if I sign up with them, you'll get $97, correct? :) But I haven't yet decided so don't buy that beer just yet! ;) I may go with site5 or PowWeb or...

Thank you in advance for your reply!

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----
Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659

RE: switching from GoDaddy to DreamHost

benthere commented 22 March 2006 at 19:25

I'm slowly coming to the realization that GoDaddy takea a REALLLY long time to respond to my emails, and their autoresponder emails state, "Your question has been received. You should expect a response within 24 hours." That's too long, in my opinion.

I found that as far as support, they're very slow by email and you're on hold for quite a while if you call. Neither method lets you contact anyone all that knowledgeable, and they'll often email you canned replies using template emails. The emails were very strange: they were HTML and had a special place between two lines that you were supposed to type your reply so that it could be processed properly. I didn't like it at all.

I also asked GoDaddy why it was taking so long (about 10 minutes) for me to access a newly created database or to delete a database as well as even longer (about 30 minutes) for a database password change to take effect, and they told me it was because "...the database is located on a remote server for security as opposed to locally on the same server as the site." For a newbie like me, is having the database on a different server an issue?

The database being located on a remote server shouldn't be a problem with Drupal. It's the same way with DreamHost and seems to be fairly common for hosts to do it that way. They're not being particularly honest IMO about that being the reason for it to take a long time for new databases to appear and password changes to take effect. It's their scripts or their long queue of requests that makes that take longer.

DreamHost says that changes like that may take "up to 5 minutes" but in my experience it's only a couple. You can create as many databases as you want on DH, as opposed to GoDaddy's single DB (if I recall correctly). And I did have some problems on GoDaddy where the database connection slowed down or caused errors in the rest of the site. That occasionally happens with DH, but it doesn't last very long before things are back to normal.

I noticed that in at least one spot, the

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/database';

line in the settings.php file I will need to insert the correct database server location in place of "localhost". Are there other Drupal files (core and/or contributed modules) that I'll need to worry about in terms of inserting the correct database server location in place of "localhost"?

Nothing to worry about. After you set that $db_url correctly, it works for all core and contributed modules that I've come across (probably all of them).

So, benthere, what else have you found with GoDaddy? I need to make a decision on hosting and I'd rather know more about what I'm dealing with sooner rather than later. So lay out the pros and cons of your experience with GoDaddy hosting.

GoDaddy was actually the first host that I used. I used them for one high-traffic site that I developed for but didn't own a while back, and used them again when I was setting up my own domain and got a deal on the first month of hosting with the domain purchase. I cancelled after that first month and switched because I already had bad experiences the first time. But as I said, they're fine for domains alone, just not hosting.

GoDaddy makes you feel like you're just another customer in a big system of theirs, with their canned tech support, restrictions on databases, domains, subdomains, etc. Both ASO and DreamHost have provided tech support that treats you as an individual, and are willing to help with any issues with setting up products like Drupal and other forum/blog software, at least as far as their configuration is concerned.

I got into DH because of the deal that I got on a yearly plan, that I passed along to you through your contact form. I don't get anywhere near $97 for giving coupons out, and I don't want you to think that I am biased because of that.

I am probably sticking with DH after this first discounted year is up because I have several domains that I am building under the same plan. DBs, domains, and subdomins are all unlimited, and the bandwidth/disk limits are so high that I can fit everything under one plan for quite a while I believe. I don't stream video or offer huge downloads but with the 1 TB limit I probably could get away with it for a while! I've got my videos offloaded to video.google.com so that they can pay for it instead. ;-)

My sites aren't anywhere near high-traffic at the moment, so I don't know if you'll run into any problems down the road with that, but it works well for my purposes and I have confidence it will continue to work as they grow. I'll just keep building more sites under the same plan until I hit that limit.

So you have: 20 GB disk (grows 160 MB/week), 1000 GB bw (grows 8 GB/week), unlimited domains/subdomains/DBs/email addresses, shell access, Jabber server, Quicktime streaming server, Subversion version control server, and their own administrative panel (similar to cpanel) that works pretty well and lets you do anything I can think of. I tell you this because I didn't know they had so many extras until after I became a customer.

I looked at site5, and I used and liked ASmallOrange. And on the surface the deals look about equal. But with the coupons that I sent you, you end up with a much better deal with DreamHost. The setup fee is only the outrageous $50 if you don't have a coupon. ;-)

Well I hope that helps. Can you tell I'm liking DH? Again, I don't have huge traffic sites, and I can't tell you whether they'll have perfect reliability, but they give you more options than GoDaddy for sure, and possibly others, with a huge discount with coupons. My $0.02...maybe more like $1.

-- Ben // profilefx.com

Wow, thanks! Excellent deal with DreamHost

Walt Esquivel commented 28 March 2006 at 16:09

Benthere's feedback was definitely more like $1 AND $0.02! ;) Thank you so much to benthere for a very thorough reply which really helped me make my decision.

After a LOT of looking around for a few days in mid-March 2006 and comparing features, pricing, etc., I went with DreamHost.

DreamHost has A LOT OF FEATURES to offer, including a really nice control panel they developed. Also, the COUPONS I created for folks to use when signing up should make the DreamHost offer all that more attractive. I created two coupons: (1) a NO4995SETUPFEE coupon to waive the $49.95 set up fee that appears on monthly plans and (2) a 50DOLLARDISCOUNT coupon to obtain a $50 discount on the initial cost of any plan that's for a year or two. For example, you'll pay an average of $5.78/month on the Level 1 "Crazy Domain Insane" 1-year plan with the $50 coupon vs. $9.95/month without the coupon. You simply enter the coupon code when signing up to get the discount!

Another Drupal user here on the forums, benthere, gave me a great deal by allowing me to use his coupon and so I'm extending a discount to other folks that are in need of hosting like I was. You'll be able to offer other folks a discount like I did and also make a small amount of money by recommending DreamHost and having folks use your coupon, so everyone wins! :) Take a look at http://dreamhost.com/rewards.html

If anyone has questions about the coupons, please feel free to contact me via http://drupal.org/user/15083/contact.

For my UNscientific ;) web host research, I used these three web sites to help compare many web hosts to each other. They may help some folks make a decision:

http://www.webhosts.thelist.com/
http://www.webhostingratings.com/
http://www.webhostinginspector.com/

Which web hosts did I take a look at? In addition to some reviews via the three web sites above, I took a look at ALL the following in this alphabetized list:

http://www.101sitehosting.com/Hosting_Plans/
http://www.gate.com/unix/compare_plans.htm
http://www.highlandwebhosting.com/
http://www.hostingzoom.com/services.html
http://www.hostmatters.com/plans.html
http://www.hostpc.com/http://www.westhost.com/
http://www.ipowerweb.com/
http://www.opensourcehost.com
http://www.pair.com/
http://www.serverfly.com/webhosting/index.html
http://www.site5.com/hosting/comparison.php
http://www.startlogic.com/products_prologic.html
http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/

...and I reviewed many of the others listed here on this page although I may not have listed them above.

Good luck to everyone in their web host search and I hope the info above helps!

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC

Affiliate sites

wdrupal commented 28 May 2006 at 18:20

For my UNscientific ;) web host research, I used these three web sites to help compare many web hosts to each other. They may help some folks make a decision:
...www. webhosts.thelist.com/
...www. webhostingratings.com/
...www. webhostinginspector.com/

Be careful when using sites like those. Check their link URLs for affiliate IDs and even for masking of destination URLs in the statusbar. Referring people to hosting plans can be very profitable, so many "hosting comparison" sites are actually just referring you to certain companies for a profit. The site owners make between $20 and $100 for each person that they refer. Most "hosting plan directory/review/comparison" sites cannot be trusted.

Thanks for the very insightful info

Walt Esquivel commented 18 August 2006 at 14:32

Thanks for your insightful observation. Yes, I've noticed the links here and there on some of the "hosting comparison" sites and I'm sure some of the ones I don't see are in fact masking the URLs.

Overall, I find the sites helpful, even if they have an agenda in making money through referrals. I visit the sites, see what they say, look around at features, and, in the process, learn a bit and also whittle down the choices. It's the process I used for DreamHost, and I'm happy thus far with my decision.

I think everyone has to "pay the light bill" in some manner, so you see the activity you described and other activity such as consultants posting their "services" signatures here and there. I see nothing wrong with it and it just goes back to the old saying, "caveat emptor" (let the buyer beware). As a discerning buyer, it's not so much a matter of trust/no trust as it is gleaning bits of data to make a decision.

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA
President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

DH to site5

solutiondrop commented 28 February 2006 at 03:44

I signed up for a monster code plan with dreamhost. The package is incredible, but the speed is quite hard to deal with. I've only tried developing a few drupal 4.7 sites with a fairly basic core code and a few extra modules running. Sometimes my page loads are about 1 to 1.5 seconds and often each page takes over 30 seconds to load. On my other server where I have 3 fully developed 4.6 and 4.7 drupal sites and the page load time is almost always under 1.5 seconds. I'm thinking of moving away from my current host for many reasons I'd rather not get into, but one of the things I'll miss most is the query and page load speeds.

Another problem I've had is when I set up a mySQL db for a fresh install it has taken hours for the subdomain to be usable. In other words I've had to wait over 6 hours for to use phpMyAdmin for a project I'm ready to start work with. This has happened about 3 times and 3 other times the subdomain becomes usable within 15 minutes.

So, I'm just about to sign up for site5 and opt out with Dreamhost. One of the main reasons I choose DH was the 97 day moneyback guarantee. I'm in a lucky position to have the convenience of continuing to use my current host while shopping around. I hope the site5 proves to be a good trial. I'll post back here in a few weeks after I develope a little with site5.

Any updates on site5?

Walt Esquivel commented 22 March 2006 at 17:42

Hi DS,

It's almost been a month since your 2/27 post and I was wondering if you've had a chance to work with site5 in order to post any feedback here. Any pros or cons would be great to read.

Thank you in advance for your reply!

Much appreciated!

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----
Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659

Site 5

stevryn commented 24 March 2006 at 16:12

I just started hosting with Site 5 about 3 weeks ago, so far everything has been excellent. I had a trouble ticket opened and it was answered promptly. The entire issue was handled well, with responses to my question being given sometimes within minutes of the request. The offer pretty decent hosting plans and if you prepay you get the best deal. Their interface is very easy to use (especially for a novice user such as myself) So far thumbs up for me with Site 5!!

DreamHost and site5

solutiondrop commented 29 March 2006 at 18:52

Well, I've been usng site5 for a little over a month now, and doing pretty much the same thing that I did on the DreamHost Account I had; setting up a few Drupal 4.7 beta 5 and 6 test sites, and am now developing 3 full drupal sites with site5 as the host. I can honestly say that site5 is excellent. I think it is better than Dreamhost due to ease of use, as it uses a modified version of cPanel that I am familiar with. I haven't really found any cons yet, just all pros.

I'd like to preface the following by stating that this is hardly a scientific comparison, it's only one users experience.

The difference between Dreamhost and site5 is:

1.) Page Load Time

DH - was simply awful for about 2 weeks, but the rest of the time is was wonderful. When I complained that my server was sluggish I did get a reply after 2 days about moving servers, and/or they were looking into the problem. It seems they did get things running faster on the same server because I did note that the Page Load Time was back to mostly under 1 second per page which was great.

site5 - I have been very satisfied with page load time, almost always under 1 second.

2.) Mysql

DH - It took sometimes up to 12 hours for me to create, and then be able to use, a mysql databases. This was eventually fixed. A lot of people have written about Dreamhost using a seperate server for databases. I don't feel I'm technically conversant enough to speak on this, but query times (using the devel module) were quite slow when the 2 weeks of Page Load Time I mention above occured. They were excellent when things were runnng well.

site5 - creating new databases is almost instant, so no problem there. Query times are excellent, and comparable to DH when DH was runnng well.

3.) Usability

DH - is pretty good. I was not confused by much. The DH Control Panel is fairly straight forward.

Site5 - Coming from using a cPanel envronment for the last three years it was simple for me to get used to site5's home-rolled cPanel. They have little features like site jumping, so you can easily move from account to account that are helpful.

Both DH and site5 give you the ability to have a SSH Shell Access, which is one main reason I looked into the two. On my old host I'd have to ask, then if I didn't use it for a while, the server person would turn off shell access.

I'd like to finish by saying that DH would have gotten my vote if site5 didn't exist. The problems I had with them were not insurmountable, and they were all fixed and relatively quickly. Since I haven't had any reason to contact site5 tech support I can't rate site5 for support. That is a good thing. DH support was relatively quick, between 4-48 hours response, with an average of 8 or so hours. Each problem I had was eventually fixed. My main problem was those 2 weeks when the server I was on was very sluggish.

THANK YOU!

Walt Esquivel commented 18 August 2006 at 14:33

DS,

Thanks for your excellent reply! It's very thorough and easy to follow!

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA
President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

After 14 months with Dreamhost

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 02:39

I'm a very happy customer. It works exceedingly well with Drupal because of the freedom they give you in setting up multiple sites, and administering multiple databases. I have about 10 domains setup on Dreamhost now, and I've only seen 1 connection problem that lasted less than 30 seconds in those 14 months. Not bad for hosting that cost me about $4/mo with a $65 off coupon.

I've noticed that they've improved the database creation process a lot since I first signed up. It used to take up to 12 hours or so to create a database (avg. 2-3 hours), but now most are created within 30 mins in my experience. They also changed it so you could have all your databases on the same server and administer them all from the same phpMyAdmin just by pulling down a menu. I have the same connection settings now for each of my sites, which is another bonus for Drupal especially.

Shell access is also really helpful. I don't really know how I lived without it before. Now I just wget to download large movies or Drupal modules directly to the site and unpack them, and backups are a quick command away so I do them much more frequently.

They also have daily MySQL backups that you can restore yourself, and even if you delete your whole development database by accident, they'll restore it for you within a few hours. (don't ask how I know that, haha) Their support has always been within 24 hours or close to it, and they have such good deals now I might upgrade to the plan that has phone support.

I also made good use of the Darwin Streaming Server that is included. One of my sites was a Drupal media site, so I could use the Drupal video.module and Quicktime to create MP4 videos that load instantly and let you seek to any part of the video quickly. It's something that I've never seen offered on any of the other managed hosts, especially not for free with a very affordable plan.

They're by far the best hosting I've used in terms of reliability, support, and even affordability. I'm really surprised that I was able to get all 3 from the same host. Needless to say, I'll be sticking with them for much longer than these 14 months.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

Affiliate links

Z2222 commented 29 September 2006 at 03:10

Advice on hosting that also includes affiliate links cannot be trusted.

Not really.

benthere commented 30 September 2006 at 00:58

I used the same deal when I got my hosting at DreamHost over a year ago. Around $4/mo for hosting that has much more bandwidth and disk and better reliability than most $5-10/mo hosts is a good deal to me.

I recommend them because I use them. I host several sites at DreamHost. I've seen one significant period of downtime so far, just recently, that lasted about 2 hours, in over a year with them.

You can take my experiences with a grain of salt, as you should any hosting advice, but if you actually read it, it's based on firsthand experience. I host with them and I'm happy with them.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

Page load time

djorn commented 10 December 2006 at 21:33

1.) Page Load Time

DH - was simply awful for about 2 weeks, but the rest of the time is was wonderful. When I complained that my server was sluggish I did get a reply after 2 days about moving servers, and/or they were looking into the problem. It seems they did get things running faster on the same server because I did note that the Page Load Time was back to mostly under 1 second per page which was great.

site5 - I have been very satisfied with page load time, almost always under 1 second.

How can you tell if the page load time is an issue with your website or with the server? I'm having some issues with my website page load times, so am trying to figure out if it's just because I've misconfigured my drupal installation or if it's a slow server. I'm using Site5 myself.

Major problems with Site5

media girl commented 31 March 2006 at 00:20

Once upon a time they may have been a good company. But nowadays they seem to be way oversold. Today I had a site shut down with 256 pageviews. Yes, you read that right. 256 pageviews.

My other site was taken down twice a few days ago with 575 pageviews for the day. This is with major IP blocking in action, bad behavior working -- doesn't matter. In the past, that site has hit 25,000 pageviews -- real visitors -- in a day, without a problem. Now I don't think it could it 1000 without being shut down by their techs. I've had to strip down the site to a basic blog just so it doesn't disappear altogether.

Oh, and that scaling up option they've been selling? Doesn't happen. They'll take you down for "resource usage" way before you ever come close to hitting your bandwidths. An Inktomi crawl of your site could take it down on Site5.

Not recommended (any more). What has happened to Site5?

--
mediagirl.org

The biggest problem nowadays

capmex commented 17 May 2006 at 03:26

The biggest problem nowadays seems to be overselling and limiting server resources through cryptic TOS.

It's very difficult to find a good host, many people go with dreamhost, site5, etc. because of unrealistic claims of space and bandwidth, but in the end they turn down sites using certain amount of resources because they want to squeeze every bit of server resources overselling.

mediagirl, I'm very happy with my current host http://www.dwhs.net, I highly recommend them they have a limit of 150 accounts per server. Check this thread for more info: most reliable shared webhost
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory

Hmm...Site5 experiences are

venkat-rk commented 28 May 2006 at 06:27

Hmm...Site5 experiences are swinging back and forth from the positive to the negative.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

BABYLIN commented 20 January 2007 at 20:19

IM NEW @ THIS & I DONT KNOW WHAT IT IS IT A CHATROOM OR WHAT?

BBB gives dreamhost an "F" rating

James Phelps commented 15 March 2006 at 02:19

I'm reluctant to try a company with an "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau.

Click for BBB Rating.

Interesting

benthere commented 15 March 2006 at 03:58

Would be better if I could find any other hosts mentioned in BBB for comparison. They don't even list GoDaddy.

-- Ben // profilefx.com

Do you have GoDaddy?

Walt Esquivel commented 22 March 2006 at 17:48

Please see http://drupal.org/node/46707#comment-104644

Thanks for any feedback and have a great day!

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----
Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659

dwhs BBB "A" rating

capmex commented 31 March 2006 at 02:41

Glad to know my host has an "A" rating. Thanks for the link James, it's going to help me alot with a webhosting project I have.

dwhs BBB Rating
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory

DWHS bad service

seaneffel commented 5 October 2006 at 14:35

My entire hosting account was suspended by DWHS because a call to the cron.php script that supposedly maxed out the server resources. Nothing unususal being done on my site, so I can't confirm or deny this.

However, I didn't get a single email or courtesy call about the suspension. It was automatically switched off, no site access on two domains, no cpanel access, no EMAIL access, for almost 24 hours. No ticketing service as available because my login was also disabled. None of my calls were answered, the outgoing message on their phone support said to leave a message and it would be emailed to their support team.

I was originally enthusiastic about DWHS, as most people are when the see the site and services offered, but when issues like these pops up the company has the opportunity to show its real colors. So, I'm back in the market for (yet) another wehbost.

My sites are still on DWHS

capmex commented 6 October 2006 at 04:42

I have been with DWHS for more than a year now, and I haven't being suspended or have had any serious issue. In favor to them I have to tell that they have a public support forum and a backup system ticket.

In my experience this has been for me one of the most reliable hosts and I'm still very impressed by the rendering speed of my drupal sites.

