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By Sharique on
I'm looking for hosting company.
I want to host my site and my clients sites.
I want to what is ur experience abt http://www.anhosting.com
Pls suggest me any good hosting company for drupal related sites.
I want to keep clients site totally sseparate from my site.
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Sharique
Comments
I did some research on this and...
I chose servage.net for my company. Other options I considered included: ANhosting, BlueHost, and OpenSourceHost.com. The last one actually provides support for open source CMSes, like Drupal. To my knowledge, all of those that I mentioned are really good and solid.
Great Service
My site is hosted by anhosting and I've had nothing but excellent service from them. I've had a few questions, sent a few support tickets and they've always responded very quickly. Moreover they have never once complained about my bandwidth spikes (which are probably small to them) or large downloads.
In the interest of disclosure I am signed up for their affiliate program and as such would invite you to use this link in order to sign up if you choose anhosting.
A non affiliate link is here: http://anhosting.com/
--
tcblack
- Truth Is Still Truth, Even If You Don't Believe It
AN Hosting is great for Drupal
I host all my Drupal sites on AN Hosting. They're the perfect budget host, IMO, and I've tried about 4 now.
I wrote up a full review of my experience with them here: http://blamcast.net/articles/drupal-hosting
--
John Forsythe
Blamcast - Custom Drupal themes and more...
BlueHost verse ANHosting
I set up two identical websites with a complex setup on both ANHosting and BlueHost. I then ran a remote service that is made to monitor sites and their performance. The service I used had over 100 locations around the world. After 1 week of running ANHosting was over 2 seconds faster on a page load then BlueHost.
The customer service for BlueHost is really good. ANHosting has two common situations that result from their service. The first is that ANHosting's tier 1 support is useless. Everything is escallated to a higher tier, and then all support is done over Email. The other common situation that came out of this all was a common pointing fingers off to another... The most common was "Its not a file issue its a scripting issue"... even when it was clear that the problem was with the server setup.
Moving servers from BlueHost to ANHosting took a good day, and this was the longest by far I have encountered.
I have tried 3 hosting services now. BlueHost, LunarHost, and ANHosting. ANHostings performance and reliability makes it the perfect choice!
Does update work in Anhosting?
Have you managed to get Updates in AnHosting?
I did two installations, one with the Acquia package, the other with Fantastico. Update doesn't work in either. According to the Acquia people, and they know their Drupal, this is a server configuration issue. And to me, the update module is absolutely essential. If it works for you, can you please tell me what did you do? I write this now because I am waiting for a reply to my ticket, but that can take ages
Yes
They did close my connection, but I simply pointed them to the issue and the error message, linked a Google page with a bunch of problems, and they ofcourse found that the server blocked the HTML requests to and from Drupal.org. They fixed it (opened it back up) within a Day and I was off and running (again)
ANHosting is a pretty good
ANHosting is a pretty good hosting for Drupal. And you can try midPhase as well. Both of them belong to the same owner, but midphase is for business, and anhosting hosting for individual.
=============================================
Want to setup a Drupal site, find the Best Drupal Hosting for it now.
Be aware of memory_limit restrictions!
ANHosting / midPhase shared hosting provides many positive things for a Drupal developer but there is one major drawback:
You cannot increase the PHP memory_limit above 32 megabytes as outlined in their support forum:
Find the original ANHosting/midPhase article here
For any Drupal developer who's made more than 3-4 sites, you will know that 32 megabytes of memory can be gobbled up by PHP quite quickly. Remember all those white screens you kept on getting? Yep, bumping up the PHP memory_limit:
ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');inphp.iniis usually the solution.There have been a few write-ups praising ANHosting, such on blamcast.net praising the performance of their servers and databases - which I totally agree with. Unfortunately, the article fails to mention the memory_limit restriction.
Other, such as on Drupalhosts.net have been claiming that you can set the memory_limt as you please. While this is true, it goes against their policy - and all it would take is an audit and you'd be tagged as having violated it. While I don't know what action they'd take if they discovered this, I am sure they'd at least ask you to change it back to 32M. Then what, you'd be left with a site that doesn't work because you needed 64M..
