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By andre75 on
I have my sites running with site5 and I am mostly happy. They have had some problems with abusive users eating up all cpu and /tmp space recently which made my MySQL to put out error messages. They also had some problems with DNS recently.
All of this does not make me want to switch (yet), since they still outperform powweb by a great lenght.
Yet I have a friend who wanted a really reliable shared host. Yahoo seems to use IIS, so it is out of the picture.
I know that shared hosting is inherently unreliable, but I was wondering if someone could recommend a really good shared host to me that virtually never has problems. I went through some threads here and looked at the list in the Handbook, but I am afraid their service will be similar to the service of Site5. For his project he would like just a little bit more reliability.
Would be glad if someone could recommend a host where Drupal runs just fine who doesn't oversell like crazy.
Comments
After some problems with
After some problems with previous hosts I found a very reliable small company http://www.dwhswebhosting.com, in the plan I have (advanced plan) they have a limit of only 150 domains per server. They do not offer a lot of bandwith, but I haven't had any issues with them and I have almost a year hosted there. One of my previous hosts suffered from server overload (more than 800 domains per server) and it was difficult to keep the connection with my site, adding content was a nightmare (when I tried to publish something the server didn't respond), here I'm impressed with server performance and speed of my sites.
I really recommend this host.
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
Drupal
Could you send me (or post) the url of a drupal powered page that runs on that webhost?
What OS are they using?
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Both of my sites on the
Both of my sites on the signature are hosted there. http://capmex.biz is the most active one. They run linux servers, they have a public forum where you can ask more specific questions. Don't forget to check the server specs, they recently upgraded the shared servers, they also use clustered mysql servers.
Very professional people.
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
Could be more than 150 domains
capmex -- Your site is quite fast, but there could be more than 150 domains on your server. DWHS's policy is 150 accounts per server, and accounts can have up to 11 domains each.
It looks like they may be keeping it below 150 domains: I did a reverse IP lookup on your domain using www.domaintools.com, and it showed 125 sites with the same IP (about half of them adult/sex sites, btw). There is no way to tell how many other IPs are associated with that server, but I'm guessing not too many.
Scott, you are right. I
Scott, you are right. I reread the faq and it says 150 accounts per server. I did a reverse lookup on two other sites hosted there (that I found on their forums) and I found 254 and 201 domains.
They must be balancing their servers with different accounts: Micro 1 domain, Business 3 domains, Advanced 12 domains, Extreme 12 domains.
Thanks for pointing about the adult sites on the same IP, I asked them and they will be moving my account in the next few days to another server.
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
http://www.dnsstuff.com/ is
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
is pretty good too to search for ... dns stuff :)
Alexandre Racine
www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal
I found 290 sites listed....
a few minutes ago.
Links
http://www.webhostingtalk.com is a good place to look for comments on webhosts. Search on the one you are considering for comments.
http://www.whreviews.com recommends some hosts mostly based on comments at WHT - "Honest Hosts" in the lower left
Not much experience but...
I've had an incredibly positive experience with Rhombic Networks (http://www.rhombic.net). They use Drupal themselves and tuned their hosting to make Drupal fly and work nicly. They've been fantastic thus far for me.
My site's at http://www.nicagay.com . Also their site is a drupal site so you can watch both fly.
The only real "downside" is that they don't have a web control panel, but the staff has been very helpful and responsive, so really to me it only delayed my site's setup by about 5 hours or so total. :-) They don't charge extra for ssh access or any bs like that either.
More
They both look promising. Are there any more suggestions?
Above all I need reliability. Gigantic bandwidth promises and unreasonably large storage are not important to me!
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Well my site is hosted at
Well my site is hosted at http://www.infranet.ro (ignore the romanian part from it , an english version will be soon here:P) and the servers are in the US. So far everything is ok :).
------------------------------------------------------
Be Smart, Think Free, Choose OpenSource
Thanks
Thanks for the tip, but the romanian language and domain really is a turn off for me.
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
WB-Hosting works great for
WB-Hosting works great for me. They have an up-to-date Fantastico thingy as well, so it all works like a charm: setting up Drupal took me all of fifteen seconds. Support is always at the ready, and service is super friendly.
You can find them at http://www.wb-hosting.com.
... and I ain't getting paid for that, either.
Looks good
Their site looks good. I will send them an email asking about their features.
I am getting very careful with companies that are promising extremely large bandwidth.
Thanks for the tip.
I am still open to suggestions though. I will check all of them out and send them a bunch of questions. Lets see who responds faster and more accurate.
My two favorites so far are:
http://www.dwhswebhosting.com
http://www.wb-hosting.com
Any other suggestions?
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Rhombic
Yeah, don't pass up http://www.rhombic.net . :-)
Sent
I sent the following email to:
rhombic.net
dwhs.net
wb-hosting.com
and my own host site5.com
Lets see how fast they respond and what they have to say.
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Sorry for the mix up
Hello,
We actually get several of these and from our experience most are just pranks or competitors since most of the information is easily found in our FAQ.
But I would like to answer now if it's not too late.