I'm also aware of the limitations of inexpensive shared hosting accounts, and therefore my sites are very optimized.

There certainly is a

seaneffel commented 6 October 2006 at 20:21

There certainly is a ticketing system, but you must have an account with them to use it. if your account has any issues then you will certainly face a world of hurt. Their phone support is spotty. Usually I have to leave a message and hope for them to call back. On a previous call I asked them how large their staff was, I think the answer was less than 20, and that makes for tough times ahead if each of their server is capped at 150 clients.

There are two ticketing

capmex commented 7 October 2006 at 02:38

There are two ticketing systems, one of them didn't require any login details, that's what I meant about a backup ticketing system.

It's on their support page:
http://www.dwhs.com/support.htm

DWHS is a small company. People living in LA California can visit their datacenter and talk with some of the staff. From my perspective they are a very human company. Recently they upgraded their servers and backup systems so they also plan ahead of contingencies.

I don't mean to go back and

seaneffel commented 10 October 2006 at 16:58

I don't mean to go back and forth, I just want to point out my personal experience with DWHS so that people can take my feedback and weight it against others (like yours) and make their own decisions on a web hosting company.

I want to wrap this up by saying that there ARE two ticketing systems, one that requires a login and one that doesn't. I could not post on the login required ticket system, obviously my account was disabled. When I posted on the system that DID NOT require a login, I got a response 24 hours later that said something like "this ticketing system is no longer in use, for technical support please login here: (link to login required system)." It didn't help much, obviously because my account was disabled.

Aside from their sales team (a very knowledgable and responsive sales team for sure) I haven't experienced much human-like behavior from them in the world of support. So I'm giving them the benefit of doubt based on others strong opinions about DHWS. For the time being, I'll assume that this issue was a once in a blue moon problem like they said. But if I experience another problem of any variety or caliber, it will be goodbye time. And I'll be sure to report back.

Done with DWHS

seaneffel commented 6 November 2006 at 18:56

Just to follow up on my experience with DWHS from last month.

My account was again disactivated, the reasons unclear. I suspect some operation took up a larger than average CPU percentage, all services shut off. This includes my two sites, my admin access, ALL of my email accounts.

I got no courtesy message from them so I don't know how long my site has been down. I called tech support 6 hours ago, no answer. No call back either. The message on their "Live Chat" said there was "no staff member available at this time" and I should please open a support ticket. The ticket has been open for three hours.

I am just bringing this up because its a repeat of the same situation I had last month, I hope you all consider this before you jump onboard with DWHS. If you site doesn't have any problems, great, their services are awesome and the price is right. BUT, if you do have a problem prepare to get hosed. Their tech support is one of the least accessible I have ever used. This has cost me one full day's worth of work already.

Good bye, DWHS, I can't wait for them to reactivate me so I can grab my database and abandon them.

Bad DWHS experience

seanberto commented 12 January 2007 at 03:57

Seanjuan, I couldn't agree with you more. I wish that I had seen this post month earlier. DWHS was great at first when I had questions about their service. They sold me on a vDedicated box - which their site stated was an IBM blad server running it's own CPU and RAM - with a clustered harddrive and mysql server.

However, about a month in, my server started going down. I was told that this was because my scripts were overloading the server. They suggested I rewrite my PHP, use static HTML front pages, not run cron, not run gzip, etc. - all good advice if the problem was with CPU overload.

However, after a week of daily back and forth, they finally admitted that I was on a completely virtual box and that they just hadn't rewritten the description on their site for what their vDedicated package included after moving from blades to totally virtual hosting. Their justification for this was telling me that the fully virtual machine I was on was actually allocated more CPU power than the CPU that was installed on their old blade configurations.

My experience has been the virtual dedicated hosting is still pretty buggy technology. Regardless, I was most upset that their sales materials didn't match their product. I don't know how you can maintain an "A" BBB rating that way.

I switched to Atjeu dedicated hosting. They are great - with an average live response time of 33 seconds for "server down tickets." If you are just getting into dedicated hosting, they provide great support. At this point, however, I'm looking at fully managed dedicated hosting - particularly Rackspace. I just don't want to have to worry about managing my own server. Plus, I don't want reactionary support - I want proactive monitoring and support.

What experiences have Drupallers had with fully managed hosting in the $500-$1K/month range for a single entry level server with a RAID 1? I need uptime. Rackspace seems great - but for what they claim to provide, I'm not sure how they can come in with such low prices. I've seen similar fully managed packages for twice the price, same hardware.

-s

Sean Larkin

They have a "C" rating now...

paulrooney commented 13 September 2006 at 19:29

http://www.labbb.org/BBBWeb/Forms/Business/CompanyReportPage_Expository....

Thanks for the update

Walt Esquivel commented 13 September 2006 at 21:38

Here's what the "C" rating means, per the BBB:

Acceptable rating. We know of no reason not to do business with this company. If the level of this rating relates to anything specific that we know might be of concern to consumers, it is stated in this report. Read our full report to determine if you have questions or concerns.

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA
President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

DH blogged about the rating

benthere commented 17 October 2006 at 19:39

I came across mention about the rating in this comment from an employee on the official DH blog:

# Jeff C. Says:
May 19th, 2006 at 2:32 pm

> In short, the justification for their F grade seems to be that Dreamhost didn’t
> call them up and tell them what they did to resolve some of the complaints
> made and that Dreamhost happens to be in an industry that suffers from
> fraud.

This is exactly what the deal is.

While in the past we bought into their program, since then we’ve pretty much not bothered to officially respond to BBB complaints (even if we did resolve the matter directly with the customer). In our view the matter is between us, our customer, and the 10,000 or so people who read that customer’s weblog. :>

The fact is, in the nearly 9 years we’ve been in business we’ve somehow amassed a total of 11 complaints that - according to the BBB web site - haven’t been resolved (which is probably untrue). Eleven. That’s a rather small number of complaints for a company as old as ours. Sadly, I can probably name more than that many disgruntled ex-customers by name.

Basically, if someone is using the BBB site to help choose a web host, they’re not getting even close to an accurate picture. The BBB doesn’t know anything about web hosting, and there’s no way that you can get an accurate view of a company based on what they have to say - it’s just too small of a sample size, and you never the words of those people who’ve hosted with us for over half a decade and are happy as clams.

We’re not really interested in propping up the image of the BBB as some sort of consumer crusader. They’re a business like anyone else, and not one that seems all that useful for their stated purpose (in our opinion).

Anyhow… If someone has a concern about our services, they should come to us and resolve it. Usually, that works great, and they end up happy. If you try this and still think we’re lame and would like us to go bankrupt, post about it on your weblog, tell the hosting review sites (who already hate us after the last weblog post), tell your friends, etc. It’s word of mouth from actual customers that will make or break a company, and to that end I think we’ve done remarkably well.

I had realized that the grade was based primarily on complaint resolution, and that most of DH's complaints were resolved, just apparently not well enough resolved to get a good grade (see the bbb page for a detailed break-down of complaint status). It's interesting, though, that they say that "In our view the matter is between us, our customer, and the 10,000 or so people who read that customer’s weblog. :>" And yeah, 11 complaints in 9 years isn't so bad. Not "F" bad.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

BBB Rating for DreamHost

NewsTrend commented 16 February 2007 at 22:45

When I click your link it shows a "B" rating.

can dreamhost let you change php.ini upload "file_size"

radiofranky commented 24 March 2006 at 00:54

can dreamhost let you change php.ini upload "file_size"

a note on dreamhost

benma commented 15 May 2006 at 17:07

Hello!

After reading the generally good reviews on dreamhost here at drupal.org, I decided to try for myself. I set up a site using drupal 4.7, using ~10 contributed modules, and was quite shocked about the performance. While sometimes page generation times would be as 'low' as 2 sec, the average was around 10 sec, and 30 sec wasn't unusual.
I had already set the php memory limit to 20 M, so I sent a support request, which was answered after 2 days (in incomplete sentences) basically saying 'sorry, php is resource intensive, you will have to live with it'.

I was already starting to believe this was what I could get for what I was willing to pay, until I set up exactly the same installation on another provider I was using from before (it's all-inkl.com - unfortunately their website is in German only) - and suddenly, page generation times were always under 1 sec, averaging around 0.5 sec...

Good they have the money back guarantee at dreamhost! ;-)

Just my experience... I hope you have a better one!

Ben.

Which 10 modules did you use?

Walt Esquivel commented 15 May 2006 at 17:29

I'm currently using DreamHost and would like to know which 10 modules you used in your test.

I get concerned when I see posts such as yours because I plan on using DreamHost for a large community site and don't want long page generation times such as those which you experienced.

If you can post here the 10 modules you used, I'll try and see if I can replicate the situation, but hopefully with much lower page generation times.

Also, what country are you located in and what connection speed do you have: cable, DSN, dial-up, etc.? I use a cable connection. Your profile says Norway, but I just want to be sure. Does it make a difference that you're in Norway, that DreamHost is in the U.S., and that all-inkl.com is, I presume, in Germany? Or should all the pages load up at about the same speed regardless of what country you're in?

Thanks and I look forward to your reply.

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----

Hello Walt, the modules I'm

benma commented 15 May 2006 at 19:01

Hello Walt,

the modules I'm using are:
- bad behavior
- banner
- captcha
- gmap
- image
- insert_view
- location
- nodevote
- pathauto
- search404
- userpoints
- views
(and later devel)

Yes, I'm located in Norway, using a 6 Mbps connection, and all-inkl.com is located in Germany. Bandwith was clearly not the problem: After I installed the devel module, I could see that single sql queries would sometimes take several seconds. Add up a few of them, and you're waiting...
They were typically (but not exclusively) coming from drupal_lookup_path and cache_get (I'm actually not sure what this means, but maybe it helps somebody else...). Now those take less then a ms.

Given the number of positive reports here on drupal.org I don't think this is a typical experience at dreamhost - I would just go and try, having 3 months for testing...

Hope it helps!
Ben.

Problems with Dreamhost

malberty commented 18 August 2006 at 04:46

Dreamhost went down when CSS Reboot launched May 1st. They were down for like 2-3 days because of the server load so watch out! They are also quite expensive.

I have been using http://www.virtuosonetsolutions.com/affiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=80_0_... for my reseller account for just over a year and the amount of stuff they provide is amazing. They support just about any language you can think of and they will give you SSH root access. I highly recommend them and my customers are happy with all the options they have. Feel free to contact me with more questions!

The cost of reseller accounts is better in the beginning, but once your client base grows you can switch to a VPS solution for free.

CSS Reboot? Web hosting cost comparison

Walt Esquivel commented 24 August 2006 at 16:36

Hi malberty,

What is CSS Reboot? Was the server load issue directly because of CSS Reboot and not because of something else? If that ever happens to me, I would be sure to document everything. Of course, one runs a risk with any shared hosting company since one's "neighbors" on the server can, and often do, cause all kinds of problems. A "neighbor's" poorly written scripts can cause havoc and endless loops on the server, thus affecting one's web site in the process and, potentially, bringing the entire server down. In fact, the main advantage of having a dedicated server or VPS is that one has a much safer distance from one's "neighbors", but then again, that is not the price range I can afford at this time and thus I stay with shared servers.

Overall, I've been quite satisfied with DreamHost but they did have issues a few months ago. I also looked into Site 5, Go Daddy, ServerFly, and a multitude of others for my hosting a while back but then started seeing quite a few negative posts for quite a few of them, including Site 5. It seems to me a majority of companies mentioned on this thread have had issues, at one time or another, so I decided to stay with DreamHost and it seems to me things have worked out quite well.

My average monthly payment with DreamHost shared web hosting is under $6 US, thanks to a DreamHost discount coupon another Drupal user offerred me. And since I offer DreamHost $50 discount coupons as part of an affiliate program, I've actually been able to contribute part of my affiliate proceeds back to Drupal in order to fund further Drupal code developers in their work to help make Drupal an even better CMS. For every affiliate dollar I make because of Drupal (I track my sales), I contribute back to the Drupal project.

So how is DreamHost "quite expensive" when compared to Virtuoso Net Solutions? Are you referring to reseller accounts? I'm not aware of DreamHost offering those. Are you able to give out huge discounts through your reseller plan?

Cost comparison summary:
DreamHost without a discount, = $119.40 per year
DreamHost with a DRUPAL50DOLLARS Promo Code $50 discount coupon, = $69.40 per year
Virtuoso = $274.45 per year

Cost comparison details:
This isn't exact because the DreamHost Level 1 shared hosting plan, their lowest, offers more diskspace and data transfer than Virtuoso's highest shared hosting plan:

- - - DreamHost Level 1 Plan = $119.40/year for 20 GB diskspace, 1 TB data transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domains, etc. With a DRUPAL50DOLLARS Promo Code hosting discount coupon good for $50, the first yearly payment comes down to $69.40, or $5.78 per month.

- - - Virtuoso Net Solutions Developer Plan = $274.45/year for 15 GB diskspace, 500 GB data transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domains, etc.

Thanks for your feedback, especially on what CSS Reboot is all about. Please let me know if my calculations above are correct.

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA
President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

CSS Reboot?

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 02:48

Like Walt, I've never heard of CSS Reboot. I was a customer of Dreamhost during that time period (and still am), and I didn't experience any downtime. I got really lucky and caught one of my sites down for 30 seconds (less than a minute) once, before it came back and was working fine.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

Affiliate links

Z2222 commented 4 February 2007 at 05:33

Advice about hosting that contains affiliate links cannot be trusted. It is corrupting the quality of this thread.

Dreamhost rocks!

HSGuru commented 13 October 2006 at 14:28

I've been a happy customer for the past 6 months, and counting.
Great value for money. Great tech support.
Love them!

Dave Ganner
Home Security Guru - The web's largest Home Security resource

I'm testing several hosters,

testhosts commented 19 November 2006 at 15:12

I'm testing several hosters, and I've used a lot for almost 10 years.

I have around 60 sites with DreamHost, and the best thing I like is the possibility of using just one ftp user. It's a real time saver.
It's SQL can be a little slower than some other hosters, but those are also really more expensive.

If you want a promo code to test it out, and pay only $23 for the first year, check my site:
http://www.dreamhost97.com

I referred almost 200 happy dreamhosters. Didn't earned almost nothing, but that doesn't matter. I also used a promo code when I signed up.

The next hoster I'll evaluate is LunarPages. Already bought a package, but didn't have much time to try it out.

NFS

mfredrickson commented 27 January 2006 at 16:53

I've got to plug Nearly Free Speech.net (https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/).

Pay as you go, excellent service, bare bones. You won't get everything*, but if you don't need everything, why pay for it?

I use it to put up demos of stuff I'm working on. Nothing hardcore, but then why pay $8 for something so simple? I'll stick to my $.10/month plan, thank you very much.

*Everything: SSL, subdir = subdomain hack, cPanel, e-mail hosting (you do get forwarding), Tomcat (this one they need to change - HTTP is HTTP is HTTP...), kitchen sink ...

interesting one

Adrian Freed commented 22 February 2006 at 17:23

but they don't support static IP or https or

"A partial list of servers that will not work with our system includes: Shoutcast, Icecast, RealServer, video streaming servers (beyond what can be done with standard HTTP), Tomcat, MUD servers, email servers, anonymous FTP servers, gaming servers, and IRC bots and servers (though many web-based chat programs do work)."

HostRocket

bullfrog commented 27 January 2006 at 17:23

They're solid. My site's only ever been down for rare routine maintenance. Bandwith and response speed is good to excellent. The 24/7 helpdesk has always responded to tickets within a couple hours, and the help has been of a high quality. Though I've not used it they have Fantastico ready off the control panel for point and click installation of most of the popular OpenSource aps (including Drupal). Price is competetive (US$11/month for 3 gig space on a quarterly plan is my current price)

opensourcehost $

kae commented 20 March 2006 at 20:38

opensourcehost is only $9 / mo for 1 domain.

Majordomo

D3sign3r commented 28 January 2006 at 09:48

I'm using majordomo.ru

Unlimited traffic
500mb space
10 domains
Unlimited subdomains
PHP 4.x, 5.x
MySQL (10 databases)
Free domain (ru, com, org, net)
24/7 support via mail or phone (only St. Petersburg :)
etc... It costs $7.2/month

---
Sorry for my english ;)
Greetings from Russia!

What About Hosting of Drupal For Russians?

pfc commented 31 January 2006 at 06:17

Dear Friends,

I found a lot of good words about Drupal CMS. Nevertheless there is a problem of a cheep, reliable and effective hosting for it.

What about to start a host company for Russian-American Exchange Programs Alumni? We have a plan to create a new media for Russian professionals in the form of distributed high integrated portal on the base of Drupal. What is necessary: base software of Drupal installed on your host and many separate sites hosted by your company for money of some of 51 000 alumni here in Russia..

See information of "Professionals For Cooperation" Association at http://www.prof.msu.ru/eng/index.html for details. Now I am ready to start trial hosting of my site www.amo.ru which will be redesigned by Drupal soon.

Dr. Valeriy A. Zaytsev

"Professionals For Cooperation" Russian Association

For contacts:

54, Yubileyniy Prospect, the City of Reutov,
Moscow Region, 143969, Russia

E-mail: vaz@reutov.net

nice

Gighen commented 12 March 2006 at 11:38

It's nice if you have some projects mainly related to russia... but the website is in russian :(

http://goodidea.afiua.com

.....drupal coming soon

Thanks for the positive comment!

chameleonwebhosting commented 1 February 2006 at 11:57

Thanks for the positive comments. We do try our best.

The scripts are changing fairly regularly since they go out of date so fast and more get added.

As for the hosting itself, we've been trying to make it as fast as possible, we claim instant account activation, and to be honest, it's as close to instant as i've seen so far. The account is accessable instantly, but the domain registration is usually complete within minutes so you can view your .com (or whatever) within minutes through your browser.

Our suport staff however are fully trained and highly qualified so that we can offer you the best possible support.

www.highlandwebhosting.com

What about EUROPEAN hosting providers?

ortles commented 4 February 2006 at 09:45

Hi, let's start a new thread for evaluating hosting providers

all the posts I've seen in this thread and its 2005 edition seem
to miss one kind of info which I think is important.

I don't know about you, but having my data, content and servers
under direct influence of laws and judges which
I cannot (even just in theory) control or influence by voting or writing
to a Parliament which I elected would really bother me. Yes, I
do know that in many other cases having your local police unable to
immediately block your website is a plus, but this is not my case.

So, can anybody name competent, reliable, Drupal-friendly hosting
providers.. ...which are a company 100% based in any EU country,
not USA, with an EU based datacenter? The only one I've seen in
these nodes is flexservers.com. Any others?

Thanks,
O.

To be honest, so long as you

chameleonwebhosting commented 6 February 2006 at 08:40

To be honest, so long as you are happy with the Terms and Conditions with a host, i can't really see an issue with where the servers are located.

What i mean by this is that hosts will obviously be bound by the laws and rules of the country/datacentre that their services are hosted in, and so these rules would be factored into the T&C's. If you aren't happy with those T&C's then move onto the next host on your list. that's about the best advice i can give on that.

Data propogation through the internet is that fast nowadays that it doesn't make much difference where the servers are geographically located, and for most the servers will be closer to their target audience.

www.highlandwebhosting.com

European Data Protection Act

bullfrog commented 7 February 2006 at 10:47

Hi, a bit of education time

It has nothing to do with the hosters T&Cs, but with European law.