So, all I can say is do your research before throwing your money any provider and ask them to provide the technical information to you. Don't simply trust a review written by fellow Drupal user (who are sometimes just trying to make a quick buck through affiliate links), get it from the host provider themselves. Each provider should have the technical information written somewhere on their site or, more commonly, in an official forum article - use this as a guideline and hold them to it.
Is there a market for hosting a Drupal site with ANHosting/midPhase? Absolutely - if you run a fairly small Drupal site and you know that 32MB will be enough for you now AND in the future. If you plan on running a mid-sized site with 30+ modules and some traffic, think twice.
Midphase/Anhosting
I am satisfied with the support. It was really great and the customization possibilities too, BUT see http://drupal.org/node/490156
I am sorry but you are wrong
I am running a server that requires over 128MB and I have no issues what so ever. I am running Advanced Profiles, Advanced Forums and over 20-30 other modules.
That article is old or outdated. If you find any issue with a ANHosting account, I know midPhase will work on it. ANHosting accounts are different then regular mid phase Accounts. This can be frustrating since sometimes it seems Im using the ticket system to fix issues with there computers. For instance I am having issues with Permissions and Accessing ImageMagick. But they do work on the problems, and have been very helpful.
The ONLY host that I have seen that uses a 64MB memory limit is Hostgattor. I have tried most of the other plans, including some lower costing VPS solutions, and in the end stayed with ANHosting. I have found no perfect solution to shared hosting, but at least with ANHosting, I get reasonable performance!
ANHosting is good for you!
Hi MGParisi,
1) If you haven't changed your
memory_limitthen your site does not need 128M for PHP. If you have changed it, then you are breaching ANHosting's policy, as I stated above.2) Although I did say:
To be honest, I was making a guess at to at to what limit you could push your Drupal site to with ANHosting. It always depends a lot on the size of the modules you are installing, how much PHP memory they require, number of concurrent users, and several other factors. In my experience, 32M does not go very far.
Despite the names, Advanced Profiles and Advanced Forums would not fall into my idea of large modules. I was thinking more about Views (which is 10x bigger than both the ones you mentioned) and a few others to do with image manipulation (128M is the bare minimum for those). They are common modules to install on most Drupal sites and real PHP memory hogs.
So, based on what you've mentioned, I wouldn't think you'd have any issues with PHP memory limit for your site on ANHosting. You made a good choice for a hosting service!
3) The article is not outdated because ANHosting sent me the link twice while trying to sort out some issues with memory_limit. That was 5 weeks ago. Write them an email yourself and ask if you can set your
memory limit = 128M, see what they say. If their response is different from what I stated, I would be very interested to hear about it.4) You're right, ANHosting does offer a reasonable service for the price! I just wanted to make everyone aware of the limits of their service because there was a lot of "they're the best" conversation happening here (sometimes from people wanting to make some quick affiliate money). I didn't want anyone to get swept away with the sales pitch without knowing the full story.
Damn wish I found this
Damn wish I found this article yesterday eve!! Always the way huh! Searched all over for hosting providers, bish bash bosh, I signed up with anhosting yesterday and have now come across this 32mb max memory issue, cant even load my modules page! spits this at me:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 128422 bytes) in /...
So I cant seem to change the memory limit through php config in the control panels, you mention its possible to change it though, how would I go about that? But seemingly it is against regs as you stated, ah buggery/
Here is what anhosting say
Here is the anhosting response to my issue, so im not sure what this guy up top is talking about?? seems like just air to me:
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I am sorry that you are experiencing issues with your Drupal site.
Unfortunately our shared server limit for php memory is 32mb. This cannot be
raised on a shared server. If you need a higher memory limit, you will need to
upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated server. You can view those options from our
website:
http://www.midphase.com/
--
Sorry to hear it
Another surprised ANHosting customer. Sorry to hear about your experience with them as well.
It's a real shame because they do offer some really strong pluses for running a Drupal site with them:
- The MySQL database is hosted on the same server - so SQL calls are MUCH faster than other hosts (DreamHost, etc).