-What is your average uptime? Only once that I know have we fell below our guarantee of 99.5% which if we did then we would refund the month. This was from a power outage that shorted our generator. Wow what a nightmare. But within about 3-4 hours everything was back to normal. And we are very excited knock on wood to have perfect network uptime which means our router has never lost a connection. We have fail over with level3 and Globalx so our connection is very strong. So basically we have 100% network uptime this year and around 99.8% uptime server wise this year.
-Do you offer an uptime guarantee? Jumped the gun on this from the last question.
-Do you support PHP and MySQL? Yes
And we have quad xeon servers for MySQL, where talking google response rates with most php.
-What versions of PHP and what versions of MySQL are installed?
PHP version 4.4.1 - MySQL version 4.0.25-standard
-What operating system are you using?
A customized kernel based on Red hat Enterprise
-Using Apache Web server? What version?
1.3.34
-Support for .htaccess and php.ini configuration files?
Yes, you can mange both of these even with our starting level plans.
-What php extensions are installed?
Zend, Image magick, GD, Get Text, Mb my crypt, Free type, Too honest I hate to post all of them publicly it might entice the wring person.
-What php libraries?
Once again this is not the best place to answer but I can say we will install whatever is needed for you free of charge the same day you ask. It just needs to be safe and regularly updated.
-PHP accelerator (e.g. Zend)?
Zend
-What Bandwidth and Storage Plans do you offer?
http://www.dwhs.com/web-hosting-plans.htm
Our most popular is the business plan for $6.95 a month or $63 a year.
-On average, how many people are on the shared servers and what CPUs do they have?
We cap the servers at 150 and limit the add-ons to 11 per domain. We also run remote dns, remote mysql, and custom tweaked kernels on newer dual xeons machines. All 2 u with aluminum cases and 11 fans. As machines heat up the cpu slows down, we make sure that's not a issue.
-What connection (eg. OC-48) do you have?
We have each network on a 100 meg line and have about 16 networks.
-What is the average Server Load?
less then .10 if a server spikes over 1.0 even though we run two dual xeons on our shared servers we start working on making the machine run smoother. This was if everyone spikes and we are attacked the server is still ready.
-Is the MySQL server and the web server on the same machine?
nope
-Are other customers running Drupal (drupal.org) on your servers?
Yep, several. We highly recommend it and we have talked about pre-installing it for all customers to use if they choose.
-Does the Database User have all privileges (including Lock Tables and Drop Tables)
Yes, you have a phpmyadmin built in and can do all of this.
-What control panel are you using?
Cpanel
-What is the average response time to support tickets?
Average response: 2.799 hrs.
--
Once sorry for the assumption that you where not legit.
Also I would like to mention that own our own data center in downtown LA on 7th/Garland and give tours to anyone that is interested.
Thanks for your time,
Charles
Customer Relations Manager DWHS inc.
A question for DWHS
I've been considering switching from A Small Orange because my site is so slow (still investigating if it's them or me) and yours sounds quite nice. One thing that drives me nuts with ASO is that every time I add a new domain or subdomain (say test.mysite.com), it creates a new directory at the root of public_html and I have to email them to move it to the Drupal /sites directory. Do you offer any way of setting what directory domains point to without having to bug tech support?
Thanks,
Michelle
Only 2 domains :(
I just looked closer at your business plan and realized you only allow 2 add on domains. I guess that puts it out of the running for me. I run a couple small sites for clubs I'm in so I'm already using 2 and I'd like the flexibility to add a few more if needed.
Thanks anyway,
Michelle
also on ASO
Hi Michelle,
I'm also on ASO it seems to have connection problems (timeouts and delayed responses). Their tech support is super fast and responsive though, but its not enough to compensate for the connection problems. BTW, you can ask for SSH access to do the directory move yourself.
Allen
Nice answer
Lovely. Sounds really good. I have taken the no-response as a lack in customer support and signed up somewhere else though.
What made you think I was not legit?
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
I am sorry to hear that...
...Especially since I just started with Site5! I heard that they have a great reputation, so I went with them.
If you are unhappy, I'd recommend Text Drive. See their description of themselves for a flavor of what they are about (http://www.textdrive.com/about)
Beware that they are not cheap or feature gobs of space. However, they do not oversell and are great people. If it wasn't for the cost for a good amount of space, I would have gone with these guys.
Hope this helps if you do need to switch. Also, if you could elaborate more on your experiences with Site5, I would really appreciate it!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Vugteveen |rickvug.com @rickvug on Twitter
NoNoNO
Personally I am quite happy with them. They responded quickly and we worked the problem out. I even got a credit to my account. I have no problem with that for my personal sites and I am still thinking about using them for that other site.
I have gotten 3 interesting responses to my questions so far:
Site5: Fastest and most complete and forthcoming response. They reacted within the hour and answered every question. They even sent links to where I can see the server loads, uptime ...
wb-hosting:They also answered within the hour but did not answer all questions. They claim low load but no proof.
Rhombic:4.5hrs response. Very honest reply, they mentioned they are a new company and thats why the load average is 0. I asked them what they meant by this: "At the moment we do not offer any control panel."
DWHS has not replied yet.
So far, site5 has come out the winner of my little test. I really liked the honest response of Rhombic and if it weren't for a very critical site I would give them a shot, but newcomers sometimes face the problem that users sign up faster then they can increase servers.
As I said, I am very happy with S5. I had a glitch but they took responsibility, cleared it and gave me some refund. Overall what you would expect. Things like this can happen.