The European Data Protection Act is an all encompasing piece of legislation that all EU countries must follow as a minimum. Most have enacted much more rigourous protocals. In all cases there is an assumption of jurisdiction. A European company who is holding personal information on a European consumer *must* comply with the act as its enacted in their country. If it doesn't it can face significant fines or even prosecution.

I won't go into the various details of the act, but one of the key articles is an assumption of jurisdiction. A complying company must host personal data on a physical site within the EU. This has nothing to do with technical capability and everything to do with the law. If the physical site is within the EU, then the appropriate legal body has full legal control (ie it can force the hosting company to comply with all aspects of the legislation). For most countries it is adequate to be in another EU country as there is legal protocals and cooperation between EU nations. However, some EU countries are even more strict and legislate that data must be hosted within the native country. This is a disputed restriction as it goes against EU law.

Some companies do try to get around this by gaining positive consent from the consumer (Microsoft significantly). This is both technically incorrect and also against the spirit of the legislation.

Any hosting body outside the EU, irrespective of its personal morality, or compliance with its local laws, can legally ignore any foriegn legislation.

So, the request is valid. What EU Drupal friendly hosters are out there?

What you said is true, but

chameleonwebhosting commented 8 February 2006 at 15:26

What you said is true, but im not going to start a debate in this thread.

As you have already stated, if there is a host based outside of the EU, it doesn't have to face the rigours of EU law (which in my opinion, could do with a review, but that could be said about any nations law lol), so you could use a foreign host for your site. Just so long as you kept data yourself, and as long as you aren't resident in one of the said EU countries that only allow hosting on hosts within that country.

This however i feel is a breach of that persons (i.e. the Owner) rights as it may be more cost effective to have hosting elsewhere.

www.highlandwebhosting.com

"Data propogation through

ortles commented 14 February 2006 at 09:10

"Data propogation through the internet is that fast nowadays that it doesn't make much difference where the servers are geographically located"

To be honest, "it doesn't" my ass. It does make a whole world of difference. As
Bullfrog already explained, it has nothing to do with T&C. If webmaster,
hosting company and datacenter physically and legally reside all under
one set of laws (whateve that is) it is one thing. If not things change completely: do you really fail to see it?
Who cares if on average users get
data one second earlier? Or if the monthly bill is a few dollar higher?

Say I publish my opinions in a way legal where I live (country A) on a server
hosted in Country B, by a company registered in Country C. This means that
if "freedom of speech" and privacy have, shall we say, a different legal
meaning in either Country B or Country C, anybody in those two countries can shut me down, WITHOUT any possibility for me to legally complain, or
VOTE to make the applied laws change. As a matter of fact, I am simply
amazed this issue doesn't come out every other day.

European or UK hosting

Minty commented 15 February 2006 at 08:58

Without restarting the debate on legal issues, can anyone suggest any European, or UK hosts?

How about a list of questions to ask a potential host - that could be helpful to many users.

And apart from reading opinions in forums, how do you evaluate the responses and test reliability without signing up?

Typhon

fgm

French

Paris, France

commented 8 April 2006 at 22:09

As I suggested in a previous thread on this question, Typhon is a hosting company in the EU (France, actually), which I find efficient, and that can help you abide by your EU data protection obligations (check with your lawyer, though).

See http://drupal.org/node/19674 for details.

helderhosting.nl

alexanderpas commented 2 June 2006 at 11:46

if you're looking for a simple clear host i suggest www.helderhosting.nl
there servers are located in AMSIX

for opinions about helderhosting, you can always look in: http://webhosters.nl/gegevens.php?id=1805 (dutch)

less == more

site5.com

ryooki commented 13 February 2006 at 11:47

I posted a while back also looking for a good host provider that was fast. I had been hosting with ixwebhosting.com, which had 24hr chat support, and an inexpensive plan. But, my site was incredibally slow. My website was hosted on 1 sever, and my database on another. I don't think this is a good solution.

I've just moved to site5.com, and I'm amazed how much faster everything is. It responds like I expect it to. Click, and there is my page! wow. no 5 sec or 10 sec or 30sec delay. They have 24hr email / trouble ticket support, which is not quite as fast as the chat support. But, they seem to be very helpful and responsive. They don't do domain hosting, which is the only draw back I've seen. I'm hosting 3 sites there right now through a multisite package. It's 7.77-8.77 per month depending on the amount of time you pay for in advance. They also offer fantastico, which is nice since it'll automatically install/setup everything for your for drupal and other software.

My sites:
www.liberalthinkers.com - ported over from old server, but I am looking at changing to the new version of drupal.
www.herringimages.com - ported over from old server. still working out a few bugs.
www.thehateguild.com - freshly installed via fantastico
___
www.liberalthinkers.org - a community for liberal viewpoints.

Fastest hosts

Timotheos commented 14 February 2006 at 17:23

Thanks for the pointers to your sites ryooki. The top one I think should be liberalthinkers.org like in your sig.

Anyway, I've been scouring this thread and the previous one trying to find the drupal sites that are running the fastest (for those who gave examples). Lots of factors behind that I know but it looks like site5 and hostpc really cook.

I'm on a 1and1 package right now which was one of the free 3yr deals so I can't complain but it does have that 2-5 second delay. Their mySQL hosting is on another server which can't be good. I'm not impressed so I'm looking to move.

Thanks,
Tim

more site5 examples

cel4145 commented 14 February 2006 at 20:20

I've been using site5 for about six months now and love it. Their True Multisite setup is one of the things that has really sold me on them.

Here are a couple of my site5 hosted sites:

kairosnews.org
cyberdash.com

Note that Kairosnews has over 4600 nodes and 4400 comments, so you can see a little of how Drupal runs on a medium sized site hosted on site5.

what them did u use for ur kairosnews.com?

radiofranky commented 31 May 2006 at 05:59

what them did u use for ur kairosnews.com?. thanks

theme

cel4145 commented 31 May 2006 at 22:19

It's a combination of more than one theme with some personal touches.

-----
Charlie Lowe | cyberdash
Tips for posting to the Drupal forums

hostpc examples

peter_n commented 23 February 2006 at 02:20

Have been running on hostpc for a couple of months now and things are going well. I did have to tweak some settings to get php to allocate more memory with some modules, but otherwise everything is running smoothly.

Peter
----------------------------------
neish.net | botanicalartistry.com

another Hostpc example

nels commented 13 July 2006 at 15:26

I've been running my band's site on hostpc for about half a year now. Overall, I'm quite satisfied. Check it out: www.vcsb.com. They have an Installatron - Drupal 4.7.2 installer, and use Directadmin control panel.

Their shared hosting is (currently) $35/yr for 1 GB of space, 10,000 MB monthly transfer..

I have used their support for some small hosting things via their Ticket system and IRC, and got great fast help.

::hugs and kisses::

down for 1 minute

kae commented 14 February 2006 at 19:17

my hosting provider keeps going down for 1 minute at a time.

This is the explanation they gave me
The server isn't going "down". There is software on the server that limits the resources of all the daemons. If httpd begins to get out of control it will kill the offending processes. If there are too many open processes it may kill the main httpd thread which causes httpd to stop serving pages momentarily. httpd is never offline for more than a couple of minutes when this happens. I've actually increased the limits slightly to try and keep it from killing the main thread, however most times it is best to kill the offending processes rather than having the server really go down.

is this a common way to do things? do you have this problem? it's not good for my users to keep getting "cannot connect to site"

my host says tries try again after 1 minute

Happened to me

kbahey commented 14 February 2006 at 21:44

This happened to me sometime back ...

Check the acceptable use policy of the hosting company.

You will probably find that they limit memory (e.g. 8M), CPU (so and so seconds per process) and number of process (8 or whatever) for your account.

They have a watchdog process that monitors if you exceeded resources, and kills the processes that do.

This means that cron will die sometimes (you will see "previous cron run did not complete").

Once your site gets over a certain size (page views, number of nodes, ...etc.), this will be a no-win situation.

You have to upgrade your hosting pages for less restrictive limits, find another host, or go VPS/dedicated.
--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

This is happening to me too

ajwwong commented 15 February 2006 at 19:13

When my cron jobs run -- occasionally I can't get onto my site
and my cron job fails.

Using: Siteground.com

I emailed them. They told me to change how frequently I run my crons (I was running them every 30 mins). We'll see how it goes.

I guess these guys are ok, but mostly, probably, for smaller sites.

Albert
www.ithou.org

Not so sure anymore

nomad411 commented 7 May 2006 at 10:29

I used to love them, support was quick and all, but after a few tickets (7 maximum they tell me) then each request for support costs $12.

That includes any questions of a technical nature, even reporting that your site is down it seems.

Gérard

Agree 100%

ajwwong commented 8 May 2006 at 16:18

The new 7 ticket limit for Siteground is a killer. And I'd advise people not to use them for that reason.

They *were* good, but now after this limit, I'm gonna move when my time is up there. No question about it.

Albert
www.ithou.org

No longer a limit...

rl commented 26 January 2007 at 05:43

I recently contacted them and asked them about the limit. Siteground said they no longer have the ticket limit. For $4.95/month, it has worked out for me. Not the fastest site though. I did notice that they throttle down loads. Initially downloads are fast and then slows down a bit for large pages. I'm happy.

Rich

Site5 seems to be it

marknewlyn commented 19 February 2006 at 00:58

I have done some looking and I am going to go with Site5 for my site (Xtreme package) unless someone here has a good reason not to. Has anyone got any complaints about Site5?

They've answered my questions, have active forums and I like their FAQ sense of humour so I've made well-educated and thought-out decision :)

Mark

Me too

dgrant commented 19 February 2006 at 01:08

I am also thinking of going with Site5. I have yet to hear anything bad about them... They have been quick when I asked them questions over email.

Site 5 - so far, so good

PakWaan commented 21 February 2006 at 17:55

I went with Site5 (Xtreme package) a week ago, after GoDaddy failed miserably( a key change which is necessary to run Drupal is "not available" on their shared hosting plans).

So far so good - they have Fantastico with Drupal 4.6.5 in their control panel, so the install took a couple clicks and all of 10 seconds. The site has been responsive, their control panel is very flexible and powerful, and has features I have to manually request for my other sites hosted at APlus.net (they have been a fantastic host for 5 years now, and I have 7 sites with them - but wanted a different host for this particular site). They do not have telephone support (one thing I miss from APlus.net which has 24-hour tollfree support) but they have 24-hour email support and responded in about 25 minutes the one time I had to ask them something.

Their price is attractive, and they provide plenty of storage space and bandwidth.

Plus - one HUGE feature I haven't seen other places - they have an automated backup system called Flashback that allows you to restore your site the way it looked at any point in the past with a couple mouse clicks. Did you mess something up this morning? Put it back to the way it was last night. It uses auto-versioning to make backups each time you change a file, and it keeps all the older versions. Unfortunately, it doesn't auto-version mySQL databases yet, but they are working on that. Almost all hosts make backups, but very few give you anyway to restore those backups at will by yourself. For more information see:

http://www.whatisflashback.com/

I'll post a follow-up should my opinion of them change at any time in the future........

aplus

kae commented 21 February 2006 at 18:36

i like that aplus has phone support. I'll try them or site5. what's aplus missing for your new site? (do both have ssh?) thanks.

My APlus Pro plan is $19.95

PakWaan commented 22 February 2006 at 12:10

My APlus Pro plan is $19.95 per month, plus $1.95 per month for any additional domains you host in the same account. They have cheaper plans (the Solo XR plan is pretty comprehensive for $9.95), but I needed an SSL certificate in my name rather than the included shared certificate for my eCommerce site, and you can't do that without the Pro plan.

Site5, I believe, does allow you to use your own certificate for a one-time $15 installation fee, so I may wind up moving all my sites over there. Plus Site5 allows you to host 5 domains in the same account for free - so the same thing with APlus will cost you $20 plus $8 for the additional 4 domains - $28 per month compared to $8.77 per month at Site5 ($7.77 per month if you pre-pay for 2 years).

I wanted a different host for this account because one of my sites has very good Google PageRank, and is in a category that is related to my new portal site. I would like to put links to the new site on the old site, but if you do that on a shared account (same IP address), Google will penalize you. From everything I've read on the Google forum at WebmasterWorld (THE place for everything web-related at http://www.webmasterworld.com ), hosting multiple sites on the same account that link to each other can really hurt you with Google. I had a good friend who had a PR6 site drop to PR4 after he started linking his other related sites together. He dropped from top 5 on Google for his search terms to the 3rd page overnight - into the Google penalty box you go!

I have another account at Hostway that's costing me $45 each quarter for a single domain - I did a lot of custom work on that one that's specific to the host, so I just haven't had time to re-do all my custom scripts to move it elsewhere.

Hope that helps.

downtime

kae commented 22 February 2006 at 16:42

pakwan, that's really useful information! thank you very much. sounds like site5 has ssh. I may migrate over there because my host (opensourcehost) goes down for 1 minute a lot. Has site5 done that to your accounts?

I wouldn't put up with that

PakWaan commented 23 February 2006 at 01:42

I wouldn't put up with that any longer than it took to set up a new account with someone else. I looked at opensourcehost when I was shopping around - their website was down twice when I tried to get information, and decided there was NO WAY they would get my business when they couldn't keep their own site up.

osh

kae commented 8 March 2006 at 17:44

interesting. 2 other users have said they've seen no downtimes. you are the first person who has confirmed my impression. thank you. (the downtimes frequency has gone down)

Yes, site5 has SSH, but this

venkat-rk commented 8 March 2006 at 03:26

Yes, site5 has SSH, but this is not available for any of the additional FTP accounts you create. Those will be plain FTP only, unless their policy has changed in the last couple of months.

thx

kae commented 8 March 2006 at 17:45

thank you. i'm looking at vps on westhost. good price. tollfree phone 24/7

Can you please elaborate on GoDaddy?

Walt Esquivel commented 22 March 2006 at 18:49

Please see http://drupal.org/node/46707#comment-104644

Thanks for any feedback and have a great day!

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----
Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659

1AND1 Hosting

pcs305 commented 22 February 2006 at 16:15

I've been using 1and1 for 2 years now and switched to the developer package in January while it was on special for $9.95.
The package includes :
Space 30,000 MB
Transfer 1,500 GB
FTP Accounts 50
100 X 100MB MySQL db's
5 free domains etc. etc.

My sites is low volume (for now) and up untill now I have had excellent service from them. The only gripe I have is the naming convention they use for the MySQL db's and ftp accounts.

Drupal installed and runs like a dream and the tech support from 1and1 was good the few times I had to use it.

Ian

www.pcs305.com

Another 1and1 user...

genemcc commented 15 May 2006 at 20:54

1 and 1 has been very good for me as well. For those looking for a European host 1 and 1 is also a good choice. They have a presence in Europe and the US.

1and1...

alexandreracine commented 14 June 2006 at 18:43

1and1.com - The good, the bad and the ugly. This is my critique about 1and1.

With 1and1, you are a number. Better not have some troubles with them, cause you'll have those cut and paste answers right away.

Alexandre Racine

www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc

www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal

Westhost

llyra commented 21 February 2006 at 19:23

I just moved my personal site to westhost.com. I have a client there and I like the fact that I have 'server' type access (unlike a lot of the shared hosts). Its not as cheap as a lot of the shared hosting plans out there, so that may deter folks a bit.

Was using Crystaltech and they were fine but I went to westhost for a Linux host (Crystaltech is windows).

Stay away from GoDaddy.com. OK to have as your domain registrar but not for hosting.

I'd stay away from GoDaddy

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 03:11

I'd stay away from GoDaddy for domains as well. Their control panel is way too slow, their transfer process is overcomplicated, and there's advertising every time you change an option.

I'm transitioning all of my domains to NameCheap as they expire from GoDaddy. It's less than a dollar more expensive, but it saves a lot of frustration.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

ipowerweb

seaneffel commented 23 February 2006 at 19:02

I've been using iPowerweb for some time now and have few complaints. It's like 7.95/mo and includes support for mysql and php and such. Its nice they have their own secure phpmyadmin application installed on their account control panel.

PS. I used to use a great

seaneffel commented 23 February 2006 at 19:04

PS. I used to use a great great great company called Burlee.com, based in S. Burlington VT, and they were the best hosting experience I ever had in my life. Then they were bought by Interland and their service went to shit.

Wow, that would have been

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 03:13

Wow, that would have been great for me. I live not that far away from Burlington and I would have loved to support a local business with quick access times because they're so close. Too bad they went downhill.

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Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

used to host

orion94nl commented 23 February 2006 at 22:37

with iPowerweb but encountered a lot of problems.
f.i. no lock tables permission, although my site nearly had traffic I always seemed to hit the max_queries per hour, as well as the famous too many connections error, etc.
Moved to another host and the website works flawless now (before that every week one of the other error popped up).

Moved to another host and . . .

Timotheos commented 23 February 2006 at 22:39

Moved to another host and the website works flawless now

And they would be?

well actually...

orion94nl commented 24 February 2006 at 21:36

I moved to opensourcehost, the one mentioned above with the 1 minute issue.

After being down for a couple of hours every week at iPowerweb due to connection errors, too many queries and whatever came across, I searched for a couple of weeks on the internet for decent hosts and that ain't an simple tasks. There are so many hosts overselling or have some restricting to amount of queries, etc.

I mailed several other drupal website owners who also host a this host and they were all satisfied (and these sites where not the smallest ones). So.. that's why I ended up with them.
With only about 2 weeks of hosting with them I can only state that I have not yet encoutered that problem. Support is quick and good.

Site5 also gets good reviews, but I was (and still am) hesitant because of the enormous growth they went through the last couple of months.
400 gb of transfer per month is a lot (for only that $7).

But going through 1000s of threads in hosting forums etc, did learn me that the more visits you get, the more problems arise with shared hosting and one should seek for VPS or dedicated server solution.
Unfortunately I am not in that position.....yet :)

orion

kae commented 24 February 2006 at 23:57

that's very interesting. my site's not busy, so i suspect that the constant 1 minute downtimes are due to a busy site (owned by someone else) on my server. if you don't have that problem, maybe i should think about staying with them. may I ask which server you are on ? I'm on the one at the top of the server list. however, when mine goes down i check the list and i have seen others down. are you logged into your site much of the day so that if it went down you'd notice? i am intrigued that you haven't had this. if you do experience it please do write back. thank you.

I have sent

orion94nl commented 25 February 2006 at 17:39

you a private e-mail as to not move away from the original intent of this topic :)

As a matter of fact...

seaneffel commented 4 December 2006 at 05:09

Almost as soon as I talked up ipowerweb then I started to get the 'too many connections' and 'max queries' errors. I moved to dwhs.com, but they suspended my account three times without notice with no information more than "your cron job is breaking our server". Now I am back on the market for a new host.

Surpasshosting

fool2 commented 25 February 2006 at 19:57

http://www.surpasshosting.com

They're pretty good. Never had a problem with Drupal.

They also have "OC Plans" here: http://www.surpasshosting.com/ocplans.php

The point is you pay at ones for an entire one-year plan... but 59.00 is less than 5.00 a month for 5GB storage 100GB BW

They also have all the right things installed- I haven't run into any obstacles yet. Everything from dom_xml to mod_rewrite, unlimited mysql databases, and they also offer developer's plans that have both php4 and 5.