- They give you a lot more access to important configuration files so you can fine-tune your shared server (clean URLs, PHP and Apache modules)
In my eyes though, all of these positive points are heavily outweighed by the draconian memory_limit. It's no good having clean URLs if your Drupal site keeps white-screening your visitors..
To be honest, it's a little embarrassing that they happily flaunt the Drupal logo on the homepage.
Hey, Andrew...
Where are you going from AN?
I've got AN but I'm not live yet - I've been looking into where to go from shared and I'm not too familiar with the VPS or Dedicated platform.
Is this the solution?
And is VPS worth it, or is a jump to dedicated the only thing that makes the most sense?
Thanks for any input,
- Paul
A shared hosting might suffice your needs
A shared hosting might suffice your needs.
When the traffic increases, you can think of other expensive and efficient options.
VPS options
Hi Paul,
profjk is probably right, if you're yet to launch your site you don't know how much traffic you're going to get - perhaps the ANHosting shared host will be fine. Having said that, having a backup plan if the site gets a lot of heavy traffic is always advisable (see the infamous Slashdot effect)
The midPhase group (which ANHosting is part of) has a myriad of other hosting solutions, such as VPS.NET and dedicated server services. I do not know if they will handle the transfer of your Drupal site to a different system but it might be worth asking them. Also find out how long they would take to do it and if they can guarantee it would be fully set-up and ready to go after transfer. So if they don't end-up doing it on time or as specified you can ask them to reimburse you some of the money. I've heard quite a few tragic stories of site transfers going wrong.
If you are not familiar with Linux (or not willing to learn) then I don't suggest going for a Dedicated Server or VPS. You really need to get your hands dirty setting up and some occasional maintenance tasks.
Dedicated servers are really expensive, normally $100+ / month. I have had no experience with renting one as have never had the need.
As far as Virtual Private Servers go, I think it's the next logical step from a shared hosting server. The prices are really good (from $20 / month) and the service is very flexible: you can upgrade to more RAM, traffic or disc space with an online payment within minutes. I like the VPS plans because a lot of them let you pay as you go, so you don't need to sign-up for a 12/24 month contract. I paid for 1-month to see if I was ready for a VPS; I liked it so I stayed on. But if I want to leave tomorrow, I just cancel my automatic payments and transfer my sites somewhere else.
I have tested VPS.NET (midPhase) for one week and found it to be ok. I ended up going with Linode due to this article and the follow up comments for the Linode service being very positive. Linode offers more for less money, as far as I am concerned: I pay $20 / month and I get 360MB of RAM. Another, more popular, VPS option is Slicehost which offers similar prices as Linode but with 256MB of RAM.
I originally setup my Linode server as outlined in the guide above but ended up starting from scratch and just installing the basics with much lighter software. For example, I didn't install PhpMyAdmin, Webmin, FTP, etc. I also installed Lighttpd instead of Apache and saved myself a whole lot of memory.
Now I have 4 sites running on my server and have not encountered any issues with RAM usage. It comfortably sits on 180-250MB usage most of the day. If I ever need to upgrade, it's as simple as clicking on a button.
In the end, you really get what you pay for. $5/month for a shared host really isn't a lot of money, so you need to accept that there are limitations. It seems a lot of developers are trying to get a Ferrari but for the price of a Ford.
I second this experience. I
I second this experience. I have told them that I will have to get hosting somewhere else if I can't get something more than 32M, waiting for reply, which will probably will be negative.
I can't believe they're doing that, after marketing themselves as a drupal-optimized host.
FYI, the site is pretty simple, has basic modules(views, cck, simplenews, workflow) and can't even install ubercart because of the memory error.
The threats worked...
They've raised my limit to 64M -- good to know for other Drupalers in similar position.
they claim its 128M now
Maybe they changed it but on their website it says 128M.
Didn't An hosting website use
Didn't An hosting website use to have a community forum ? Their web site now seems all bells and whistles but details and no user interaction like it was before. You can often tell much about a host by looking at their forums to see how users feel about them and issues, etc.
My php is 128MB and still experience issues, have to face it, Drupal is a resource hog, doesn't matter how much you increase php/database limits. I've done all the php/mysql tweaks and it didn't change anything lol
When I used Wordpress, never did I have such issues, Drupal can learn a thing or two from Wordpress.