EDIT: Rhombic replied. They do everything for you until they have decided on a CP. Sounds like an interesting option for Newbies!
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Rhombic Networks' reply
Andre, if you don't mind, I'll go ahead and post the answers we (Rhombic Networks) gave you:
> -What is your average uptime?
Our servers are rebooted every major Linux 2.6 kernel release, which happens to be approximately every 2 months. Upgrade and reboot downtime is about 10 minutes or less.
> -Do you offer an uptime guarantee?
We offer a 99.5% uptime guarantee. If you can demonstrate that your site has been been unavailable for 0.5% of the month, we will waive/refund your payment for that month.
> -Do you support PHP and MySQL?
> -What versions of PHP and what versions of MySQL are installed?
> -What operating system are you using?
> -Using Apache Webserver? What version?
At the moment, we run Debian Linux unstable with a 2.6 kernel. We're using PHP 5.1.2, MySQL 5.0.19, and Apache 2.0.55.
> -Support for .htaccess and php.ini configuration files?
Yes, we support .htaccess files. If you use PHP through Apache's mod_php (recommended), you cannot have your own php.ini file. You can however set override various PHP directives via .htaccess, or we can place them in Apache's main configuration for your site.
> -What php extensions are installed?
> -What php libraries?
> -PHP accellerator (e.g. Zend)?
It's a little difficult for me to look up the extensions and libraries we use. If you name some that you are interested in, I can check if we have it or whether we can install it. We use PHP 5, and unfortunately at the moment there are no reliable PHP accelerators available.
> -What Bandwidth and Storage Plans do you offer?
Our shared web hosting plans are listed at: http://rhombic.net/hosting/shared-web
If you are interested in our managed Drupal hosting plans, you can see more information at: http://rhombic.net/hosting/drupal
Just to point out the difference: the shared web hosting gives you what most conventional web hosts provide, which I'm sure you're familiar with. The managed Drupal hosting gives you a managed Drupal install: you can upload your own themes, modules, etc and not have to worry about security upgrades/etc.
> -On average, how many people are on the shared servers and what CPUs do
> they have?
Our machines are single-processor. Our plans are to host no more than 60 accounts per server, provided system load is low enough.
> -What connection (eg. OC-48) do you have?
Please see http://rhombic.net/about/network. I can provide a test file for you to download.
> -What is the average Server Load?
We are a very new company so we have very few clients, so our current average load is 0. Our policy for the future is to keep average server load below 1.0.
> -Is the MySQL server and the webserver on the same machine?
Yes, unfortunately. Separating our MySQL and web server is a top priority for the future, however.
> -Are other customers running Drupal (drupal.org) on your servers?
Yes. Our company website runs Drupal: http://rhombic.net/. I can list a few more sites if you'd like.
> -Does the Database User have all privileges (including Lock Tables and Drop
> Tables)
> -What control panel are you using?
At the moment we do not offer any control panel. After evaluating what was available on the market we decided that we did not like what was available. We hope to complete a in-house, custom control panel by the end of this summer.
> -What is the average response time to support tickets?
I'm not sure our average response time, but we provide responses (that is, a useful answer, not an autoreply) within 1 business day.
> Thanks for your reply. I have another question if you don't mind.
> How do I control my website if you don't have a frontend of some sort for
> it?
At the moment, e-mail us at support (support.rhombic.net) and we get it done for you.
Yes, it can be inconvenient... It's one of the reasons we are not advertising and pushing our services more.
> Do you offer raw acess logfiles for me to download and analyze?
We can provide these, no problem. We use Apache's combined log format.
EDIT: Removed direct link to e-mail address, fixed some of the formatting
__
Personal home page | Rhombic Networks: Drupal-friendly web hosting
I will
I will keep an eye out for you guys and see how you grow and develop.
I really liked the fast, comprehensive and honest reply. Wouldn't mind doing business with you some time !!!
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Once again we are very sorry
Once again we are very sorry for passing up that email and I hope I answered all the questions thoroughly enough for you.
Thanks,
Charles
DWHS Web Hosting - http://www.dwhs.com
What?
What answer. I haven't seen it. Maybe it fell into my spam folder on gmail, which would be sad since that wouldn't be your fault then.
Can you check when the email went out. The ticket number is: PVUEHY-3631
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
I guess they refer to
I guess they refer to http://drupal.org/node/55586#comment-106605
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
Overlooked
Oh. I overlooked that one.
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Thanks for clearing that up!
Thanks for clearing that up! I feel a lot better about them now, which is inline with the other stories I have heard about them.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Vugteveen |rickvug.com @rickvug on Twitter
Even
You probably feel even better if I tell you that I told my friend to sign up on S5 anyways, since their reply was the fastest and most complete out of the bunch (except Rhombic which I didn't choose for their size).
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Dreamhost
I've had good luck with Dreamhost... Though I tend to think that it's not a great solution if your expecting tons of traffic... Of course, no shared host is a great solution for that...
___________________________________
Tony Wright
Day2 Technology Ventures - Venture Capital for Technology Startups
Jobby - Helping Web Geeks Find Jobs and Freelance Ops... Web 2.0 Style!