Also, on IpowerWeb they also don't have clean url (mod_rewrite) support.

No support

seaneffel commented 4 December 2006 at 05:14

No phone support at surpass? Not even a little?

westhost

kae commented 8 March 2006 at 17:48

http://drupal.org/node/42316#comment-100192
westhost is highly recommended.
it's vps, which means simulation of a dedicated server.
$4 up. 24/7 tollfree phone. great user review.

Bluehost - Webhosting for Drupal, Ruby, RoR, Python, and CGI

hofmax commented 11 March 2006 at 20:38

If you want all the above at a very competitve price (6.95$/Month)
then bluehost offers a very good package.

10gigs of storage and and 250gigs monthly bandwidth is a strong selling point.
I have been with them since last year and never had any problems. If there were any queries their support to care of it instantly. For more general questions they run their own support forum at bluehostforum.com

Add it all up and you have a really good value for money service with lots of features run by pros.

is that 24/7 tech -phone-

seaneffel commented 13 March 2006 at 21:07

is that 24/7 tech -phone- support too? That's a fairly important thing...

Thanks!

Bluehost has CPU limits that shut sites down

phoebe-1 commented 17 March 2006 at 15:23

As I've said elsewhere on this board, Bluehost has recently introduced CPU limits for its shared servers.

If any process on your site uses more than 20% of CPU resources, your users will get a red error page that takes several minutes to clear before access is restored. A very small and not well-visited blog was enough to shut us down repeatedly.

I am in the process of moving our community off Bluehost because there is no way I would even attempt a reasonably busy php based site on their shared hosting.

If you're running a personal blog, you might be okay, but I would NOT recommend them for a dynamic community site of any real size.

They're good for static sites, though.

Phoebe
--
Visit The Town
meet ~ discuss ~ connect
www.the-town.org

I have had that...

casperl commented 31 March 2006 at 09:26

I have had that problem with Bluehost, but never on the actual production of a Drupal site. I currently run eight different, moderately busy Drupal sites on Bluehost. I have both the Drupal cache and throttle enabled and none of the sites have overrun CPU resources.

But I have scheduled Drupal CRON tasks for 3am USA time (9am ZA time) for all above sites. That was a mistake! Coming into work, at 8h55 I started backing up the Drupal MySQL databases on Bluehost and 9h01 (za time) I was locked out. Blindingly obvious in hindsight....

Now I (try to) think before I do.

In retrospect, preserving CPU cycles is a magnificent feature of Bluehost. Thus, it guarantees that every site will actually run acceptably, and that no other 'dumb bunny' that makes the 'dumb bunny' mistakes I made which will cause my sites to run slowly.

To recap, a well configured Drupal site will not let the CPU cycles shoot sky-high. That is what 'throttle' is for! Inefficient code will get you locked out though, and that is a GOOD if not ESSENTIAL feature, not a BAD feature!

For the rest, the text below is excerpted from an email reply on a Linux mailing list that I sent to someone recommending Bluehost for Drupal hosting:

> Try bluehost.com - http://www.bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html

> I have had a problem with Drupal CMS being hosted in SA - required much more than za ISP's 5Gb available bandwidth. Got hit with R1,400 acc. for excess bandwidth one month. http://drupal.org/node/45094
> I have never looked back since Bluehost, moved many accounts there and now host numerous CMS systems on Bluehost, and growing!

> > Can anyone suggest something in the following range:

> > - Must be Linux (of course)
> Yes + MySQL + Apache
> > - Disk Space : At least 250 Mb
> 10 Gb
> > - Transfers : At least 1G
> 250Gb p/m
> > - Mailboxes : 10+ (or even unlimited)
> 2500
> > - Databases : MySQL (and maybe Postgre) unlimited DB's
> MySQL + Postgress - 50Db's
> > - FTP (at least more than one)
> Unlimited FTP acc. can be set up to point to individual dirs on add-on or sub-domains - one main FTP / SFTP + SSH account.
> > - Support for PHP,Perl,CGI (and maybe JSP/Tomcat?)
> PHP + Perl + Ruby/Ruby on Rails + Python + Flash +
> > - Webmail
> 3 x Different clients
> > - FrontPage extensions
> Yes
> > - 5+ Sub-Domains
> 1 .com domain reg. free + 5 add-op domains + 20 subdomains as xyz.mydomain.com + 20 parked domains
> > In the pricing department I am looking for something in the $1.50 to
> $6.95 (R42 p/m) for 24m contract - how cheap do you want to pay? - for 6 full domains this is R7 p/m per domain! Get it now while the Rand is strong!
> 24 or 12 month contract.
> 3 month contracts also available - more expensive
> > There are just too many to review and personal opinion and recommendation will be much better and easier
> Their support knocks the sox off the .co.za ISP support zombies. USA timezone though - Sunday night AM (USA) DNS server crash only comes online Monday PM (ZA) time.
> Other features = Fantastico installer for hordes of PHP packages - saves lots of time for instant instalion of support tickets, phplist, Drupal etc sites.
> Boss chappie of Bluehost runs own blog: http://mattheaton.com
> Bluehost located in Orem, Utah pop. 80,000. Bluehost physically located in the old Word Perfect/Novell Campus in Utah Valley (a small silicon valley)
> SSH Lag times noticeable but still better than others
> SFTP transfers really persistent - best I've ever seen. Pure FTP transfers sux though!
> Speed noticeable as non-za website. Still better than average.
> Overall impression: these are good guys!
> Two caveats:
> 1) - you get exactly what they offer - what they don't offer, you just don't get!
> 2) - not recommended as development platform. This is a hosting environment. CanDo for small things, but works better when developing on local PC and uploading to Bluehost for testing.

how about DH2.NET

Rashadh-1 commented 14 March 2006 at 13:14

Did anybody try DH2.NET ? the price comparing to the features looks great, but I still want someone who hosted drupal their to recommend it

check out addyour.net500

Ryan Macy commented 17 March 2006 at 15:00

check out addyour.net

500 megabytes of space
5 GB monthly transfer
5 MySQL databases
2 e-mail accounts
FTP access
cPanel
Fantastico DeLuxe (new)
5 FTP accounts
5 subdomains
5 addon domains
5 parked domains
Fantastico: easy autoinstaller
for most popular scripts (phpBB, WordPress etc.)
PHPMyAdmin
Email forwarders
Webmail
Spam filtering
Access/error logs

all free :P i have been using them for about 3 months now and no problems, they are always upgrading for the users and they provide great help ont thier forums, plus strong community!

I am looking for people to help me start and mantain a drupal <br>help website. please e-mail me at<br>capnmacy@yahoo.com if wish to help.

New plans at Highland Webhosting!

chameleonwebhosting commented 29 March 2006 at 15:21

Just to let everyone know, there's two new Drupal friendly plans on offer from Highland Webhosting. The services upgrades have been made cheaper, with the biggest savings on the more commonly used items.

Highland Webhosting

Bluehost Webhosting

hofmax commented 29 March 2006 at 19:06

With regards to the CPU Limit that bluehost.com imposes on its shared hosting accounts. Most hosting companies do this and it requires a very demanding application to run in order to eat up 20% of the CPU. I can´t imagine that a modestly frequented blog should use this much CPU.
If you have any questions about how reliable dynamic sites run on bluehost sites you should go to their bluehostforum and ask some of the members there.

Many of them have fairly sophisticated dynamic sites, written in PHP,Ruby and ROR, or Python or even some other language such as Perl. As far as I can see there have not been major problems. The only major hickup was a guy who had installed a PHPbb forum mod that made his site so slow that he repeatedly overshot the CPU limit.

I´ll raise this issue in the bluehostforum and see what members have to say.
I´ll keep you posted.

Max

P.S.: bluehost.com does have 24/7 support

matrix server

zom commented 29 March 2006 at 19:27

I'm using matrix server (group of the planet) I must say I'm very happy about the quality of the hosting for more than one year now, interface and price. I used racksaft wich was nice too. But I prefere the matrix wich is cheaper

zom, what post are you replying to?

Walt Esquivel commented 29 March 2006 at 20:11

In the future, simply click on "Reply" for the appropriate post and Drupal will take care of adding your comments to the applicable thread instead of some unrelated one.

Thank you.

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----
Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659

Maybe I missunderstood, but

zom commented 30 March 2006 at 05:56

Maybe I missunderstood, but I thought this topic was open to give evaluation about hosting providers.
Isn't so ?

Replies have a proper place in threads

Walt Esquivel commented 30 March 2006 at 13:24

Hi zom,

I hope all is well in France. Please take my reply as helpful advice. :)

Yes, this topic is definitely open to give evaluation on hosting providers, and I highly encourage it! However, as with any forum, one needs to follow the correct posting procedures.

Although both you and hofmax have very valid hosting provider info that does in fact belong on this page as part of the original article (thank you!), both you and hofmax responded to "New plans at Highland Webhosting!" with replies that don't have anything to do with Highland Webhosting. It appears you clicked on the "Reply" button for the Highlands thread instead of hitting the "add new comment" button for the overall thread near the top of your browser. I noticed you did the same thing with http://drupal.org/node/40940#comment-93738 when someone replied "Looks interesting" and you replied with "smf module and drupal 4.6.5."

Basically, you need to be choose which thread you reply to and, accordingly, which "Reply" button or "add new comment" you choose. I made the same mistake before and someone kindly explained the situation to me so that I could learn, and I thanked that person for taking the time to explain things to me. :)

So, thanks for your comments, but just put them in the right place. I hope my reply makes sense to you. If not, please reply via my contact form so as to not clutter up this hosting-related page too much.

Have a great day!

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----
Drupal Users and Developers by Geographical Location
http://drupal.org/node/46659

Well thank you for those

zom commented 31 March 2006 at 01:29

Well thank you for those explications, I will take care about not mistake between "reply" and "add new comment" !
have a nice day!

hofmax, what post are you replying to?

Walt Esquivel commented 5 June 2006 at 04:24

I believe you meant to reply to http://drupal.org/node/46707#comment-103143

In the future, simply click on "Reply" for the appropriate post and Drupal will take care of adding your comments to the applicable thread instead of some unrelated one. For more info, please see http://drupal.org/node/46707#comment-107128

Thank you.

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
DreamHost Rewards Affiliate Program

What's funny is that you get

dvessel commented 8 May 2006 at 15:05

What's funny is that you get complaints either way. Oh what? CPU limit? I can't bear that!! Then at the same time if there were no limits and you have a bad neighbor trying to get a free ride on a shared host you'd get worse troubles.

If you have such demands on the server then go get some partners and share out a dedicated package if you can't bear the cost.

These limits are a good thing on shared hosts but what I think is lacking in the industry is a middle way. Something beyond the $7 a month and below the huge jump to dedicated hosting. There is a market out there for a shared plan that limits the amount of sites being hosted on one machine with higher resource limits. If a host marketed this middle ground properly they'd definitely start something big since -to my knowledge- it doesn't exist. Heh, it probably does. I just haven't searched for one.

And yeah, BlueHost is great.

Here's another discussion on hosts in here.

-joon
www.dvessel.com

Someone pointed out that you

venkat-rk commented 22 May 2006 at 11:49

Someone pointed out that you can only host additional sites on sub-domains on Bluehost. In other words, you can't host more than 1 site on Bluehost if it has a different domain name. I think that is a big let down and where Site5 scores.

Also, the Bluehost site is rather misleading. It says, "Host 6 Domains on 1 Account!!!". Those additional domains are sub-domains of the main site.

Of course, please correct me if I am wrong.

You can host additional domains on BlueHost

pathscollide commented 22 May 2006 at 12:48

Hi Ramdak,

Quick correction to the above -- you can host additional domains, and you don't have to run them as subdomains. I currently have two separate domains hosted there (on the same account).

However, I believe a subdomain is created automatically for all add-on domains, so you can use them as subdomains if you want to. If you don't, there's an entry in the BlueHost KB explaining how to prevent people from connecting via these subdomains:
http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/kb/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=152

I currently have two

venkat-rk commented 22 May 2006 at 15:27

I currently have two separate domains hosted there (on the same account)

Sorry if this sounds dumb, but do you mean separate web sites when you say two separate domains? If so, that's a big misunderstanding you helped clear up. And, the knowledge base is pretty decent too. I bookmarked it because I am evaluating Bluehost for my future needs.

Do you know how many separate web sites one account is allowed to have?

Ramdak, please forgive me

pathscollide commented 31 July 2006 at 13:55

Ramdak, please forgive me for the loooong overdue response. The answer to your question is here: http://www.bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html under "Add-on domains." You can have 6 separate domains (web sites) -- i.e. 1 main plus 5 add-on -- hosted on your single BlueHost account. I prefer the way Dreamhost manages this to the way Bluehost (using cPanel) does, but my impression from using the two is that BlueHost is far more reliable and has a lot less down time than Dreamhost. Dreamhost would indeed be a "dream" host if it was rock solid, because the features they offer are great and they cater to the power user (in ways that in my experience Site5 -- for example -- doesn't).

Thanks, appreciate the

venkat-rk commented 1 August 2006 at 02:22

Thanks, appreciate the details. Some people have recently reported lack of official support from Bluehost due to so called 'memory' issues in 4.7.2, although you can apparently run it on your own. I am loath to move because I have never had any of these memory issues and think Bluehost is simply passing the buck.

Drupal on BH.com

Z2222 commented 8 August 2006 at 06:13

You can sometimes run the latest version of Drupal on Bluehost. If it doesn't work, you are out of luck because they will tell you the latest version of Drupal is unsupported . It "has a memory problem" and that it won't work "until the Drupal team fixes it". They recommended that I use an older version of Drupal or try Joomla.

Yeah, I would stay away from

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 03:06

Yeah, I would stay away from any site that wants to charge you for "add-on domains", or more than 5 email accounts, when it doesn't really cost them anything to allow you to have as many as you want. What really costs them is bandwidth, disk, and especially CPU time. Not an extra domain or two.

I haven't had any downtime that lasted more than a few minutes with DreamHost, but I can imagine since everyone is parked on their own server, your experience may vary.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

and your link...

alexandreracine commented 12 May 2006 at 20:21

to bluehost is pointing to a refering account, witch means this will give you 97$ if we clic and register. Not too transparent heh?

Alexandre Racine

www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc

www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal

Highland not impressive from pre-sales questions I had

seanm commented 14 May 2006 at 15:21

I saw the positive responses about highland hosting and decided to take a look.

Their plans look ok, but I noticed that the prices only listed yearly prices so I decided to ask if there were month to month plans (the yearly were broken up yearly and monthly by yearly so it seemed reasonable to ask.)

I finally got someone named "Ben" who popped on the online chat client, who seemed to have either a hard time writing english sentences well, a poor command of english, or was just trying to twist the conversation.

I was told that all fees were annual only... OK I can understand some companies do that.

The refund policy is only 30 days....so I asked about whether the yearly plans were pro-rated for refunds.

Reasonable question....I kept getting back "You can get full refund if 30 days refund is used", long pauses, one closing, and reopening of the chat window by "Ben" (Unsure if he was tired of my questions or not).

Finally when I DID get an honest answer set in concrete (No refunds at all after 30 days but "hosting will be available for whole year") I decided that Highland (without some pro-rated refund after 30 days) isnt for me....

They might be excellent hosts for all I know....But personally Im not willing to pay for 12 months of service and have no recourse if there are issues after 1 month.

Just thought I would share with everyone....

SeanM

Isn't Highland simply reselling the plans of Resellers Panel?

Walt Esquivel commented 14 May 2006 at 17:04

I could be wrong, but isn't Highland simply reselling the "Business" and "Corporate" plans of Resellers Panel?

http://www.highlandwebhosting.com/?action=webhosting&submenu=compare
http://resellerspanel.com/reseller_hosting/web_hosting_plans.html

I'm not sure where Highland's "Gold" and "Platinum" plans are being resold from, if they are in fact being resold, but I did notice that Resellers Panel also allows their resellers to package custom plans in addition to the standard Business and Corporate plans.

-----
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
-----

list

kae commented 3 April 2006 at 19:42

Please feel free to post your opinions here:
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/hosts

the list of hosts is alphabetical, which will make it far easier to find info on say dreamhost than reading through this thread.

when there is enough info, we'll promote the top-rated hosts to the top of the list.

Anybody tried/currently on aplus.net

killedar commented 11 April 2006 at 19:46

Anybody tried aplus.net? I am considering them to host my drupla based website and would love to hear your experience?

There are some negative reviews on the net (that tech support is not good once you signup) and they are very aggressive telemarketers so got a little worred. But would love to know anybody's experience here.

moved from aplus to site5

drupalec-1 commented 13 April 2006 at 16:21

http://www.drupalecommerce.com/node/354#comment-97
-----
Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site written using language that Drupal beginners and intermediate users can understand. It has about 300 unfinished pages. 2 tutorials for views module under "Modules"

Site5 and multiple domain pointers?

rjung commented 16 May 2006 at 22:43

Since there are a number of folks using Site5 with Drupal here, can anyone confirm that Site5's domain pointers work for running multiple sites off a single Drupal installation? E.g., if I have a Drupal site on Site5, can I set up pointers example1.com and example2.com to point to it?

Thanks,

--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/

--R.J.

I ferreted out the following

venkat-rk commented 22 May 2006 at 11:40

I ferreted out the following threads for you as bonobo has some sites on Site5 (as I do too):
http://drupal.org/node/30857#comment-53693
http://drupal.org/node/49089

Hope this helps.

Yes

stevryn commented 22 August 2006 at 14:48

You can run multiple sites off one Drupal base install. I belive you have to have symbolic links pointing to the drupal install for it to work.

I had this working and Site5 actually helped me get it working.

HostGo, Dreamhost

iNik commented 18 May 2006 at 19:08

I'm currently on Dreamhost without problems. However, I've also used HostGo with good results running Drupal and other apps. Only reason I'm using DreamHost now is because I hosted my own site for a while and then got a string of coupons for DreamHost (not entirely sure why) which gave me a price too good to pass up.

I apologise for this, and i

chameleonwebhosting commented 27 May 2006 at 14:16

I apologise for this, and i will chase it up for you.

You do pay for the whole year when you take out the package, an yes once the 30 day trial period is over you can only get your money back in extreme cases.

To answer the other point, yes im a reseller of resellerspanel, and i have not tried to hide that fact. here's another way to look at it; Say you go to an independant mobile phone shop, they still sell the Orange, O2 and vodafone contracts, but they are selling them under their name i.e. Phones4U. They're not hiding the fact that the phones are on other companies contracts, which is exactly the same thing as im doing.

Now take Tesco Mobile for example, they're simply selling phones which uses excess bandwidth on the O2 network, but they are selling it under their own name, thus hiding the fact that they, in the end are simply resellers for O2.

Highland Webhosting

The good, the bad, and the ugly of 1and1

alexandreracine commented 31 May 2006 at 17:47

Here is my critique of 1and1.com posted here on drupal.org

Overall, not good.

Alexandre Racine

www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc

www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal

5 best hosters

Anatsim commented 31 May 2006 at 18:29

Here the list of 5 hosts: http://www.karpatchev.com/computers/hosting

All of them support Drupal.
Starting from $0.5 per month upto $8 per month with 1TB traffic !