Forum
I believe the forum was discontinued when UK2 bought Midphase/AN early last year. Web Hosting Talk is a good alternative.
I found this interesting
I found this interesting http://www.midphase.com/ on the front page no mention or listing of Drupal, Wordpress is mentioned though at the top, guess that gives a clue about how much they love Drupal. I think more people should look into self hosting on their own computer, its' been taboo for so long, but I think you can do as good a server and better than hosting companies.
that means nothing
WordPress is just a better known application. It has more name recognition than Drupal does. They don't even list Joomla.
It's not about love. It's about them getting customers. And just because they don't list any other of the hundreds of open source apps doesn't mean they don't support or want to support them.
~silverwing
definitely www.dataxi.com "li
definitely
www.dataxi.com
"life in web"
It`s funny
It`s funny I just sign up on An Hosting before read this article.
Most funny yet the last post talking about a non-american server makes me think about the hosting services in my country (Brazil). So i just check the php.ini in the shared hosting plan that the company I work uses to find out it gives 64mb memory! And it`s cheaper then An Hosting!
Too late now.
http://www.locaweb.com/default.html?lang=en_us
Trying to set my Drupal site
Trying to set my Drupal site up on ANHosting at the moment. So far I don't think I could be any LESS impressed. Clean URLs *does not* work right out of the box. I had to use non-Clean URLs just to get logged in so I could reach the backend and turn them off. I've had their tech supports tell me the reason for the site not working is due to:
1) Database incompatibility (we are both using MySQL 5)
2) You can't serve Drupal up from an IP address (erm - ok!)
3) And the winner (from one of their Sys Admins):
Words fail me.....
Hi Jason, Looks like your
Hi Jason,
Looks like your site is in a subdirectory, so you'll need to change your .htaccess file a little bit. Drupal expects your site to be on its own domain, by default.
I wrote an article to help with just this situation, check out section #1:
http://drupal.org/node/256410
Basically, you just need a line like so:
RewriteBase /~vinvmar6Remember to remove this line if/when you start using your own domain. Hope that helps.
ANhosting vs Hostmonster
Anhosting has a rather inefficient support system. Plus they put in place way too many security measures that screw up complex Drupal installations.
I'm using Hostmonster and so far my sites are running without a problem.
ANHosting: Consistently poor performance
I've had two low-traffic corporate sites on ANHosting for about 7 months, now, and it has NOT been a positive experience at all.
Performance has been consistently poor from day 1. MySQL crashes frequently, page loads are glacial. (Talking about anon users, here.) I've opened multiple issues about it. The most response I've gotten is that they went and killed a couple of rogue processes once.
We will almost certainly be taking this client to Hostgator in the near future. Will probably have them share space on a VPS with us.
From my perspective, any performance advantage for Drupal w/ ANHosting is historical, not present.
EDIT: Following up on my most recent attempts to get better performance, they weren't interested in hearing about poor performance -- said that if we want acceptable performance (which in this context means MySQL not crashing on a regular basis), we should be on a VPS or a dedicated server.
Great service and software but very poor performance
After months of trying to get Drupal to perform reasonably at AN Hosting and even challenging some very (fishy) positive "independent" reviewers elsewhere, I finally canceled my account and moved everything to Site5. It's a night-and-day difference, although Site5's in-house control panel has a few rough edges and we're paying $30 monthly for Site5.com redundant hosting vs $7 for shared hosting at AN.
If you decide to give AN Hosting a try, just buy a monthly plan since there are no refunds after 30 days, even if you cancel early.
I read lot's of good reviews
I read lot's of good reviews about AN hosting around the web specially here http://blamcast.net/an-hosting-review as this link was often mentiond but its all a big lie. Guy showing that AN hosting can take up spikes of traffic etc its so funny now looking when to login it takes up to minute, database timeouts on things like webform, wont even mention modules page. Everything is so slow it hurst. Also one funny thing, when they created that shared account for me, they "accidently" made it that i can put only one site on it, altough they market you can put 20 of them. Yeah i would like to see 20 drupal sites working on their shared hosting. So when i tried to put more domains it didnt work, they said they put me on "old" package by mistake. I switched to them as i didnt like hostgators shared hosting so much as it was slow also but this seems to beat it in slowness by decent amount, and i told client we were moving to better hosting.