Hm
Aren't those the guys promising 1TB of traffic? Anyone making such outrageous claims while cpu limiting ones account does not seem like a good hosting partner to me. I don't need this much traffic anyways, so I rather find someone who can deliver what they promise. At least all those guys with heavy apps will sign up somewhere else.
Also I read on the hosting page here at drupal.org that some people had trouble with them.
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
After several horror stories...
After several horror stories I arrived to dathorn(http://dathorn.com) before my drupal days. I've been there for 3 years now, and can only remember a couple of instances of downtime. They are not a friendly, cozy webhost with lots of friendly help modules and nice salespeople, but their servers are state-of the-art, their linux-apache-perl-php software is kept up to date with stable, proven versions, and trouble tickets are knowledgeable answered in minutes, not hours, by the owner himself, a guy named Andrew that apparently never sleeps. They have Fantastico & CP Skins, so Drupal installation is automatic, especially in the Fantastico units.
http://www.hostm.com/ ?
As someone try this one?
http://www.hostm.com/
Alexandre Racine
www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal
hostm is unreliable
Server performance is very bad due to server overload. They removed their support forums a few months ago when they started receiving many complaints from angry customers. Some of the customers claimed their sites been down for a few days.
I still manage two sites from a client on hostm (his 2 year term ends in July), and one of the recurring complaints is about email, very often they receive messages of server not found on their email client. The same problem happens with their site being not found very often.
Last year one of my drupal sites was hosted there, you can read more about my bad experience with this company at:
http://capmex.biz/forum/hostm-review
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
I've been very happy with Rochen
I've been with Rochen for over a year now and have found their team to be beyond belief. If you have a problem they have it fixed qucikly. They are very well versed and accomidating. The prices are not the cheapest but you get what you pay for. I have 6 ( http://www.pcsites.com and http://www.patentlystupid.com to name the two most prominent.) domains hosted with them and couldnt be happier.
Backgrond is bsaically this, they are UK based but their servers are global hosted at various locations. I know of Texas, New Jersey, Atlanta and I think some overseas. The are very active on fighting spammers and anything that eats up too much processor time. While there arent many Drupal users there as yet, I hope to change that! An example of their customer service, recently when I tried to apply 4.7.0 RC1 I hosed my install, completely. Spent about 4 horus trying to undo what I had done, never figured it out. Contacted them and within a few hours I had my site fully restored including all MySQL data. They have active forums with knowledgeble customers who are willing to help too. Their server hardware is first rate and easily accomodated the loads demanded of it.
Not for some needs...
They seems pretty good, but on the disk space, they are cheap. 200Mb, that's low. So if your needs are in this range, I have nothing more to add. In my case, I have a gallery of 500Mb and growing! :)
Alexandre Racine
www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal
True disk space is low but
True disk space is low but on the plan I am on its a nice raid 5 setup so I can tolerate the low disk space, not to mention the fact that I sahre that server with 72 other sites 5 of which are mine, your server on the other hand has 434 other sites on it. The server my sites are on consists of the following.
Operating System
CentOS 4.2
Server Specifications
Dual AMD Opteron 244
2048MB (2GB) System RAM
Hardware RAID5 Disk Controller
3 x 120GB Hot-Swappable High Performance Hard Disks (Drives in RAID5 Configuration)
1 x 120GB Hot-Swappable High Performance Hard Disk (Drive for Nightly Backups)
If anyone else wants some other info just let me know. For 5 domains +1 parked on their premium multiple domain hosting I am paying a whopping $22.95 a month. With the reliability its a small price to pay.
Hello Andre, I don't know if
Hello Andre,
I don't know if your friend is still looking for a good shared hosting provider, but I thought I would recommend Pair Networks. I was with them for 3 years before switching to Site 5 mainly to save a little money (free sub domains and more space, basically), a move I am now regretting a bit.
Pair charges you for subdomains, they have their own control panel etc, but they do a thoroughly good job.
S5
Thanks Ramdak,
we have settled with S5. Their performance seems acceptable, even though not great.
Recently they messed around with lynx and wget permissions, screwing up my cron and other scripts.
Calling cron directly via php somehow triggers the badbehavior script and does not work.
I didn't have any problems with lynx before :-(
Thanks for the tip though. I will check them out anyways.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
www.phpwebhosting.com
I've used www.phpwebhosting.com for about 5 years, it's $9.95 US/month, gives you a full unix account, no traffic monitoring, no throttle, unlimited mysql databases, emails, subdomains, and webspace. No catch either! They also have fast tech staff.
If you need 500 Megs or less.
I did not try them, but these are 500Megs accounts. You can ask for more for free, but not if you have videos, pictures, audio and porn.
Alexandre Racine
www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal
site5 getting worse
site5 has been getting worse. ramdak just posted about this.
Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/troubleshooting
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/modulegroupings
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/47vs46
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/compared
Hm
Yep. I noticed that too. Unfortunately that is something you will have to deal with on just about any shared host. I am so tired of moving around and forefeiting my pre-paid packages (since refund usually costs a fee, I don't bother asking for it).
What bums me out most at this time is their frequent changes.
First I fought the battle, that they had a new httpd that was logging something into the temp folder. The temp folder ran full and I got mysql errors. Took them a long time to turn that off. Was something gzip related. At first, they didn't even monitor the tmp folder so I had to contact them each time.