Minervahosting

Rosamunda commented 10 June 2006 at 05:18

I think they are a us/Spain company, that is targeted principally to spanish sites, but their support is excellent.
Until now (a year now), everything seems to be very good with them.

Rosamunda
Buenos Aires | Argentina
www.ligadelconsorcista.org

site5 down briefly

edrupalec commented 12 June 2006 at 22:50

this morning one of my sites on site5 went down for a moment. I logged into site5 to find out the name of the server. I looked on site5. it said my server was up. I checked my site. It had come back up.

Do you think hosts don't count it if the server goes down for a few seconds. I know the opensourcehost.com servers have gone down with some frequency for less than one minute.

Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/troubleshooting
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/modulesexplained
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/47vs46
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/howto

It's my turn today. My

venkat-rk commented 13 June 2006 at 06:32

It's my turn today. My reseller account and all the sites on it are down since about 20 minutes. They reappeared briefly and went into hiding again. Strangely as always, the mail server is working fine. So, it's the db server that seems to be having these issues time and again.

I have come to the conclusion that Site5, despite all their recent reorganisation, is not completely reliable to use for client sites. It is not funny when you have a deadline two days away and sit staring at broken sites. Perhaps I should take Eaton's suggestion and restrict Site5 to my personal sites.

Update: Sites back again.

101sitehosting.com offers the easiest Drupal one button install

gerrybakker commented 14 June 2006 at 06:45

www.101sitehosting.com offers the easiest Drupal one button install at very reasonable rates for web hosting and domain name in one low priced package.

Just ask the owner of www.beyondsatire.us - a very popular drupal site with some of the most interesting material I have run across in years. This site highlights the truths that are now stranger than fiction, as well as the rare instances of satire that surpass reality.

interesting

edrupalec commented 14 June 2006 at 18:57

thanks for the update. I guess we'll move non-personal sites off of site5.
Please write back with what you choose. We'll probably go with dedicated servers, maybe rackspace. suggestions appreciated.

Wow... this thread is getting long...

ajwwong commented 14 June 2006 at 20:58

I've been looking at Cartika hosting recently. Just spec'cing them out. They seem like a quality operation, ... I chatted with a sales rep for a while who sounded like she knew what she was talking about....

They use Hsphere clustering and say that they *don't oversell*. And have a great reputation on WHT. I checked out some of their websites using a websearch and reverseIP and the mambo-based ones are *really* fast.

But I couldn't find any drupal sites based off of their code.... so I'm hesitant to take the plunge. Anyone on them?

They're a bit most costly than the budget hosts. $15CAD for their entry level. And you don't get promises of 25000000000 MegaSuperTeraGigaWhoppoBytes of Data Transfer. But it does seem like you are allowed to use what you pay for.

Anyhow, I could care less about price [within reason] at this stage. With the amount of time I've spent looking for a decent host, I could host my own dedicated server at rackspace for a year. [Well, almost... :-) ]

I don't mind paying for what I use at all. I just want it to work.

Albert
www.ithou.org

Well, I was ready to write

venkat-rk commented 15 June 2006 at 00:50

Well, I was ready to write off that day's outage as the odd abberration in service but I had another one yesterday and it wasn't funny.

To be fair to Site5, I found out that one of my "service outages" that lasted a couple of days (no, I am not joking!) had to do with my ISP who messed up their DNS service in such a way that none of my domains worked. Correcting that and additionally installing TreeWalk DNS on my PC took care of that.

But, when you see SQL errors, you know it has nothing to do with ISPs. And, most of the outages on Site5 seem to have to do with MySQL servers getting overloaded.

Now that Cartika Hosting has been mentioned, I am going to check that out too. Seems to be a never ending chase, this one.

Update: Cartika Hosting look professional, but the space they provide is absurd (for me). Just 2GB for a basic reseller account upto 40 domains? At 36 USD per month, that is almost twice what I paid for a 4GB account with Site5. Even their personal plans offer very paltry space.

Try www.hostorama.com 3$

Anatsim commented 20 June 2006 at 22:10

Try www.hostorama.com
3$ per month for 4GB. very quick, but only 5 domains !
------
GP4S
------

I have to (sadly) agree

rjung commented 11 July 2006 at 18:10

I have come to the conclusion that Site5, despite all their recent reorganisation, is not completely reliable to use for client sites. It is not funny when you have a deadline two days away and sit staring at broken sites. Perhaps I should take Eaton's suggestion and restrict Site5 to my personal sites.

Unfortunately, while Site5 is still working great for my personal site, I don't think I can recommend them as a host for getting-paid-to-do-this client sites. In the last few weeks, a corporate site we have hosted on Site5 has been having intermittent outages, from 20 minutes to several hours, usually from runaway processes from someone else sharing the same host. Needless to say, any kind of outage makes the customers unhappy, and having repeat problems -- with a host you recommended -- just makes things more embarassing.

Time to move to a dedicated server, methinks.

--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/

--R.J.

interesting, I have had no such problems

stevryn commented 31 July 2006 at 20:07

I recently upgraded my plan, adding 3 additional sites, two personal, 1 paid. I have had no outages reported, no problems encountered. The response time for any issues I had (which were issues created by..ahem..my own mis-calculated click of a mouse) was excellent. Overall my experience with Site5 since my original post has been excellent.

Site5 response time

Z2222 commented 8 August 2006 at 06:20

Response time is often too slow. Some of my issues never get any response. I've been waiting on one for a few weeks now. Another one never got any response.

Site5 is ok for personal sites, but don't put a client's business site on a host that doesn't offer 24/7 phone support. If site5 would add phone support I might have a better opinion of them. It would be worth raising their prices. They should at least give phone support to the more expensive hosting packages.

Two more hosts

venkat-rk commented 15 June 2006 at 00:58

Just remembered these two:

1.) Futurequest.net, which I have been looking at since 2000.
2.) trkhosting.com, which is highly recommended by Fred Langa who runs Langalist, one of the most popular newsletters on the Internet.

I won't touch the latter, though, as I read somewhere that they host adult content. But, that's just me.

anyone here have any experience with DrupalCMS.com?

ajwwong commented 16 June 2006 at 18:51

I saw their website and it looked interesting. But I'm not sure whether they're set up for support, yet, really.

I think it's run by one of the guys who helped design the architecture for the current Drupal set up. So, it sounds really good... but I haven't been able to get a hold of a sales rep, at all! So... maybe they're not really ready.

Good luck, all!

Albert
www.ithou.org

Well, these guys seem cool...

ajwwong commented 21 June 2006 at 02:12

... and I might give them a whirl...

... so, I just got off the phone with the guy who's in charge of this [DrupalCMS.com], and they seem pretty on the ball...

It's a VPS environment, so it's a bit pricier than shared. But I really want to give it a shot. Especially, since it seems like their system can integrate pretty well with og2list... and these guyz definitely seem like they know Drupal... It seems like they're rolling out some new hardware, and systems, so there might be some bumps along the way... hopefully not too many... but they're definitely very cool and very intelligent people.

I also wanted to give a shout out to Rhombic Networks... These guys are definite Drupal people also, and might be a great place to check out for shared Drupal hosting. I emailed briefly with Samat the CTO there, and he seems really on the ball and definitely a great community member / contributor. They're a small company... which has its pros and cons... but on the plus side, he seemed really cool about trying stuff out -- like playing around and helping me configure og2list -- which lots of big hosting places just wouldn't even begin to know how to do...

And if you go with either of these guys, it seems like you'd be doing a little something to help support the Drupal community too...

And that's a good feeling, somehow....

Good luck, all...

Albert
www.ithou.org

Startlogic - Who else is sufferring?

nymrulez commented 21 June 2006 at 08:02

I chose Startlogic to host my Drupal website about a month ago not knowing the first thing about how to set one up. Startlogic got fantastic reviews on several different hosting evaluation sites, including hosting-review.com.

Let the problems begin. From the moment I first tried to set Drupal up, I encountered one database-related problem after another. The first was that Startlogic's Vdeck control panel mysteriously was missing two of the permission fields necessary to setup the Drupal database. (I believe one was "create temporary tables, or something of that sort.) After several calls, e-mails, and two days of waiting, Startlogic corrected the permissions, allowing me to move forward with the development of my site.

After hours of tinkering with my site and starting to get excited about the possibilities, I encounter my next woe; the infamous "Too Many Connections" error that has been mentioned several times before in this thread. Another e-mail to Startlogic yielded a quicker, one day response. The problem was corrected.

However, after a full week of further developing my site, I realized that there was now a problem far too large for Startlogic to solve -- that their servers are simply too sluggish to run Drupal. On some occasions, it runs rather quickly - just a few seconds to display each page. However, it seems that for half of every hour I spend making modifications, the site runs almost UNUSABLY slow.

Don't get Startlogic, it simply isn't for Drupal. I will probably be switching my hosting in the next week or two to Site5. They have good prices, seem to be well-recommended in these forums, and also market themselves around their CMS services. Startlogic users, speak up! Am I the only one who uses them or has a problem with them?

phpwebhosting

drupal777 commented 27 June 2006 at 02:46

Oh, my. I guess things have changed. Dramatically. Quickly.

First, I sent a request for information on Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 2pm. Their autoresponders told me the time via email.

The response came Monday, June 26, 2006 at 5pm. That is 4 days, and 3 hours later. Even if you eliminate the weekend, that is 2 days and 3 hours later. 51 hours at the least. This is truly a poor showing.

Second, I had read somewhere that they were moving to MySQL 5 and that Drupal doesn't play nice with MySQL 5 so I asked whether I could request to "stay" on MySQL 4.

Response: No.

Third, I asked two questions in my request, but it seems that because the answer to question #1 was "no", they didn't even bother to answer question #2 (dealing with terms of service and email limitations).

All in all, anybody who goes with phpwebhosting from this point forward has to be, in my opinion, looking for a disaster.

Nick Lewis on Site5

zroger commented 5 July 2006 at 00:11

Check out Nick Lewis' excellent post on site5.

http://www.nicklewis.org/node/776

reply to Nick Lewis

mwu commented 6 July 2006 at 21:00

Nick raves about how management executive Greenfield addressed his concerns.

I tried to post on Greenfield's blog, but posting is disabled. (And it's deceptive because it gives you a field to submit comments. Only after you type it all out do you get a message saying interaction is no longer permitted on this article.)

Hi. Thanks very much for this blog. There is an issue I hope you'll address. I signed up with site5 to get flashback. I paid extra to have flashback. Then I was told it had been removed from the server to fix some bugs. I was told management would send email out in a few days about it. That was many weeks ago. Apparently flashback is no longer advertised on your website. Neither is rapid reflex. The talk on drupal.org is that you are doing bait-and-switch, that you are selling vaporware. I signed up for a one year contract to avoid the set up fee, and I've stayed, but I am upset.

I also followed the link to

venkat-rk commented 7 July 2006 at 09:53

I also followed the link to Nick article, but when I saw it had been posted in February, I just shrugged and stopped reading.

The mysterious outages on Site5 seem to be less now. May be they have really improved things. I have another three months to go, so I will wait and watch.

By the way, if you paid extra for the flashback and feel you should be refunded, try writing to the management email id on Site5. They generally tend to respond.

Cancelled account at DreamHost after 30 hrs

kloshih commented 18 July 2006 at 22:30

I signed up over the weekend with DreamHost for their Code Monster L3 plan and got online on Monday morning after having to fax a credit card authorization. Initial experience was great, I was able to quickly transfer over a copy of my existing Drupal web site and got it up and running very quickly. Their control panel isn't the easiest to use but works very well.

At the beginning, the page load times took twice the amount of time of where this existing web site is currently located (GoDaddy Deluxe Plan--yeah, I know.) I didn't end up compiling PHP from source because DreamHost had some major outages an hour or two later. Non-database PHP pages served up lightning fast however. It was just traffic between their web and database servers had connectivity problems. PHP would give up on pages after 5 minutes with a "Lost connection to..." message.

There are six ways to get technical support from DreamHost:

Via Their http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
Where you can find out the current status of any problems with their network,
Control Panel's Support Page
To submit what I imagine to be trouble tickets. However their control panel was
down during the time period I was having problems (3 hrs),
Their Wiki-Based Knowledge Base
Where you can look up strategies to improve performance. This site also suffered
the same outages and was unavailable,
Via Email to support (a) dreamhost.com
My email to support bounced, undeliverable,
Via Phone
Which I didn't try, because I knew they were probably battling fires, and
Via Fax
Which I used to send them the contents of my bounced email. This worked.
However, after 24 hours, they still haven't responded.

So, I cancelled. I don't think it would've turned out well anyways. I have no influence over the the shared hosting servers, their shared database servers or the network between them regardless of what or how much I recompile or tweak.

Online with Site5. So far so good.

kloshih commented 27 July 2006 at 16:32

After receiving my full refund from DreamHost, I signed up with Site5's Gold shared hosting plan. Here's what I've found when comparing it with my GoDaddy Deluxe Plan.

Drupal Speed
Page generation times (measured using the devel module and summarized by the graphstat module) look to be
- Site5: ~700ms, GoDaddy: ~2500ms for my light home page
- Site5: ~900ms, GoDaddy: ~2900ms for admin/modules
This may have to do with the fact that the MySQL database server seems to be running on the same machine as the web server (MySQL connections are made to localhost). Also, the standard deviation bars in graphstat look a lot shorter at Site5 than it did at GoDaddy. That seems to mean that page generation times seem to be more consistent and less to do with either web server or database server load.
The mailhandler module
I was finally able to set up mailhandler and test it out. It works great. No need to recompile PHP as with DreamHost--the module is available in their PHP 4.4.2 install. Haven't checked PHP 5.*. Oh, and I've set up a cron job that hits cron.php via their control panel. Got it set up to fire off every 5 minutes. I should add, you can create as multiple mailboxes (POP3 and IMAP) for both hosted and aliased domains. GoDaddy only supports one email address for aliased domains, a pain if you're trying to consolidate accounts.
MySQL Privileges
No more errors for "CREATE TEMPORARY" because by default you're GRANT ALL-ed. I'll note that you can also create additional database users that have restricted access via their control panel.

That's all so far. I'm pretty happy about it all in all, but I'll do more banging on it before my 60-day trial period ends and I'm committed to the 2-year contract.

Bad Luck on the DH timing

emilyf commented 17 October 2006 at 14:01

Hey Kloshih

Just wanted to let you know that the weekend you signed up DH was in the middle of some very serious server problems. We all know hosting companies encounter major meltdowns at some time in their life, and the thing I appreciate about DH is that they are honest about it and keep their clients updated rather than not respond about the real errors, which I have had happen to me with hosting companies like 1and1 and Midphase (both pretty big nightmares). In the middle of July they were experiencing problems with filesharers as well as their main UPS systems (not their fault -- problems with the building -- same place mySpace is hosted).

You should read this blog entry: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/08/01/anatomy-of-an-ongoing-disaster/
And this explanation look under Saturday July 15th: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/index.php?s=filer&paged=2

I've been with DH for months now with two separate accounts and have had nothing but good experiences. I'm running 4.7 on both and have had no issues (yet). Tech support response time has been generally very good with my problems resolved quickly. The longest I waited once was 1 day, otherwise it's been 10 minutes to 2 hours. With one issue I was having with my Darwin Streaming Server the main tech guy gave me his direct email and number.

Emily E Frazier
Independent Technology Consultant

One vote for Idologic Inc

rational@rationaldev.com commented 25 July 2006 at 16:59

I like Idologic and wrote the following review http://www.rationaldev.com/idologic-inc-hosting-review---top-quality-rel....

I would use them even if they didn't have the affiliate program like I happily used BlueWho before them. They are faster and cheaper than the BlueWho account and support has been very responsive. They seem to be getting popular though, because at the moment they have temporarily stopped orders for DirectAdmin accounts. cPanel is still available though. Starting at $15.95 you can host unlimited domains. You can find more features for you $s... but if you want something fast and reliable, I recommend Idologic. I did a lot of research when deciding and I am very happy with the results so far. Happy hosting hunting.

~-~
www.rationaldev.com

site5 crappy performance has improved

dgrant commented 26 July 2006 at 19:08

I had some really crappy performance with site5 since I signed up, but not it has gotten better. I talked to support about it and it turned out there were a couple spammers operating out of my box. They have also hired some senior sysadmins who are skilled at finding these types of things and optimizing everything. They didn't use to have people like that hired specifically to do that kind of thing. Anyways, my performance is better now. I understand they took on a lot of new users, but they needed to do that to get money I guess, and hopefully now they invest their profits into more hardware.

Site5 Support Was Useless

smartpill commented 4 August 2006 at 21:56

I had signed up with Site5 and was pretty satisfied until I needed some help from their support. It took about 9 hours for them to "reply". I had asked them 2 questions and all I got after 9 hours was a useless link in reference to one of my questions and the other question (which happened to be the first of the two) was ignored. I asked them twice more about the issues and it seemed like they use a Magic 8 Ball to answer. Garbage. I finally got fed up and tried to forward the domain to a new host and that took 4 days and an email follow up! I am now using Siteground, and except for their lack of shell access (unless you get the $$$ package) I'm satisfied, so far.

Response time Site5. different experience

stevryn commented 22 August 2006 at 14:43

Of the 4 support tickets submitted for various problems I have submitted, every one was responded to in a timely manner. the longest wait for support I had was 6 hours which I didnt feel was a problem.

They were very supportive helping me figure out what the problems were, problems were resolved quickly, and they even followed up with me to be sure everything had worked out.

Perhaps it just depends on who gets your request, I dunno, but I have had good luck with them.

aplus.net increases stats of Unix Solo and Solo XR hosting plans

bpapa commented 26 July 2006 at 19:34

This add caught my eye whilst skimming hosting pages the other day:

170GB Storage
2TB transfer
$7.46/mo
2 free domains
3 free mysql databases (of apperently unlimited size)
+Plus all the standard bells and whistles.
http://hosting.aplus.net/soloxr/general.html

This is what you get with the aplus.net Unix Solo XR package. I have been trying to find the scam in this package for about two weeks now. And all I have been able to figure out is that after three months the price goes up to $9.95/mo but everything else stays the same (service-wise). I noticed that one earlier poster said they had been using aplus.net for several years and are happy with their service... Thanks for that report!!! Basically the only thing that had been preventing me from signing up was that I hadn't heard from an actual person what they thought of aplus.net. The BBB report on aplus.net is not very good, but then the more I learn the more it seems that very few hosts have a good rep with BBB.

If anyone has any experiences with aplus they would like to share, I am all ears! I really can't seem to find any other hosts that can match this deal in terms of storage/price. (I am planning on building a personal drupal site that will host a fairly large amount of streaming video of concerts I have taped recently, and several thousand pictures of a couple of recent vacations; so the seemingly rediculous amount of storage is actually kind of a necessity for me).

TIA for any thoughts on aplus.net, or if anyone knows of any hosting offers that give even more storage for the price! ;)

Thnx,
B~

Looking for Best Drupal Hosting with Full Drupal Support...

nvisioncurtis commented 8 August 2006 at 14:36

I need to find a hosting solution that is not only reliable with good server tools, control panels etc., but also has great Drupal CMS knowledge and support. A hosted reseller solution is a big plus too.