Anyway this whole hosting bussines is such a "cat in a sack" (saying translated to eng from croatian :) ) bussines, never know what you will get unless you take dedicated hosting. But they are expensive and you have to have real bussines to backup it up, so drupal seems to be bad solution if you dont have money to invest in better hosting packages and ofcourse hosting companies dont want to have 100 drupal sites when they can have 10 000 of non drupal sites for same cpu and memory occupaction, its understandable in bussines terms and i guess they hate when someone with drupal comes to their hosting :-)
Adriadrop Drupal development
I've been keeping an eye on
I've been keeping an eye on Wordpress development lately, it's really growing into a very powerful CMS and it works on any shared hosting. It looks as if Wordpress will soon have the best of Drupal without all the headaches.
Wordpress and Drupal
I just created a bunch of Wordpress sites, it's pretty but pretty superficial too. Great for homemade personal stuff but not at all in the same class as Drupal for extensibility and features. WP learning time was 6 hours, Drupal was 6 months before I really understood what CMS can be.
Hm.
Well, that's my review you're talking about. I'll try not to take the "big lie" comment personally and just stick to the actual facts.
I haven't had any of the problems you mention, my sites run quite fast with AN, and have for years. But that's just one data point, and experiences vary, so let's look at the bigger picture:
Since 2007, I've sent hundreds of clients to AN, and the number of refund requests has always been low. Here are the exact numbers for the last 3 months:
April 2010: 12 clients referred, 2 refunds. 83% satisfaction rate.
May 2010: 14 clients referred, 2 refunds. 86% satisfaction rate.
June 2010: 14 clients referred, 1 refund. 93% satisfaction rate.
Considering AN is a low cost, shared host, and all my clients are Drupal users, those are really strong numbers. Obviously no host will be perfect for everyone, but overall, most people seem to find it works just fine.
I see you're located in Croatia. AN's servers are in Chicago. That puts about 4500 miles between you and the servers, which may be a contributing factor. I noticed you also had problems with HostGator, another host based in the US. Perhaps you'd have more luck looking for a host with European-based datacenters?
Moving to Linode
Site5 had a 3-day meltdown so all my sites are moving to Linode VPS for $19.95 per month. Linux was a learning curve for this old Microsofter but it's great to be able to set everything exactly the way Drupal wants. It was well worth the investment.
Great Host - with strange mail limitation
Moved last week with a Drupal/Civicrm site away from GoDaddy to ANHosting.
Up to now good experience in all points.
* Cheaper
* Very fast and competent support. SSL was setup in one day, catch all email within 1 hour.
* My feeling is that now the website is (depending on which page is loading) 2-5 times faster.
* No annoying advertisements on cPanel!
Discovered today (11 Jan 2011) one ridiculous limitation:
* The sum of sent AND RECEIVED(!) eMails must be less than 200 each hour!!!!!!!!!
Incoming mails exceeding the limit are bounced with an error message!!!!!
So if you do a bulk mailing (obeying the 200/h limit) and many people respond immediately their mails are bounced! Really a "nice" feature to discredit the organization sending the mails and to put them on spam lists.
Try Google Apps
This comment may be coming too late for bijama1, but perhaps others will find it useful.
You don't have to use your web host as your e-mail provider. In my case, I'm using AN Hosting for the site and Google Apps for my e-mail. You can read about my experiences switching to Google Apps. You have to change some DNS settings and then copy over your e-mails.
Using Google Apps probably won't help with the 200/hour send limit, but it certainly will do away with the limit on receiving mail.
This is really very good
This is really very good comment.
Normally, shared web hosting will limit the number of email you could send out per account, please refer to Constraint of Shared Web Hosting.
So, the best way to bypass this issue is to host your email in some other place (free email service). One is Gmail from Google, just like igrok mention in above, and another option is hotmail, please refer to http://domains.live.com/
Another benefit of separating your web hosting and e-mail provider is to avoid your email (or spam emails) to impact your web site.