What can I say. Pay for dedicated if you can (I can't) or learn to live with this.
I retreated from their forum as well, as one of the admins there has a serious attitude problem.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
terrible
Andre,
that's terrible. I had no idea. perhaps it's time to cancel the one year contract, which is only a few days old.
wanted their cvs and automatic upgrading, but seems to be vaporware.
westhost has virtual private hosting beginning at $4/mon
www.drupalecommerce.com/hosts
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
Not really
I have been with Powweb before. Believe me, S5 is quite an upgrade from their service.
Seems to me, that you have to deal with this kind of thing from all shared hosts.
At least S5 responds and does not always blame things on me like PW did. They take responsibility of a problem, even though it takes them quite a number of trials.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
my experiences with dreamhost, gaterhost and bluehost
Dreamhost gives a lot but they definitely have problems. They often have DNS outages. Way too many domains that depend too few DNS servers. I forget the details but once DNS is out, everything's functionally kaput. Lot of the back end soft is home made so it can be confusing. I've had plenty of problems the month I stayed there. For over a week straight everything was downloading at about 5KBps. All due to a bad switch which wasn't dropping packets they claim making it hard to detect. They are one of the biggest and there are plenty of people who love them but I'd stay away from them till they get everything straight. Oh, and forget about support. Not really there.
GaterHost is pretty sick. The backbone they are connected to is super fast. Very low ping times and transfer rates are the best I've seen. There is a compromise though. They give very little control over the configuration. A control panel is provided but there is no way of gaining access to php.ini or shell access. With less variables and no shell users I think they'd be more reliable than others. Just very slim software running on fast dual & quad cpu's.
What I'm using now is bluehost. They are excellent. the CEO is very responsive to his customers and they provide a lot. Excellent support. 7 days a week telephone support which is unheard of in a shared hosting plan. Not that important to me but still, very nice to have. They also upgraded my account with 15GB of space and 400GB or transfers for the same $6.95. Not a lot of options though. One price for one set of features. You can upgrade little pieces though so it's just as flexible if not more so. They do have fantastico with drupal for 1 click installs.
As far as reliability, they haven't gone down so far. There's a fail safe so if a bad neighbor starts choking the cpu, they will go off for a minute. The limit is reached when more than 20% of the CPU time is taken which is only an issue if you get tons of visitors with tons of modules on your drupal install. Or if you have buggy software. They are running Quad Xeon servers. It would take a lot to get them beyond 20%.
-joon
www.dvessel.com
one minute downtimes
Joon,
thanks for the reminder about bluehost. they had been our number 2 choice, when we went with opensourcehost.com. the problem with opensourcehost is that there are frequent (about once a week that we've noticed) downtimes of one minute. Does that sound similar to what you have, or would you say bluehost is better for this. what's your traffic like? do you think bluehost can handle a heavy traffic site? (I know dedicated hosting is coming down the road.)
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
My site doesn't get much
My site doesn't get much traffic at this point. It's not a community site, more personal than anything. The only limiting factor is the CPU so it depends on how loaded your drupal install is times the number of simultaneous users. BlueHost does seem to oversell but it's not a problem so far. They are running really good hardware and it's not being stressed as of yet. The server I'm on I have never seen the CPU go beyond 5% and on average it stays at or a little above 1%.
I'd look into how your visitors use your sites. Is it sporadic, everyone onboard at once, etc... If you think you need dedicated hosting then bluehost isn't for you. They have no way of upgrading your account since all they offer is shared hosting. Someone like Host Gator would be better as long as you don't need access to config files while being in their shared plan. They're strength lies in there dedicated hosting where you can do what you want.
-joon
www.dvessel.com
great idea
hostgator is a great idea. We haven't found anything like that. Will check it out. thank you.
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
Be careful
IMHO, terrible support.
Someone got into my reseller account on May 5th and tried to hijack a Drupal Db on a resold account. I called and wrote HG immediately. A ticket has gone back and forth, but I seem to be conversing with software, or people who don't read.
On May 22nd they showed fleeting interest after I threatened to "make some noise". By then they said they couldn't do much; the log was erased on the 7th. As of today the 26th, nothing has been done, there isn't even speculation about how it happened, or any preventative measure taken. Luckily this is just a test site with no useful content / mail modules disabled.
Last year they had a problem with autobill. They told me it must be my card, then they said it was because CC co's blackball web hosts. No matter how I tried to drag it out of them, they wouldn't just *tell me the truth*. Finally someone complained on the message board, and wouldn't shut up. Then it was fixed. (That board can no longer be seen by the public.)
So after 2 yrs, I'm reading this thread with interest. Their cheapest reseller account is $25/mo. Worth it for support handled in-house, as I was told two years ago. But I've since seen proof that it's not even in-continent (so to speak). Worth it to get someone knowledgeable on the phone when necessary; but now I'm told "level three techs don't have time to talk to customers."
DLS
I don't doubt this. Haven't
I don't doubt this. Haven't been with them long enough to know. But I bet you get enough people in here, someone will point out an issue with all hosts. Best thing we can do is to know enough to prevent what we can.. Here's their forum for what it's worth.