Specifically, I want to push off ALL system related maintenance, upgrades and backups to the hosting company. A major plus would be a hosting company with a tech support team that really knows Drupal and could be consulted regarding Drupal CMS in tight situations. Lowest price is not necessarily that important but is a factor. I am more inclined to pay for Drupal support ala-carte then as a SLA.

I have been in discussions with Siteground.com sales team but I was not left with a real confident feeling that they would be there to help out in a Drupal crisis moment. Alternatively, I'd also be interested in a worthy Drupal consultancy group that could be called upon as needed.

If anyone has found a hosting provider of this caliber I would like to hear about it.

Suggestion - create a spreadsheet to rank your needs & companies

Walt Esquivel commented 8 August 2006 at 15:14

Having been to business school and having read your post, I would suggest you create a spreadsheet with all your needs down the left hand side. Then, list the companies you've identified as contenders across from left to right.

Needs can be items such as:
- Response time (plug in your time needs, e.g., within 24 hours, or within 1 hour, etc.)
or
- Phone assistance provided
- Hosted reseller solution
- etc.

Once you've identified all your needs, I think your task of company selection will be easier. You might also want to rank-weight your needs, e.g., "response time (7)" might have a higher rank in your overall calculations than "phone assistance provided (4)" while "hosted reseller solution (5)" might be in between. You would then tally the points and see who the top winners are. Of course if you have some "deal breaker" needs, only those companies providing the "deal breaker" needs will make it to your final selections.

Good luck and be sure to post back here what you find. Thanks!

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

That's good advice.

nvisioncurtis commented 8 August 2006 at 19:39

That's essentially how I came to choose Drupal over many others.

If fact, I think you hit upon an idea for a website "drupalhostingmatrix.org" similar to CMSmatrix.org. Qualified hosting geared specifically for Drupal. Unfortunately I do not have the time to do that one myself. I am making a list of companies mentioned on various post in this forum for further exploration, I can post back later my findings.

I currenlty have a dedicated server; but that experience proves to be a little bumpy with out a full time server guy to look over it... which leads us back to finding a suitable host.

I think these are all equally important to me.

Reliability (99% up-time)
24/7 phone tech support
10gigs of storage and and 250gigs monthly bandwidth (As a benchmark)
SSH / SFTP
Tech support 1-4 hours response times
Tech support should be Drupal knowledable - able to assist in Drupal upgrades and migrations
Fast and speedy page serving for small to moderate sized Drupal sites.
Good reliable backups
Reseller possibilities

dream coupon

dasda commented 16 August 2006 at 03:25

Use TRY90 to get the best possible discount on dreamhost.
Get 90$ off all hosting plans ..Best working coupon around

VirtuosoNetSolutions

noagendas commented 23 August 2006 at 23:42

I noticed someone else here mentioned VNS (virtuosonetsolutions) and I am also a customer of theirs. They are awesome and as far as your comparison to dreamhost goes (pointing out to member Wellness Corps' response to malberty) virtuoso does not oversell, cram their servers and I am witness to that. I have the developer shared plan which is hosted on a dual xeon box with 4GB memory, SCSI disks, 100Mbit port to be exact (I have jailed shell access and can check all these things).

By now its common sense that all these hosting providers providing an entire hard drive for $7 a month (sarcastic example, but sadly true) are all overselling. It does not take brain to realize this. Not only that, its sad that someone like Wellness Corps would even assume he would use 20GB of space and be concerned about a few bucks.

Does anyone care for quality anymore? I do. I dealt with numerous hosts including lunar pages, webhost4life to name a couple and virtuosonetsolutions is by far the greatest. Their support is superb, servers blazing fast and they do not categorize/advertise themselves as 'just another' typical host giving you impossible allowance on disk/bandwidth for a few bucks a month. That's just pathetic of those kind of competitors

I'm with malberty all the way, virtuoso is the best and I highly recommend them. My testimonial to you.

talkpixel.com is my site, under construction at the moment (hence the cpanel default page).

I had drupal on there running awesome, blazing fast and decent traffic as well. You'll see it again shortly.

VNS is my home for good. www.virtuosonetsolutions.com

Thanks for your feedback; I respect your comments

Walt Esquivel commented 24 August 2006 at 17:42

It's good to know that folks are reading my post. It's always good to receive constructive criticism, even if it points out shortcomings here and there. Does DreamHost have occassional issues? You betcha. Yes, I have already acknowledged that DreamHost is not always the best, but I have seen plenty of other web hosts praised here on drupal.org on one day, only to be dragged through the mud the next day. At the end of the day, one needs to make a decision and move on. I respect someone that has chosen VNS as it seems to be a solid company from what I know.

I'm quite happy with DreamHost and it serves my needs...for the time being. If VNS offered me a better solution for my specific needs, I would go with it. But, as a consumer and business person, my needs are unique, and at this time, pricing does make a difference in which web host I choose. The fact that someone else has different needs and is happy with VNS is great and I'm happy for them. It's all about having options and being able to choose what's best for one's particular needs. VNS does seem like a great web host, but they're just a bit too expensive for me based on my current needs.

Web hosting is, to an extent, a commodity, and I don't see why I should pay more than a few dollars per month and still be able to receive unlimited databases as long as I don't exceed my disk storage limit. I acknowledge that I gravitate towards low-priced web hosts. :) Yes, DreamHost provides a generous 20 GB of disk storage for their most basic plan but, to be honest, 20 GB on a server is practically nothing these days. Heck, there are 80 GB MP3 players these days and it won't be long before they're bumping up against 100 GB! So I don't really think that 20 GB is at all "too much" for a web host to offer.

By the way, could you please explain "100Mbit port" and why it's important? I'm completely naive about this. Thanks in advance!

So, is my below cost comparison accurate? It is, afterall, a part of my reply to malberty and it would be good to read your feedback. Yes, cost isn't everything and I might get better service with VNS, but for me, cost is quite important at this time.

Cost comparison summary:
DreamHost Level 1 Plan without a discount, = $119.40 per year ($9.95/month)
DreamHost with a DRUPAL50DOLLARS Promo Code $50 discount coupon, = $69.40 per year ($5.78/month)
Virtuoso Developer Plan = $274.45 per year ($22.87/month)

Cost comparison details:
This isn't exact because the DreamHost Level 1 shared hosting plan, their lowest, offers more diskspace and data transfer than Virtuoso's highest shared hosting plan:

- - - DreamHost Level 1 Plan = $119.40/year ($9.95/month) for 20 GB diskspace, 1 TB data transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domains, etc. With a DRUPAL50DOLLARS Promo Code hosting discount coupon good for $50, the first yearly payment comes down to $69.40 ($5.78/month).

- - - Virtuoso Net Solutions Developer Plan = $274.45/year ($22.87/month) for 15 GB diskspace, 500 GB data transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domains, etc.

Note: if DreamHost goes out of business tomorrow, please don't laugh at me! ;)

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA
President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

101sitehosting.com is great so far

smegger commented 24 August 2006 at 04:48

After reading about some of the GoDaddy horror stories regarding Drupal installation, i quickly decided to switch hosts (luckily, I was paying month to month). I read all of the above recommendations, and decided to go with 101sitehosting.com... mostly because it seemed to be the only site still offering one button installation of Drupal (as of this posting, Dreamhost had disabled it's one button install due to some sort of bug). So far, I'm extremely happy with the choice. Installing Drupal was really as easy as pushing a button. The site is up and running without any problems. I'm still in the process of adding modules, so I'll update this post periodically.

Also, when I signed up for the web space (I chose the $8.99/month option which gives you 10GB of data transfer, but they also offer a Basic Plan for $4.99/month and a Starter Package for 29.95/month) I received an email from 101sitehosting that prompted me to switch my domain registration. I wasn't sure if i had to do this or not to make things work (I'm new at this), so I emailed them for an explanation. I'm a pretty suspicious guy, so I was assuming they were trying to pull one over on me. They answered my email in 2 hours, and informed me that this was simply a service they offer to everyone and it was not mandatory.

They offer a 15 day money back guarantee, so I'll keep everyone posted on how it goes, and if I decide to stick with them.

I just bought a dreamhost

kylube commented 28 August 2006 at 19:51

I just bought a dreamhost level 1 account for a year and im crossing my fingers that things will go well.

I read all about the problems before I signed up, but I figured it's cheap, there is money back guarantee, and plus I still have all my sites on my old host and this was just for a new site im starting.

with the $97 discount promocodes you can find on the dreamhost forums, the grand total for hosting for a year plus a domain came to $22.50. Because im strapped for cash this is the best option for me.

I expect some problems, but I needed a domain and host to start a new site on, get indexed in search engines ect. Down the road I might go dedicated anyway. I expect some problems, but as long as the site isn't offline when a crawler is doing a deep index or anything I really dont care.

I moved the drupal site I was working to on new dream host account and it's working fine now. It took about 15 hours for name servers ect to start working, which was longer than my old host, and it took a few hours for my sql host server to start working.

So far site is working great. Also the fact that you can host adult content on dream host made the choice even easier.

For $22.50 a year, there may be some down time, problems, and slow down, but when it comes down to it, the pros have out weighed the cons thus far.

I will keep you informed.

Yes, the coupons are great

benthere commented 12 September 2006 at 03:00

I really didn't expect much for the price you pay for Dreamhost. But they've actually been more reliable than any host I've used. I'm really surprised at how well it has worked out.

ASmallOrange had slightly better speed, and sometimes their support was incredibly fast, but they weren't consistently helpful, and there was a period of a few weeks with such sluggish performance that I decided never to use them again.

At this point, I feel I can really count on DreamHost for all of my several sites. If I ever have huge traffic (which I expect for a couple of my sites), I'll probably move the Drupal part of the site to a more expensive VPS plan and leave the streaming media and large downloads on DreamHost where I have such huge bandwidth/disk limits. But right now, it fits my needs perfectly, and will probably scale very well.

--
Cheap, reliable Drupal hosting: 20GB | 1TB
Save $75| DH75OFF coupon for 1 year ($3.75/mo!)
Save $50| DH02SETUP coupon for monthly ($10/mo!)

Are you sure DREAMHOST accept adult websites?

wwwoliondorcom commented 1 November 2006 at 19:51

Hi,

Are you sure DREAMHOST accept adult websites?

Thanks for help,

http://www.oliondor.com

Update: So far so good

smegger commented 2 October 2006 at 01:45

I've been using 101sitehosting for about a month now, and everything's been great. I've had zero problems getting Drupal installed and running, and I'm a newbie at this, so take that into consideration. So far, my site has only gone down twice... both times it lasted for about 5 minutes. I'm using pingalink, so I get an email whenever the server goes down. I don't know if 2 times in one month is good or not... seems reasonable to me, but I'll leave it up to you. Actually, it's probably more like 3 weeks since I didn't sign up for pingalink until about a week in.

So far, the only problem I've had has been with cron jobs. i can't get them to work. However, I'm chalking that up to my inexperience. I haven't called tech support yet, so I'll be able to give an update on that soon, as well.

My site officially goes live tonight at midnight, so come check it out if you're interested.
www.spoilerama.com

Total Choice Hosting

rick hood commented 30 August 2006 at 19:32

I use these guys:

http://totalchoicehosting.com/

who were recommended to me by

http://www.lullabot.com/

who are Drupal developers who definitley know what they are doing. I figured if good enough for them, good enogh for me. So far (3 months) that is true. I just have a Simple Reseller Plan for now - will upgrade if I continue to like them.

Previously I had used http://www.opensourcehost.com, which was fine, but I thought a little slow on the page load.

No support

seaneffel commented 4 December 2006 at 05:36

No support via telephone, no response on their "live chat". I appreciate Lullabot's endorsement but I advise you to keep looking!

Doreo.com

solipsist commented 3 September 2006 at 12:16

Still very happy with Doreo, they have CPanel/WHM, great response time, great uptime, daily backups, speedy servers and pages load fast even for us on the other side of the pool. Doreo isn't as cheap as some hosts but they actually live up to their promises, it's not just words like it is with some hosts. They got MailFoundry now too, which is said to be one of the best anti spam filters available.

If you ask I'm sure they can set up a demo account for you so you can try.

--
Jakob Persson
web design and usability consulting
http://www.jakob-persson.com

--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency

Dreamhost

vitol commented 19 September 2006 at 14:57

Just started with Dreamhost - totally satisfied!
--
xScience.Info

Anyone ever looked at HostMonster?

stevryn commented 4 October 2006 at 19:16

http://www.hostmonster.com/

I am pretty happy with Site5, never any problems, but someone showed me Hostmonster, which is 3.95 per month, Domain included??? I copied this from their page.

50 Gigabytes of Hosting Space
Host UNLIMITED Domains!!
Unlimited Pop/Imap Email Accounts
SSH Access (Secure Shell)
999 Gigs of Transfer
SSL, FTP, Stats
CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MYSQL
Front Page Extensions
Free Domain Forever
Free Site Builder
Best Support in the Industry

No Domain name?

Free Domain Name
Free Site Promotion
Free e-Commerce Shopping Cart/Scripts
Free SiteBuilder with Templates
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Professional Courteous Support

Transferring a domain name?

Help setting up your domain with us!
Free Site Promotion
Free e-Commerce Shopping Carts/Scripts
Free SiteBuilder with Templates
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Professional Courteous Support

Smells too good to be true.

solipsist commented 4 October 2006 at 20:03

Smells too good to be true. Likely they'll slash your site once you get any more than 20 visitors per day to your Drupal site.

--
Jakob Persson
Drupal developer, web designer and usability consultant
http://www.jakob-persson.com

--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency

It's a Bluehosts' alternate

dvessel commented 5 October 2006 at 15:20

It's a Bluehosts' alternate and they've been very poor lately. Don't even bother.

–joon

I'm using hostmonster and

ladycentaur commented 14 November 2006 at 06:26

I'm using hostmonster and haven't had any problems at all. In fact, I personally think they're the best host I've ever used.

The Search Continues

WeRockYourWeb.com commented 6 October 2006 at 13:39

I've come to the conclusion that there is no one host that consistently and reliable outperforms in all areas (reliability, service, etc.). I've been with several hosts now, including imhosted.com, lunarpages.com, resellerzoom.com, and am once again continuing my move. After reading this whole thread I'm leaning towards site5.com, which sound good on the surface, but after Googling for "site5 sucks" (I'll run similar phrases to find reviews of hosts) and checking out the site I'm questioning their tactics. It does appear that they consistently change their strategy. They are currently offering what sounds like a killer deal with their multisite platform, with 72% and 80% off the 1yr and 2yr constricts. But these days who stays with a host for that long?

One thing I do like about site5 is that they answer my main questions on their site:
1) no overselling
2) limited number of accounts per server
3) separate cpanel for each account (no subdomains, add-on domains, or pointers)
3) forums - not sure how unbiased these are, some threads with complaints seem to get closed by the admins in a hurry

And positive feedback I've seen consistently:
1) fast drupal page loads with moderately loaded configurations

That being said, if they're adding 40 accounts per day on minimum 1 yr contracts, and they appear to have been doing this for several weeks already, they must be very rapidly expanding their system capacity, or if they don't we'll be hearing about yet another update down the road where the current customers get screwed.

I've come to the conclusion that there's no way of finding completely accurate reviews of a host, since there are always competitors out there either dogging a host or pumping up their own. The other thing that's important in all these comparisons I don't often see is the type of plan people are using. Cheap reseller plans are going to be sluggy and have downtime. Moderate reseller plans will have less, but may still lag on performance from server overload due to overselling (someone running 1000 custom-made parking pages with moderate traffic is going to take more server load than someone with a few sites with high traffic), so for performance/ cost-benefit I'm going with a multisite setup that limits the number of domains.

It seems to be that large hosting companies that are driven to expand like crazy are bound to run into problems if they try to expand too quickly, which site5.com appears to do on a regular basis with their aggressive marketing tactics (a couple years ago they were giving hosting packages away for free, but disguised under another host name - wtf?). Another thing is that with their current promotion, the offer expiration simply updates at the end of the day (to the next day), giving the impression that you have to grab the offer now. In other words, there is probably always some sort of special promotion or another available with site5.com as they scurry to sign on clients, expand, experience problems, backtrack, start a new promotion, and repeat.

So I am leaning towards going with a smaller, more reliable and stable outfit. I'm currently checking out NetworkRedux.com and RochenHost.com - does anyone have experience with these? One thing I don't get at Rochen is that the 4 domain plan, when doubled (to 8 domains) is cheaper than the 7 domain plan, and you get more combined space and transfer. Why would you even bother with the 7 domain plan? Might as well open two 4 domain accounts, right?

Regards,
Alex
----------
Contract Web Development

Well a lot of hosts just

solipsist commented 7 October 2006 at 12:17

Well a lot of hosts just promise a lot but can't live up to it. If you stop looking at the cheapest hosts and are prepared to 50% or 100% more you'll find hosts that are both reliable. have fast servers, fast connections, great support and which you can depend on and who wont cause you trouble. There's a lot of shady stuff going on in this business, you just gotta learn to recognize it.

--
Jakob Persson
Drupal developer, web designer and usability consultant
http://www.jakob-persson.com

--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency

i am very happy with

ezichko commented 10 October 2006 at 17:08

i am very happy with www.mediatemple.net

uk host waytotheweb

iandickson commented 13 October 2006 at 09:40

I'm using a few hosts for different things.

I find waytotheweb to be the best in terms of support and speed (others have some very slow days..).

Ian Dickson - community specialist.
www.emint.org - Association of Online Community Professionals
www.iandickson.com/taxonomy/drupal/ - Taxonomy Server Project - generic, organic, standards compliant, directed graph using, ass-licking (maybe not) taxono

You get what you pay for...

jlambert commented 14 October 2006 at 11:21

An interesting thing... after reading these threads, I'm impressed by the number of people who are running on $6/mo hosting accounts, and for whom that's a big deal.

I think DH does a great job, and we refer "control panel" customers there all the time (among others). Ultimately, what I would like to suggest to the Drupal community is that shared hosting is not a particularly useful way of deploying Drupal. Ultimately, the model is _built_ on the idea of overselling servers, so it's absolutely guaranteed that performance will degrade as time passes, merely as customers are added to the machine as a normal part of business operations. It doesn't take much to cause performance degradation, and a 10-30 second load time is the inevitable result of having a very busy machine. The box may not be overloaded even, but it could end up being constrained on how fast it can return a request merely due to how many processes are running on the box.

Having worked with a lot of very busy Drupal sites, I can also say that Drupal performance can vary wildly depending on server configuration, the number of modules installed, and cache configuration. It's very difficult to estimate a Drupal site's performance until you load test it with (hopefully production log based) profile based load testing software.

In a shared hosting environment, minor modifications to templates can suck down resources on an entire machine, crippling dozens of sites. And it's extremely difficult and requires a VERY knowledgeable staff with lots of time (a rarity) to figure out exactly which site(s) are causing the problem, contact the customer, get it resolved, etc. Or, they just shut it down or give you a warning to get your act together - a necessity from the systems side of the business just to keep servers running well. What typically happens in a shared hosting environment is that machines are loaded to a certain capacity (a % of capacity). Then no more accounts are added to the machine. The box gradually loses customers, but existing customers add more and more. If the service is popular and has a good rep, existing customers overwhelmed the machine, and the admins have to move stuff around. So managing the machine often requires moving entrenched customers, a very unpopular and unprofitable activity.

Big companies generally have written their own system, or rely on hosting automation systems. In the case of GoDaddy, which comes up all the time, they're using Plesk Enterprise Manager. This is a many tens-of-thousands of dollar system that SW-Soft (makers of Plesk, Virtuzzo, HSP Complete, and the afore mentioned PEM, among other applications) built for a customer some years back. They have since taken that application and customized it to fit a variety of companies, automating large scale systems. The delays that happen are due to queue processing in the application, as it works with a central queue that processes and tracks requests. This is a very popular way of writing monolithic hosting systems, which is basically what the entire hosting market is built on right now. GoDaddy deploys customers (according to my sources, this is second hand knowlege) in Virtuozzo containers (Virtual Servers), a relatively robust Virtual Server mechanism, using either Plesk (if the Virtuozzo instance is a dedicated instance for the customer) or the control panel for Plesk Enterprise Manager (centrally managed, most other accounts are on this, and delays happen as the backend has many moving parts).

It's interesting to look at some of the problems that come about on the basis of architecture. I'm aware that some of SW-Soft's customers are running large clustered or load balanced arrays as well, which is commonly used by hosting companies. Redhat Cluster Suite is often used for this type of deployment, among others (there are many, many systems).

Given that the shared hosting model is literally like playing the numbers with your site (unless your hosting company isn't growing, or isn't able to get density on their servers, or is charging a lot or using insanely cheap colo servers to save cash - all bad), and the largest systems are designed around giant, immutable monolithic containers that can't be customized, it's not a wonder that other technologies are coming about to suite the technical communities.

What I would like to understand is why those who are seriously concerned about Drupal, and price, don't band together to purchase VMWare or XEN-based (not Virtuozzo or OpenVZ, it can be oversold) virtual servers. If 3-4 people got together to do it, they'd be able to run some fairly large sites, and be in the same budget range, and have complete control over server configuration. You could have the benefit of a popular control panel, and a micro-community of Drupal developers there to work with you and support you, and could even leverage one another's skills professionally to work together (works great). There is no incentive or possibility on XEN and VMWare based images of the ISP overselling your box - so performance won't inherently decline over time.

To accomodate the overhead of mantaining your own machine, you only need one or two people. I've seen developers do this with Skype - essentially creating a channel for communication about the server for all those that are interested in chat. Not only does it make for one heck of a responsive group (someone is always online), but you get the benefit of getting to know other Drupal developers.

Another option is to acquire a cheap dedicated server and install XEN (fairly straight forward if you have any Linux systems experience). A typical 4GB server could accomodate 20 xen instances of approx 180MB memory each, and could be had for a very reasonable price from a reputable place (a simple p4 will do - we run dozens of such systems). 180MB is enough to run some powerful and relatively popular applications, and any of a dozen control panels could be built into an image. That means you could have your own server for $15-30ish/mo, and be able to scale to your heart's content and have ~12GB of disk space available (raw). Such a system can be had on it's own leased line, so you could effectively have "unlimited" bandwidth (that's all hosting companies do anyways - there is no such thing - someone has to pick up the tab).

I don't know, just a thought. I think this thread is kind of amusing, because it's like watching "churn in action". One week, a host is popular, the next they're in the dumps. This is actually accounted for in hosting company business models for shared hosting (regularly 3-18% churn per month, depending on the business and system events). Remember, everything around hosting is moving forward towards virtualization and isolation of applications, and eventually towards grid and utility computing - the cost on these "enterprise technologies" keeps dropping and/or getting driven down (Open Source has a lot to do with this).

I'm just saying, there are a lot of options for deploying Drupal.

Yes, I own a company that does a lot of Drupal deployment (full disclosure). No, this isn't an advertisment - I want to raise the point in community interest.

This is a very sensible

techczech commented 14 October 2006 at 21:51

This is a very sensible suggestion. I've been thinking about doing something like this as an alternative to a VPS. My budget is $30-50/mo and I'm having real trouble finding a suitable solution - everything is either too cheap or too expensive.

RE: You get what you pay for...

Anthony Gettig commented 16 October 2006 at 02:33

Great post, Jonathon! You raise a fantastic point and provide some great facts that I, as I am sure others, hadn't really considered.

About a year ago, I was talking with a local IT service provider about VMWare hosting with them. I was going to "test" this as it was a new venture for them at the time. I never did it (I switched jobs), but I have thought about that idea many times since.

This is a great suggestion. Maybe we need a forum or list of some sort to match up interested server "room mates"?

I know someone who runs a

solipsist commented 16 October 2006 at 11:25

I know someone who runs a hosting company, I'm sure he could help if we manage to bring in enough people. It's Linux servers with CPanel.

--
Jakob Persson
Drupal developer, web designer and usability consultant
http://www.jakob-persson.com

--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency

True

iandickson commented 18 October 2006 at 23:31

Waytotheweb are a shared host, but charge more than most. What you get is a shared host, but one that doesn't get overloaded through overselling.

Personally I think quality is worth paying for, in servers, hosting, food or clothes...

On the other hand

nancydru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 4 February 2007 at 08:53

On the other hand, there are a lot of us out here in cyber land who are running not-for-profit sites for whom money is a big deal. The difference between $3.95 a month and $9.95 can mean breaking the bank. If our slow-downs are during the times most of our users are at work, that's not a significant problem. But if it's after business hours, it is; that's called bandwidth sharing. I'm not carzy about it, but it's a fact of life I have to live with.

Nancy W.
proudly running 3½ sites on Drupal so far

NancyDru

Non-profits get free hosting on DreamHost

Walt Esquivel commented 4 February 2007 at 16:27

I'm not sure if you meant "non-profit" vs. "not-for-profit", but as of December 2006 -

"DreamHost offers a FREE Strictly Business plan to non-profit, charitable, organizations registered in the United States."

Follow the 1st link in my signature and good luck.

Disclosure: I'm a DreamHost affiliate. However, I doubt I receive anything monetarily from DreamHost when non-profits sign up for free. Also, I've been with them since March 2006, host my main site on one of their shared servers, and am pleased overall.

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

Yes and No

seaneffel commented 7 February 2007 at 19:30

I found that running on $4/mo hosting companies pays off for a while, until you have to spend a full 72 hours changing hosts. The cheapo hosts will break and they'll break your site pretty bad. You won't be able to get them on the phone, if they have one, or they are in India and separated from the servers by a continent, or their "live chat" crashes your computer, all the day before your big NPO event! Then you have to break up with them and start all over again with another company. And good luck getting your money back, if its later than 30 days you're basically paying double when you start a new account somewhere else.

I work with NPOs exclusively, I know how attractive those rates are, but... the cheaper the worse.

Sean
Cambridge Community Television
http://www.cctvcambridge.org

1and1 and Drupal

Z2222 commented 16 October 2006 at 18:24

Just wanted to add a comment about 1and1. I started using Drupal on a 1and1 account. It seems to run ok... but they often block my IP for 30 to 60 minutes when I upload/download large files (like Drupal). It also gets blocked if I connect with FTP and then open a file to edit over FTP at the same time (2 programs connecting, 1 ftp client and 1 editor). I've never had a problem with that on any other hosting company.

Many emails back and forth with an incompetent technical support department, where a different person would give a different answer each time -- apparently without reading my emails.

Waste of time. They regularly block my IP when uploading/downloading Drupal (no other FTP connections), and their only "solution" is to upgrade to a dedicated server.

Anyone at penguinwebhosting.com?

libre fan commented 18 October 2006 at 09:58

Penguin Webhosting

I have no idea if they are any good. Just to say that for me the choice would be Linux-powered webhosting. But webhosters don't always tell you what OS they use.

What does the popular DreamHost use?

Cheers,
---
Libres-Ailé(e)s (Association for Linux and libre software) (France, Cévennes)

New MediaTemple Grid - the Silver Bullet?

techczech commented 19 October 2006 at 06:33

On paper the new new Media Temple offer - $20/mo with scalable performance - seems like the ideal solution for a small site that may or may not grow. http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/17/media-temple-crushes-shared-hosting/ Lots of storage, lots of bandwidth and supposedly no sharing of a single server by many people. And they offer a Drupal install.

Any thoughts on that from the Drupal community? I'm seriously tempted but afraid I might be taken in by the hype.

Media Temple is fantastic.

chadcross commented 9 November 2006 at 18:53

Media Temple is fantastic. I was with them when they had the ss servers and there were a few issues with PHP safe mode but the new gs server is wonderful. Rediculous amounts of bandwidth and space, incredible support from people that actually know the technology, and a super simple control panel.

Tell me more about Media Temple

seaneffel commented 14 November 2006 at 22:16

I'm looking at media temple now, they advertise a great deal of good looking services and support, and I did try to prove that they "always answer the phone" by calling as some sick hour of the night.

But I would love to hear some significant critique on their service. Has anyone experienced overages, was it costly, how flexible is the grid server principle, if the grid architecture is so beautiful why are the dedicated hosting plans priced so low, etc, etc.

Sean
Cambridge Community Television
http://www.cctvcambridge.org

I have been with them for

techczech commented 14 November 2006 at 23:32

I have been with them for about a month and they had one massive outage that lasted about 12 hours but I think that can be chalked up to teething problems with the Grid. I think it is great value for 20 bucks a month and I run all my websites on it. However, the servers do seem a little slow. Also, I don't find their e-mail support to be all that timely. I suspect they might have oversold their service a bit but I like the SSH access, unlimited databases, and PHP.INI control. Plus, their one click install of Drupal is a great timesaver. So I think I will stick with them at least for a while. I hope that they will add some servers on the East Coast eventually because that might help the response times.

______________________
Dominik Lukes
http://www.dominiklukes.net
http://www.hermeneuticheretic.net
http://www.czechupdate.com

I suppose I'll hold off on

seaneffel commented 15 November 2006 at 19:03

I suppose I'll hold off on their services until their grid server schema matures a bit. I'm disturbed by the comment about their apparent slowness. We are experiencing dismally slow database response, if that is a symptom at media temple then I might steer clear.

I'm not sure that nearer servers would speed things up. After all, the internet is just a series of tubes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lYiDo0DjSk

SQL issues, downtime, slow performance with Grid

isaac77 commented 22 November 2006 at 15:33

I recently migrated from a Mediatemple shared server plan to their GS ("grid server") plan. Since switching, I have experienced periodic downtime (sometimes the site is down for 1 minute, sometimes much longer). The most frequent problem is related to their MySQL host. (A page on either my drupal-based site or on a gallery2 site doesn't load, and displays a message that says: "The MySQL error was: Too many connections.")

Tech support acknowledges there is a MySQL issue that is affecting their grid servers, but it's been several weeks now and it is unclear whether any progress has been made.

I have generally found tech support at Mediatemple to be average to poor, at least for relatively "entry level" customers like myself.

Pages tend to load relatively slowly on my drupal site. Just barely usable.

I'm looking to switch. I would have recommended TextDrive, but they seem to have downtime issues too. (Much less frequent, but still scary).

The performance has improved

techczech commented 28 November 2006 at 10:15

The performance has improved a bit lately - no downtimes, at least, but it is still a bit slow. I like the features they offer so I will try to stick with them for a while. I must also say that my two Wordpress blogs on there are much faster to load than Drupal (but that is to be expected).

______________________
Dominik Lukes
http://www.dominiklukes.net
http://www.hermeneuticheretic.net
http://www.czechupdate.com
http://www.techwillow.com

Not so much

seaneffel commented 24 January 2007 at 00:28

I set up a non-profit theatre in Boston with a shiny new Media Temple gridserver account. We did our development and testing, then within minutes of launch we had errors, outages, overages, failed attempts, slow query times, slow page builds, and a ton of other issues. MT kept up a steady stream of "this is a known issue, we are working to resolve" commentary - if they had known about issues it would have been nice if WE had known about them too. We dropped them after five days and got our money back.

Its true, you get what you pay for and if you want 100% reliable service then you need to pay the premium. It turns out that MT would be great cost and service for personal sites with low traffic and occasional visitors. But you cannot use MT for the front face of a well established organization, it was a humiliating experience - the public, the staff, the executive director, and the board of directors all looking on as we launched the site and the only thing they saw was "Error 500: Sorry, your site is hosed."

Everything is relative. Hope this helps inform you in your decision making.

More About the Media Temple

clockbroke commented 24 January 2007 at 18:04

As an employee of the non-profit Boston theatre seanjaun mentioned, here is my experience:

Pros - love the control panel, love the support response, love the price.

Our MAIN problem was their mysql performance. The site would go down for a minute, 10 minutes, 3 minutes, random amounts of time. This would happen ALL DAY LONG, and our visitors just got the drupal dtatbase error page stating "too many connections." It was a "known issue" but it had been "known" and "resolved" back and forth for over a month during development. When your pay is based on an approved budget by a happy board, this is not just regular bad, it's "what park bench will I sleep on tonight, since I can't pay my rent" bad.

We moved over to dreamhost, where I have been happy for many months with my personal sites. The best part is, they host US non-profits for FREE on their level 4 plan. It's not dedicated, but so far so good. Limited phone support, but fast, effective, courteous (and dumbed down if you need it) email support. Shell access, blah blah.

It's been a only couple of weeks, but no problems, and faster load times than MT.

MT's gridserver concept is neat, but just too young for high profile sites.

www.coolidge.org

use http://www.sacmis.com

sacmis commented 29 October 2006 at 14:20

very god host www.sacmis.com

My 2 cents

dsnydernc commented 31 October 2006 at 00:37

I've used shared hosting for years, and have bounced around from one company to another for one reason or another. I now use a VPS and will go over a couple of those as well.

The two shared hosting companies I stayed with the longest were Site5 and Dreamhost....

Site 5 www.site5.com
I had absolutely no complaints about Site5, they were amazing - tech support ticket turn around was always less than an hour, never had a issue with the server and I can't recall any downtime, ever. Their panel is based on cP, but is more intuitive I thought. The only issue I ever ran in to with them was having to shut down a BT tracker. I had it running for over 6 months before they said anything... the fact that they didn't insist I shut it down sooner still surprises me. It was all legit and legal, serving podcasts etc. for one of my tech media sites - just of course, consuming way too many processes in a shared server environment. I only left Site5 in the first place because I needed a host that aloud adult content for a new venture. My sites were not nearly as large as they are now, so I can only evaluate Site5 as a low to medium / average resource user.

Dreamhost www.dreamhost.com
Reviewing Dreamhost is difficult, it depends if you have been a customer of theirs during the last 4 months or so (what we call the dark ages). Service during that time was bad, really bad. Massive network issues that took a very long time to resolve, and have only been resolved in the last month. On the bright side, one thing DH does that I have yet to see any other host its size do, is constantly keep customers updated with every single issue, on every single server or network that arises via their blog. For my two cents, I'll pretend that period of bad service didn't happen, and base my statements on the rest of my time with DH, which has been exceptional. ...Dreamhost, like every other host oversells big time, the nice thing about them is they admit it, and if your site gets stuck on a server with a lot of other resource hungry sites, they will work with you to get you on a better space, like they did me. I was even told exactly how many people I was sharing a box with, to my surprise - when I asked. The vast majority of users don't even use a fraction of their resources alloted, I actually do. DH has never treated me as an unvalued customer, even though I nearly max out my 2TB bandwidth and storage space every month. I of course am a DH affiliate, with that income applied to my hosting account, I've never actually paid for my hosting service. When I was hosting my sites on DH, I did experience quite a bit of downtime, I'd say at least a couple hours a week. To DH's credit, I had no business hosting sites my size on a shared environment, and without me ever asking DH was constantly crediting my account with the month membership fee. To Drupal's credit, had I been using any other CMS I think I would have floundered much earlier. Eventually, I wanted to have a bit more control, so I moved my sites off DH and went with a VPS solution. Though I no longer host my websites on DH, I do still maintain my account with several domains that strictly serve images and videos to my websites hosted else ware. One area where I will say the DH service level has dropped, is in support. Whereas for the first 8 mo's of service or so, ticket response time was under an hour - typical response time now seems to be 1-2 days. This may be due to the fact they are still recovering from the network issues, and are devoted to that or it could be that they realize my non value as a customer and just don't say it to my face :P. Bottom line - yes you do get what you pay for, but in DH's case, I think you get quite a bit more then you pay for, but still not a good place for those who are on the way to outgrowing a shared hosting environment. Also, a Drupal specific note - using the cache mechanism while hosting on DH DRAMATICALLY sped up my site, freakishly so.

On the VPS side of things...

In switching to a VPS, I was a little nervous. Though I knew the basics of finding my way around a Linux box, I was and still am not by any means an experienced admin. -I'm still learning new things every day. I've used two VPS hosting companies, Myriad and ServInt.

Myriad www.myriadnetwork.com
I only stayed with Myriad for a few days - I had immediate issues with the tech support, or lack off. Myriad's VPS is completely unmanaged, which was ok by me, but this shouldn't mean that services shouldn't work out of the box. A lot of configuration was needed on my part to resolve some installation issues when they first set up my box - and after the first day, they were not willing to assist me at all. Now I say this, and you should keep in mind I'm not an expert... Myriad was very friendly, and I think had I known a bit more about what I was doing, and needed absolutely no technical support they would have been a good solution. I did eventually get my sites up and running, but Apache kept crashing without my being able to resolve it, or find out what was causing it - and they weren't willing to look in to it for me. One thing they did do, which is what kind of bothered me, was offer me a managed solution for an additional $100.00 a month, though wouldn't give me many details on what services that included and it isn't mentioned anywhere on the website as even being an available service. The thing that bothered me the most was that pre-sale, I asked a million and one questions of the sales team. I was incredibly thorough and upfront about my experience level and what help I would need. They stated in certain terms that even though it was an 'unmanaged vps' that tech support was always able to assist me in, if not fixing the problem, helping me figure out how to fix it myself - which they did not deliver on. That said, I requested a refund and it was given to me. So, Bravo to them for that.

ServInt www.servint.com
I made the move to ServInt and am just floored by the staff there. They rock. I signed up for the basic managed VPS solution (all their services are managed) and recently upgraded to a bigger package. ServInt did something I wasn't expecting; during my initial configuration phase when I was getting things set up, they took a completely proactive approach to support. I got emails from the NOC asking if I wanted help installing features etc. I accidentally had a typo in one of my DNS settings, and they caught it and fixed it. I emailed support with a simple question about a firewall solution, and they emailed back asking if I wanted to call in and have them walk me through getting it up and running step by step or just have them do it for me. I have yet to wait more than an hour for a ticket response, though normally it's much faster than that. Though you still have all the advantage of a VPS and root access, you get the benefits of 24/7 monitoring from the NOC. If something breaks, they log in and fix it before you even notice. Watchdog just emailed me today to let me know that Apache stopped running because of a typo in the config file (I'm bad about typos :) and before I could even get in to look at it, support had already fixed it. I haven't been with them long enough to truly evaluate the service, but thus far it is stellar and way beyond any kind of support I am used to. I would HIGHLY recommend them for anyone who is moving away from shared hosting for the first time, and still learning to admin their own box.