-joon
www.dvessel.com
thank you
thank you for the info about problems with hostgator. that was very useful. Turns out they are not suitable for us because they don't offer command line access except on dedicated hosting.
I agree all hosts have problems. I do find though, that some hosts, such as opensourcehost.com, are polite and respond when problems arise. I prefer that to site5 simply removing forums where people complain.
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
dathorn?
After seeing a couple positive comments I'm trying dathorn.com. Only a small, little-used site now so I don't have any real feel for speed or uptime.
On the plus side, they've answered all support tickets knowledgeably and quickly, plus they have a customer forum that it seems like they use to actually keep clients informed and don't block complaints. All plans are "reseller accounts" with WHM, and you get SSH access automatically (one per cPanel account you create). Backup costs extra, but apparently you can directly access the backup files by FTP.
Also, they run PHP using suexec, so all uploaded files, etc. are owned by your userid.
On the downside, they provided almost no intro documentation, so unless you already know how to use WHM and cPanel I think you'd be lost.
---
Work: BioRAFT
I disregard your claims about bluehost
dvessel, the link you have posted www .bluehost.com/track/dvessel is an affiliate link and according to partner.bluehost.com you'll receive $65.00 for anyone signing up using this link. Your comment is biased and out of place.
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
So it is, I guess I missed
So it is, I guess I missed the posting guild lines but it was only a single post with that link. Figured it was the right place and how I feel about BlueHost is true. Call it biased but I was giving my honest opinion which is basically um.. a bias. You have your experiences and your biases like everyone else.
Calling me a spammer and filing an issue is quite pathetic. And this is from someone who runs the most annoying banner on his site saying that "I WON A LAPTOP!". ..sigh
I apologize to everyone else for posting my affiliate link. Thought it was harmless... Which it is but I can see how it can be taken the wrong way.
-joon
www.dvessel.com
Funny guys
Funny war going on here.
If you had shown the link in your post http://......../youruser noone would have complained. I guess this way one could argue that you were trying to hide the fact.
Filing issues for something that can be discussed like adults is wrong too.
Banners are sometimes switched in rotation in conjunction with an advertising network. Mostly publishers do not control what is shown.
What do we learn:
Netiquette (the way we treat each other online) is more important than most think.
Maybe you two could take your issues and discuss them via email?
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Well said..
Well said.. ☺
-joon
www.dvessel.com
The appropiate place for an
The appropiate place for an affiliate link is only on your site. Did you read the TOS for the affiliate program you signed in?
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
Oh, I missed that. Thanks
Oh, I missed that. Thanks for letting me know. I just started in the program and didn't make a single cent and don't expect much of it but you went through the trouble of finding all that out just for me? Thanks!
Could you do me a favor and link to the TOS? I can't seem to find it. Just e-mail the link to me through my profile. Much appreciated. ;-)
-joon
www.dvessel.com
I am not joining just for
I am not joining just for the sake of arguing and your points are valid, but I would give dvessel the benefit of doubt and ascribe it more to naivete than an intention to deceive.
I think he meant well and anyone with a little experience on the Net would realise by just looking at the url or even after landing on the page that this was an affiliate link. I think it stands to reason that if he had wanted to hide the fact that he stood to gain a fair bit of money out of your signing up through the link, he would have gone to more trouble to actually hide the link, which he didn't do.
I'm going to go with harmless...
If someone doesn't already have someone they specifically want to give the referrer money too by signing up through them, then what does it matter where the money goes? It's not like the money comes out of the pocket of the person clicking on the link. He gave his opinion and, if you agree with him, and decide to go sign up on the spot through his link he gets some money for it. Big deal.
I suspect most people are going to take their time and do some research first anyway.
Too much ado about nothing.
Michelle
Bluehost overselling
I moved to Bluehost a few months ago after reading the previous hosting thread on this site. Service has been good, and I like the SSH access.
Now my site is down or incredibly slow frequently (most weekends, which is when I need it), even the static HTML main pages. My Drupal site is still under development so I don't think my site is the problem.
Reverse lookup shows they're running 850 sites on our host. The performance is unbearable, 16 second page load times, 4 seconds for a refresh.
http://www.cnpquadsquad.com/test/
I've filed about a dozen problem reports, usually get a sympathetic response within 8 hrs, but the problem is typically resolved within an hour or so. The emails from the CEO about their router problems were nice, but my site is down too often.
Like many others here I'm getting frustrated with site-hopping. I'll gladly pay a little more for better server performance, but as a non-profit club we can't afford VPS or dedicated.
About to try Site5 based on what I've read here. Our site won't every be very busy, I'm pleased to hear that admins shutdown the resource hogs (but I'll tell the sales people I'm concerned about not being notified).
Anyone know what Site5's typical site to host ratio is?
cheers,
peter
site5 is great!
I switched about a month ago (after reading about them here), and I am very happy with site5. Their domain pointers thingy takes some getting used to, but it's basically as good as full domains if you do it right (especially if all those domains are drupal sites). I can't find it anymore, but I think somewhere on their site they said that they only have 32 accounts per server for their diamond plans. That would mean 64 for their gold and 128 for their silver plans. I'm on a gold plan and very happy with it.
Looking at their site, they also have a special right now (true multi-site hosting for a very low price) that looks quite interesting ...
Just an update on having Drupal for easy installation at DWHS.