Bottom line - Site5 and Dreamhost are great shared hosting options for small sites, personal blogs etc. Both do a fine job of running Drupal and easy configuration. Dreamhost requires a few tweaks in the settings.php and .htaccess file, but no biggie.

If you can afford a VPS solution Myriad is a fine choice for experienced admins who do not need any assistance what-so-ever and are looking for a cheaper end solution. For a bit more, and for those who need a managed service ServInt will knock your socks off.

Hope this was helpful to someone. :)

I generally agree with your

venkat-rk commented 31 October 2006 at 11:30

I generally agree with your comments about Site5- they seem to give the best value for money, despite two root access breaches (one a kernel security hole, the other a cpanel exploit both of which left many with defaced sites) and several outages of varying durations that I experienced in the last year.

However, they muzzle critical customer feedback and go so far as blocking customers out of their forums for flimsy reasons. So, after a year of hosting with them and even signing up for a 6 month renewal, I am moving to some other host.

Hi Ramdak

patrickharris commented 11 November 2006 at 21:01

My experience with Site5 has been excellent. However, I've been a bit concerned reading through some of their forums ... one of the administrators recently threatened to "delay the introduction of mysql5" if he received any more "sarcastic comments" to his threads. I found that quite bizzare.

Where did you move to?

one of the administrators

venkat-rk commented 17 November 2006 at 11:23

one of the administrators recently threatened to "delay the introduction of mysql5" if he received any more "sarcastic comments" to his threads.

Exactly. I am actually locked out of posting to their forums right now for something over which I had no control. They want me to write to them to allow me again. I couldn't care less.

I haven't made the move yet, but after reading the post about ServInt and doing a fair bit of research, I am inclined to move to their VPS service at the end of my current tenure of 6 months with Site5.

More data needed

jose reyero commented 9 November 2006 at 10:35

Could you guys please provide some more data about your web site stats and traffic?

I mean the kind of comments like 'web hosting xxx works great for me' doesn't mean too much if I don't know how much load it's handling, like how many modules are installed, number of users, nodes, page views, etc...

Most of web hosting solutions seem to work very well until you have a few hundred users and a few thousand page views per day. That's when the trouble starts.

This thread is quite an interesting read though...

https://reyero.net

I am using AllCheapWeb.com

tomceek commented 9 November 2006 at 19:28

I am using AllCheapWeb.com Economy Web Hosting Plan $4.28/mo (5GB space 250 transfer) It works fine uptime is 100% and support is really good (via phone average 0-5min waiting and email 10-15min)

http://www.allcheapweb.com

traffic data

dsnydernc commented 13 November 2006 at 23:25

In response to your question about traffic data and site stats - at the time I was hosting with Site5 I had approximately 1000 nodes, about 1000 unique users per day, and an average page request of 10 or so per unique visitor per day. My site is very graphic intensive. When I moved to Dreamhost I had about 2000 nodes, and quadruple the visitors. My site continued to receive more visitors and at this point I had to start implementing the caching mechanism for smooth operation. As my site grew, shared hosting was no longer a good solution so I moved to a dedicated box. In my situation however, those stats can be misleading due to my use of other software, Zen Photo for example with a database of over 40 thousand images, which accounted at the time for about 15% of my traffic and Vanilla forums which swallowed up about another 10% of my processes and bandwidth. Had I only been running Drupal on my account I could have perhaps stayed with Dreamhost much longer. The point at which shared hosting operates smoothly with a larger Drupal site is going to depend on a wide range of factors of course... I found with Dreamhost in particular, it was not the file server that was causing slowdown but the SQL server - DH keeps the two separated on different servers. You may be on a box with 100 other users, but your SQL server my be shared by 5, or 500 - depending on your usage.

As far as modules installed, I run the core modules mainly. I find that user contributed modules often present additional security issues. Additional modules I run consistently are views, xstatistics and simple news. Other factors in my install which likely contribute to my level of efficiency and should be taken in to consideration when evaluating my experience on shared hosting: I have over 500 page specific blocks, hundreds (maybe thousands I've never counted) of path aliases, and at the time over 2000 users with configured profiles (though now my system is closed to users).

Drupal is incredibly efficient. In my opinion the major factor for your experience is going to be the size of your database in relation to the efficiency of the shared SQL database you are on in a shared hosting environment, the same with the file server.

It's important to note, Site5 limits the size of your SQL database (I believe it is 25MB) and the amount of requests it can serve in a given period of time; Dreamhost does not - nor do they limit the amount of requests made to the database (they used to.) This of course would only be a factor in large sites with large databases.

Hope that helps put your situation in to some sort of prospective... It was be interesting to hear from the Drupal team at what point in the early days they moved from a shared environment to a dedicated box and what the statistics of the site were at the time of transition - I would imagine in the beginning they started out on a shared machine.

Another good example of shared hosting, and its limits would be the twit.tv site run be Leo Laporte. When he started the site he was hosting in a shared environment with Vizaweb (stay away from them) - the traffic he received was probably up there in the top % of any Drupal site in operation at the time. He recounted the his experience and need to move to a dedicated box after just a few weeks in operation on his various blogs.

Siteground

andrewfn commented 11 November 2006 at 20:37

I have been using siteground for about a year now and have found them excellent. I have about 8 drupal sites with them. They usually respond to my tickets within 15mins and have followed all my requests to reconfigure their servers (like upping PHP limits and adding SPF records for email). For $4.95 /month you get effectively UNLIMITED number of drupal sites since they let you park any number of domains on the same account. If you want to sign up, do me a favour and click through the banner on my site which gets me points: s1te.org.

Funny, my experience has

solipsist commented 11 November 2006 at 20:46

Funny, my experience has been the exact opposite.

They're not a reliable host for anyone with anything beyond the most basic needs. My site doesn't get that much traffic but it was still too much for SG. Rip off!

--
Jakob Persson
Drupal developer, web designer and usability consultant
http://www.jakob-persson.com

--
Jakob Persson - blog
Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency

I would agree, Siteground is not good

rwreed commented 3 December 2006 at 08:11

I use drupal in a teaching environment and in a lab setting where 30 students tried to hit the site at the same time the site went down. Even now, with only a few students trying to access the site has undependable reliability. I bought 3 months (enough for the semester), I'll move it probably tomorrow. If I find a better site, I'll note it here.

I'm using hostmonster

ladycentaur commented 14 November 2006 at 06:24

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Forwarding Email Accounts Unlimited
Email Autoresponder Unlimited
Add-on Domains Unlimited
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Subdomains Unlimited
Additional FTP Accounts Unlimited
MySQL Databases 100
PostgreSQL Databases 100
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3 Different Web Based Email Solutions
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CGI Library
Server Side Includes
Frontpage 2000/2002/2003 Extensions
Account "Control Panel"
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Add own MIME Types
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Installations overview

If you sign up for a year it's 7.95 a month with a free domain name
If you sign up for 2 years it's 4.95 a month and they renew your domain name for free

The pages load fast and so far (a week) there has been 0 downtime or problems.
They have a built in FTP program that connects automatically from your Control Panel.
You can get Shell Access but you have to follow some simple steps to get it just to show you aren't trying to bust their servers.

www.hostmonster.com

Maiahost

looped commented 14 November 2006 at 08:09

I've been using them for the past three months and I have to say I am impressed. Very helpful staff and great speed/uptime. Maiahost

There are a lot of good ones

amino_ab commented 14 November 2006 at 17:34

You can visit some hosting plans on http://amab.awardspace.com
The list will be updated I have started now.
This help me to make money :) But I suggest to try really theese affrodable hosting plans.
If you need a free hosting plan , just try www.awardspace.com. You can install drupal on a subdomain without ads. This is great. But some features are not present such as url rewriting or email access. However, you have one Database (MySQL) with phpMyAdmin Access, you have ftp access, you can create 5 sub domain. This is fantastic for free sites or small community sites.
Best Hosting plan

System compatibility test

jwalling commented 13 December 2006 at 00:09

Has anyone developed a system compatibility test for selecting hosts?

I didn't find a problem until after I installed Drupal 4.7.4 on my current host. When I installed the Trace module - I discovered the host had disabled the PHP function "parse_ini_file()" for "security reasons". I did a text search and discovered the CiviCRM module also uses that PHP function.

These are things you have to discover after making a commitment of time and money.

I was able to work around the Trace problem by writing a substitute for the parse_ini_file() function, but it is a kludge that will break with the next module update.

If there was one project that collected these "gotchas" into one compatibility test suite, selecting hosts would be less like walking thru a mine field. Those of us who had a bad experience could notify the project team to add a new test.

In addition to PHP testing, the compatibility suite could test directives used in .htaccess files. My host is very restrictive about directives and I had to use trial and error to find out what would work and what wouldn't work.

DailyRazor

lexner commented 27 December 2006 at 09:23

- Fast support team
- SSH
- Full featured Fantastico
- Java with private or shared JVM\.NET hosting plans (besides ordinary PHP, of course)

http://dailyrazor.com/

I'm with them for more than a year.

APlus.net - Warning

bd80599 commented 29 December 2006 at 03:28

I just moved my website (http://all.ofthe.info) to Aplus.net (I had a few rinky-dink/non-Drupal websites there for quite some time), and discovered that by default, if you have a shared hosting plan with them, all external firewall traffic is blocked. That means no remote-authentication via the Drupal module and no aggregator module.

They will, open up ports, on a port by port basis, but there is a maximum of 10 per account. So, if you wanted to use the aggregator module, you could have at most, 10 different feeds (or at least from 10 different external hosts).

I asked them if this was a function of the plan I was on (I stopped just short of saying I'm willing to pay more money if they open up the firewall for me), but they said this was across the board for all shared plans. I believe that they will let you do whatever you want if you have a dedicated server, but don't quote me on it.

In their defence, I have had good results with their tech support. They do seem to emphasis website security (you have to fax them a copy of your drivers license to get SSH access), but they have been responsive and knowledgable. I have been using (almost abusing) their online chat tool to talk to their techs, and that has made things much easier.

The toolset is OK...they offer alot of website building tools, but since we already have Drupal they are mostly redundant. They will submit your site to search engine had have built a fair amount of Google tools into their control panel (you can check your page rank, see where you are in the Google data center, etc...)

If price was not an object...

seanberto commented 12 January 2007 at 04:30

At this point, I have nightmares about hosting. Started with Rochen 8 monts ago, had some site slow downs on the server I was on - but I was still convinced the $ savings of shared hosting was worth it. I went to Personalsites.org. Their whole network went down 2 times for 24 hours each time within 6 months. Then I tried DreamHost. I had two accounts, one worked great, the other was on a really slow server.

Virtual dedicated hosting was next. Not good experiences with DWHS. Now I'm on a dedicated box with Atjeu. They are absolutely incredible. Great service, ridiculously fast response time. I couldn't recommend them more for dedicated hosting. But their support is still reactionary. They can provide premium port monitoring - but not content monitoring. They can help you set up a mailserver - but it's not their job to make sure you've got your SPF records written correctly to avoid spam filtering...This isn't a critique of their services - it's there business model. They don't provide fully managed hosting.

If you could afford fully managed hosting - who would you go with. At this point, I'm looking at Datapipe and Rackspace. So far, I'm really impressed with Rackspace's sales support - but that almost makes me more nervous.

If you had $700/month for hosting for 10 small corporate sites with low web traffic but high reliability needs who could each afford to pay you $100/month just to make it happen - who would you choose?

-s

Sean Larkin

247-host.com

nancydru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 16 January 2007 at 05:52

After an extensive search recently, I ended up on http://247-host.com. They are really inexpensive. I actually went with the low-end reseller package at $3.99 a month, so now I can even set up a sand-box site.

Another note: Avoid US Web Design and Hosting - they allow their Tech Support guy to go crazy and let his personal prejudice get in the way of business. They just pulled the plug on me with no warning. They even terminated a site that I just maintain, but do not own. BAD, BAD, BAD

NancyDru

Dreamhost Coupon

meneer commented 17 January 2007 at 14:29

After reading almost all of the comments here, I'm interested in trying out Dreamhost to host a few personal, rather small web pages. Does anyone have an interesting coupon for me? I'll probably go for a one year-payment. Cheers,

Feel free to try my DreamHost coupon...

Walt Esquivel commented 4 February 2007 at 16:39

...and part of any affiliate proceeds I receive go towards Drupal projects needing financing.

Just click the 1st link in my signature and follow the instructions. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.

By the way, I've helped pay for a number of Drupal projects thus far and will continue doing so from the DreamHost affiliate proceeds.

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

need advice about hosting

zom commented 23 January 2007 at 04:40

hello, looking of all your comments, I wonder about changing my hosting. Until now I was using a dedicated server.
I am using drupal but not only (different php script SMF, coppermine), and my traffic is not so heavy 20 000 visitors/day peak
of 150 000 pages/day, 400 gigas transfer/month, 50 gigas on hard drive (for now...)

But with that small traffic, even with a dedicated server, I experienced some crash of server (P4 2,8 1 giga RAM) so I think the server should be misconfigured ?

My conclusion today is my server dedicated is expensive, and has crashes and the management gives headeack.

Looking for dreamhost solutions, capacity (bandwith, disk space) looks like a dedicated server but cheaper without the problems to manage the server.

1/ So could someone with good knowledge can advise me regarding to my traffic if shared hosting like dreamhost or site5 could be adapted for me without loosing time response for printing webpages ?

thanks very much

2/ I find interesting plans on surfspeedy.com ; did someone has feed back on them ?

That's not so small

nancydru

she/her/hers

English

Boston

commented 4 February 2007 at 08:57

Zom, that's not so small. Based on what I've seen in the shared hosting environment, you're better off where you are.

Nancy W.
proudly running 3½ sites on Drupal so far

NancyDru

Based on your comment...

Walt Esquivel commented 4 February 2007 at 16:52

...in which you wrote:

and my traffic is not so heavy 20 000 visitors/day peak
of 150 000 pages/day, 400 gigas transfer/month, 50 gigas on hard drive (for now...)

I don't think a shared server would work well for you. "Not so heavy" (your words) at 20,000 visitors/day peak???

Why don't you write some of the web hosting companies you're considering, ask them what they think/recommend, and post their comments here? That would be helpful to the Drupal community reading this.

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing

Limit removed

rl commented 26 January 2007 at 05:45

I have been using siteground for about a year now. They had a limit at first. Recently they told me that they no longer have a limit on support to stay competitve. It is not the fastest site, but for $4.95/month, it has been great for me.

Rich

Limit removed

rl commented 26 January 2007 at 05:40

I have been using them for about a year now. They had a limit at first. Recently they told me that they no longer have a limit on support to stay competitve. It is not the fastest site, but for $4.95/month, it has been great for me.

Rich

Avoid Virtuoso Solutions

cel4145 commented 17 February 2007 at 00:06

My recommendation is that you avoid Virtuoso Solutions like the plague. I wish I had read all of the negative reviews about them on the Web first (and I suspect the rumors are true). I had a shared hosting account and had to leave them after just a few months. Worst experience, by far, I have ever had. Go with site5 or open source host instead.

-----
Charlie Lowe | cyberdash
Tips for posting to the Drupal forums

Has anyone checked out

jojolimited commented 18 February 2007 at 08:18

Has anyone checked out www.hub.org? Each site is run in a VM and they are one of the few to support PostgreSQL databases (I think on dedicated database servers).
Based out of Panama and have good pricing on their Premium accts.

Joe C.

Great Service

sanho commented 20 April 2007 at 04:55

I have used EHostOne there service is great and very affordable

I am considering hosting

lionheart8 commented 10 June 2007 at 23:14

I am considering hosting several sites on one account, and so looking for a relatively cheap host, but with lots to offer. I am using dreamhost, bluehost & co for orientation, to get something a little bit cheaper.

Apart from several hosts mentioned in this thread, I found http://www.hostingplex.com/hosting/shared

GENERAL ACCOUNT FEATURES COMPLETE
RAID-1 Protected Storage Space 300 GB
Trust us, It's a lot!
Redundant High Quality UUNET Bandwidth 3000 GB
Yes, this is a lot too!
Additional Sites Hosted on the Same Account Unlimited
Actual seperate sites!
Free Domain for Life yes
Free Drag and Drop Site Builder yes
FTP Accounts Unlimited
MySQL Databases Unlimited
Sub Domains Unlimited
Addon Domains Unlimited
Guarantees 30 Day Money Back
99.9% Uptime
No Hidden Fees
CGI-BIN yes
CGI-Library yes
Server Side Includes (SSI) yes
FrontPage 2000/2002/2003/XP Extensions yes
Dreamweaver Support yes
Account Control Panel (cPanel) yes
FTP Access yes
Shell Access (SSH) yes
Override .htaccess Support yes
Anonymous FTP yes
Raw Access Logs / Site Statistics yes
Custom Error Pages yes
Web-based File Manager yes
Custom Cronjobs yes
Hotlink Protection yes
Fantastico Script Installer yes
PRICING COMPLETE
2-Year Price w/Free Domain & Setup $3.95 per month
Yearly Price w/Free Domain & Setup $4.98 per month
Additional Domain Registration $9.95 per year
Instant Activation - Secure Order Form GET STARTED NOW!
E-MAIL FEATURES COMPLETE
E-Mail IMAP/POP3 Accounts Unlimited
Autoresponders Unlimited
E-mail Forwarding Unlimited
Web Mail Access SquirrelMail
Horde Mail
Custom MX Entry yes
SERVER SOFTWARE / CGI / DATABASES COMPLETE
PHP yes
Perl 5 yes
Python yes
Support for Custom PHP.INI Files yes
MySQL 4.1+ Database Server yes
JavaScript / DHTML yes
Flash / Shockwave yes
FREE INSTALLED PLUG-IN SCRIPTS COMPLETE
Message Forum (PHPBB, Invision Board & More) yes
Form-mail Scripts yes
PHP Nuke / Post Nuke yes
Multiple Guestbooks yes
Live Chat Software yes
Web Blogs / Wordpress / b2evolution yes
Mailing Lists yes
Image Galleries / Coppermine, Gallery, etc. yes
Poll and Survey Software yes
Web Auction Software yes
Moodle yes
Tikiwiki yes
Mambo and Joomla yes
phpForm Generator yes
Help Center/Support Ticket yes
Over a dozen more! yes
MULTIMEDIA FEATURES COMPLETE
Supports Streaming Video/Audio yes
Real Audio & Video Support yes
Macromedia Shockwave / Flash Support yes
MIDI File Support yes
Add Own MIME Types yes
E-COMMERCE FEATURES COMPLETE
SSL Secure Server (Shared or Dedicated) yes
OS Commerce / Zen Cart / Agora Shopping Carts yes
Password Protection Directories yes
Free Generated Certificate yes
OpenPGP / GPG Encryption yes
WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY COMPLETE
Dual Redundant Oc-12/48 UUNET Backbone yes
Optimized Apache / MySQL Servers yes
IBM xSeries Duo Core 2 Servers yes
24/7/365 Networking Monitoring yes
Cisco Powered Network yes
UPS & Diesel Generator Power Backup yes

and http://vexxhost.com/hosting.htm --- pplease look especially at the business plan.
They look good to me, especially Hostingplex and I'm toying with taking it up.
Does anyone have any experience with any of them?

regards