We now have Fantastico for free with all plans.
So Drupal is just a click a way.
thanks everyone ;)
Charles
DWHS Web Hosting
http://www.dwhs.com
Thanks
Thanks for the update.
You dedicated plans look good. On your shared plans I am missing something in between business and advanced. Even though business would still serve me, I would be getting close to the limits with no room to grow.
What are Add-on Domains? Are they having their own control panels or are they sitting in a subdirectory of the main domain with traffic being directed via .htaccess?
How many people share a machine on average on the shared hosting plans and on the VDedicated plans?
What are your limits on MySQL usage (concurrent hits or hits per hour?) and size?
Do you offer automatic upgrades? What happens if I go over the limits, will my site be grounded or will I be charged the difference to the next plan for that month?
This concerns me somewhat:
http://www.dwhs.com/hostingforum/viewtopic.php?t=555&sid=275caff29ad3cd6...
As I don't want my site to be blocked by some corporate filter for being on the same server with an adult site.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
just tracking this thread -
just tracking this thread - need to find a new host :(
1 and 1
I've had very good experiences with 1 and 1. You may want to check them out. Reasonable fees and they have everything you need to host Drupal.
Check out 1 and 1
I did not at all. Alexandre
I did not at all.
Alexandre Racine
www.gardienvirtuel.com Sécurité informatique, conformité, consultation, etc
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal
1and1 is not good for Drupal
1and1 is not good for Drupal hosting at all. Their web stats are useless. The size of MySQL databases is limited to something like 100MB even if the total allowed space on the hosting plan is much more. They only gave me 3 of those pathetic MySQL databases in my hosting plan ($10/month).
Site5 are not perfect, but so far they are the best of the companies that I've used.
what more do you need?
i said it before, and I'll say it again, www.phpwebhosting.com is the best I've heard about. I have no complaints with them. unlimited databases, email addresses, sub domains, virtual domains, and disk space upon request. support tickets have an answer within half an hour most of the time but I've rarely needed it. you can have 3 different versions of php running in different parts of your site. full shell account. secure telnet and ftp, and https access (using your domain if you have thwate thing). full cron support. popular php libraries already installed. They will even open up a port on the firewall if you need it!
$9.95 US / month.
as far as I know, there's no difference between running your own server and this, except you're not the only person on there.
don't mind me
now I have a complaint. someone made a mistake with my permission and no one has been able to access my site for nearly two days already and no customer support about this issue. (`ヘ´)凸 Maybe they are on vacation. anyway, now I'm reading here to find a new host.
finally
after a few days of down-time and over a week without a reply, I prepaid one year with bluehost (since the 6 month account is almost the same price). A day after my domain propagated and switched to the new bluehost server, phpwebhosting.com finally replied to my help ticket. They said they will refund my last month's payment and apologized for their bad customer service.
They weren't sure why my account went down, but perhaps my site was crashing their server. I have a feeling that might be true and may have something to do with memory problems as I mentioned in an issue I submitted a month ago - http://drupal.org/node/65625 . I'm just speculating but will see if bluehost shuts me down too! btw, I'm only using the latest versions of drupal and modules.
I've had another account with phpwebhosting for more than 4 years and things are pretty good. I'll keep that server for now.
hope your not on the same
hope your not on the same bluehost box as me ;)
Site5
I believe S5 also limits your DB size to 100MB.
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
site5
I don't think Site5 limit your database size. That is one of the questions I always ask when signing up for a hosting company.
Site5 have been increasing
Site5 have been increasing the limits, last year it was 200MB and now the limit is 250MB and 200 concurrent connections. So perhaps a few years ago the limit was 100MB, but I'm not sure about that.
http://www.site5.com/support/kb/idx/0/084/article/What_limits_do_you_pla...
There's a typo on the page and says 25OMB instead of 250MB, legally they could claim 25oMB (25MB) :)
Check the following comment on another thread, apparently with those limits you can't have a high traffic site:
http://drupal.org/node/46707#comment-107330
--
Webmaster Resources | Canadian Directory
Short update
One of my articles got dugg today. 7500 visitors in 2 hours. Way over 1000 concurrent users at some point (throttle has kicked in and shut down search). All of this on a Site5 shared account without a hitch. Not a single blip.
I didn't seem to have hit any MySQL limits either.
So I guess I will be fine staying with them :-)
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
very useful to know
Andre,
1) congratulations! was it the World Cup in Germany article?
2) this is a very useful benchmark.
3) It's interesting that site5's stated policy of a maximum of simultaneous 200 mysql connections didn't kick in. I wonder if it's because you did some stuff around converting dynamic pages to static pages, if I recall correctly. Can you elaborate on that? Do you think that was why?
I've following the discussion about static caching on the developers list. Is what you did similar?
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/node/839
Thanks.
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
Thanks
No it was this one:
http://www.aguntherphotography.com/node/1698
(a funny article about screwing around with hotlinkers)
I am currently not caching my pages with comments enabled. I have currently only part of my cache running, the one that takes care of the more static content. So basically this article was running full blown MySQL with only the Drupal internal cache enabled.
At the current stage the cache only works for pages with url_alias (can be changed very easily), that would exclude the blog anyways.
Before posting the next issue of this series, I will probably have a new version of the cache running.
I have disabled the badbehavior scripts, since I noticed that it also blocks some legitemate users (got some emails). Unfortunately captcha cannot find the ttf fonts, which I need to install myself, but I want the comments to run without administration. So I guess I need to fix this part and then put the blog under a cache that refreshes very often (much like Bens original version). This way I should be able to withstand even larger hits.
Anyways, this article ran native Drupal. Good news for everyone on Site5 :-)
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
funny!
Andre,
the hotlinking article is hysterically funny! You have a great sense of humor. Now I know what to do to hotlinkers. Thanks for the explanation.
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
LOL
Thanks. Now some of my victims started to find out what was going on and sent me some funny emails and commented on that article. I can't believe how much more material for the next issue they already provided with this.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Another update
Another one of my articles got linked from some high traffic site. Site5 simply disabled my account without notification. After I realized it and emailed them 8 hours ago, I still haven't heard back from them. My site is now down for almost 14 hours. Still counting. I bet I am going to see much higher numbers. No idea why they don't reply. You should not treat customers this way, even if they are not the corporate accounts.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Site5 simply disabled my
That's really pathetic customer service. I have another six months to go on my reseller account, so I am going to start looking for another host. This musical chair never seems to end...
That really sucks -
That really sucks - particularly when you have just been linked to. I am surprised that they would disable any account without notification.
Based on earlier comments in this thread I recently setup hosting with bluehost. I have had good customer support - setting up SSH access took only 1/2 hour from the time of my first email. I dont know of their traffic policy and my site hits arent that high, but I would hope that at the very least I would be notified of why the account was being disabled at the time it was disabled.
Keep us informed.
Another site5 update
Since about a couple of hours (edited: 1 hour), all the sites on my reseller account are down. To rule out ISP issues, I checked with one of my clients running a beta site if they could access the site from their location and heard they couldn't.
Worse, I heard from them that yesterday and today the live site (beta, of course) had been down. They were under the assumption that I was working on it. Yikes! I told them I never worked on live sites, and requested them to SMS me whenever the site was down so I could keep track.
The long and short of it is that Site5 is coming across as a very disappointing host. I am certainly taking my reseller business (although I don't actually resell) elsewhere.
Update:
Forgot to mention this. This time it's not just the db server. Even the mail server is not working. Interesting uptime reports for the server I am on- just change that to at least more than 1 hour now:-)
atrocious
congrats on your article getting linked. (a hilarious one about myspace?)
that is atrocious. is it possible that they are experiencing some general problem, and your spike in traffic was just a coincidence, that they didn't specifically disable your account versus having everything go down?
Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
Drupal for beginners: http://www.drupalecommerce.com/drupal_explained_simply
It took them 19hours to
It took them 19hours to respond. They said that each email I sent, bounced my ticket to the bottom of the queue :o.
Even after the last email 9 hours.
Good news is, traffic is still very strong now that the site is up. This thing got picked up by a lot of other sites.
This is the digg article:
http://digg.com/technology/222_megapixel_image_of_Machu_Picchu_in_Peru.
This time it was not a funny article but a fun project of mine. People seemed to love it and still do so much, that I now have outsorced the content of this page to my old powweb account that is still active. Let them take all the GB of Traffic this generates daily, while the html comes from my site5 account. Seems to work nicely. Site5 traffic is down a lot, while visitors are up.
gollyg,ramdak,edrupalec: I believe all shared hosts have the same problem. I won't switch to bluehost. Believe me, it could be worse than S5. I don't mind being shut down. I would want the same if another site hogs all the resources. The traffic that this digg sent was tremendous. I'ts hard to say when it got shut down, but my best guess is in the second hour of the article being on digg, after about 12k uniques and 10.5GB traffic.
The only thing that made me really upset is that they didn't notify me and that support took this long to get back to me.
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
thank you
Andre75,
Thanks for clarifying that you would still stay with site5. That says something.
[By the way, the link didn't work. Said "item not found."]
Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
Drupal for beginners: http://www.drupalecommerce.com/drupal_explained_simply
Hm
The dot at the end (after Peru) is part of the link. Somehow the drupal forum does not add it to the link when I post it like this.
My original page is found here:
http://www.aguntherphotography.com/machupicchu_222mp.html
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Stunning!
Wow, Andre75, you are a really fantastic photographer.
I've been wondering, what's your business model for opentravel?
Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
Drupal for beginners: http://www.drupalecommerce.com/drupal_explained_simply
Business Model
Thanks for the compliment!
I don't follow any business models. I simply do what I like. I don't depend on making money with my websites, hence no option to buy pictures and no adsense (yet).
I have occasionally licensed images to people if they in turn donated money for a good cause (unicef, cancer research ...)
As long as I can pay the hosting and the domains out of my pocket, I don't mind running it like this and letting it evolve. I may choose to add adsense later to cover hosting cost.
I have already dreamt up some killer features for the travel site, but I haven't had time to implement them yet. Something to set it apart from similar sites :-).
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
thank you
that's nice of you to have people donate to good causes.
Neccessary
I'ts a thought born out of neccessity too. I am in the US on a work visa, hence I am not allowed to have income outside my company work. After getting a lot of requests for pictures I thought I could at least try to help someone else who needs it.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com