There has to be a better way to find a good web host

By kirkcaraway on 22 Jun 2006 at 14:07 UTC

It might be eaiser to find the Holy Grail than a good web host.

A year ago, I set out to find a good web host. It took about a month of research, longer than anything else in my project. I found Lunarpages, and I was happy.

But now, Lunarpages says they no longer support Drupal, which has sent me looking again for web host, and pulling my hair out in the process.

I have tried a number of the hosting review sites, but most of them have bogus information since they make their money off of referral fees and will recommend whichever hosts pays the most. And hosts which pay out more to acquire new customers often times make up for that expense by overselling their resources, which is what it looks like happened to Lunarpages.

I have scoured the forums here looking for hosts, but it is a very tedious process which thus far has not led me to what I need. Specifically, I am looking for an inexpensive shared account that can host five domains that I can use for development, which can be ramped up to a semi-dedicated or dedicated server when the need arises.

It would seem that a community like this one, which can produce such a great CMS, could find a better way to organize a list of Drupal-friendly hosts, complete with ratings and reviews. If someone could build the structure, I'd be happy to pass on what I have found in my searching so far.

I am off again on my quest.

Comments

I would recommend my host,

rivena commented 22 June 2006 at 14:46

I would recommend my host, but since they deleted all my mail a couple of months ago, I have promised not to recommend them to anyone. :)

Have you looked here? : http://drupal.org/services/hosting

So much of a good hosting company is that hard to quantify customer service... and so much of what we focus on when we shop around is price and specifications. I don't know that this is really the place to get into hosting company gripes, though. :)

Anisa.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Kindness builds stronger bonds than necessity.

www.animecards.org - 18,000 card scans and counting!
-----------------------------------------------------------

For what it's worth...

steveb28 commented 22 June 2006 at 15:07

I am new to Drupal, and my site is not on its feet and getting hammered (yet, I hope), but I have been very impressed with IXWeb Hosting (www.ixwebhosting.com). I did the Unlimited Professional Linux account for $15 per month - it gets me 10 hosted domains, unlimited subdomains, up to 100 mySQL DBs, unlimited mail boxes, and gobs of useful tools through their control panel.

Every time I have opened a support ticket (even late in the evenings) I have gotten a response within 15-30 minutes.

If I come across any red flags I will update this post, but so far I highly recommend them.

Cheers!

Steve B.

ixwebhosting doesn't support....

drupal777 commented 22 June 2006 at 18:25

integrating forums with email lists. They have a 200 emails per hour limitation and while sales said they would happily increase that limit for anybody operating an "opt in" mailing list, the good folks at technical support (whom I called and spoke to immediately after the good folks at sales said that it could be done) made it clear that they would not increase the 200 email/hour limit. Essentially, be prepared to either have your emailing severely cut back to 200 per hour or be prepared to have to send your emails out through a third party SMTP service that you arrange. Of course, that just changes the outbound from SMTP to TCP/IP, so at some point you might have to worry about bandwidth, but that is probably not an issue for most bandwidth options available.

so what do you think of them now

mrgoltra commented 13 May 2008 at 23:17

just curious. what you think about them now?

I've been using...

gilsmethod commented 22 June 2006 at 15:15

I've been hosting my drupal installation with 1&1 and am very happy with their service. they have a lot of nifty features. Check it out.Good luck!

Visit My Drupal Site www.gilsmethod.com and tell me what you think!

My Host

SpasticWarrior commented 22 June 2006 at 15:35

I understand your dilemma. I ended up selecting SiteGround for my hosting. I have two sites with them. The first is a static non-Drupal site and the second is my Drupal site. I've been pleased with the service. I am not a programmer and I had zero experience with any aspect of web site set up, including hosting services. There online support is quick and helpful, including my first experiences over a holiday weekend. Between, their help (they installed Drupal core for me; no charge), Robert Douglass's book and this site I've managed to get things up and running. There were a couple of false starts, but I learned a lot through the experience that has helped since. The hosting fee for both sites is $122.50 for one year. In my opinion worth checking out.

see

edrupalec commented 22 June 2006 at 17:03

see the list at
www.drupalecommerce.com/hosts

Drupal ecommerce, at http://www.drupalecommerce.com
Drupal for beginners: http://www.drupalecommerce.com/drupal_explained_simply

link bait?

Harry Slaughter

Omaha NE USA

commented 15 May 2008 at 19:34

looks like a bogus site for serving ads.

--
Drupal tips, tricks and services
http://devbee.com/ - Effective Drupal

--
Devbee - http://devbee.net/

how so with lunarpages?

pwolanin commented 22 June 2006 at 17:37

With lunarpages, do you mean that they just don't support the Fantastico install of drupal? We have a site on a lunarpages server, and there is no problem. You're better off installing yourself, anyhow. Any host that has mod_rewrite, PHP, MySQL, etc. will work.

FYI, I currently have installed Drupal sites on www.lypha.com, www.lunarpages.com, and www.dathorn.com servers.

So far, I like dathorn the best- all accounts are "reseller" accounts that allow you to create multiple cPanel-based accounts each of which can host 1 or more websites. Support tickets have been answered within minutes to a couple hours by a real person with knowledgeable answers. Also, each of these cPanel accounts automatically gets ssh access. However, in terms of performance I only have a very small site so I can't really comment. Also, their intro documentation is extremely minimal, so you'll have an easier time if you're already familiar with WHM/cPanel.

lunarpages has been generally good, though a couple episodes of downtime due to server/power problems. lypha is also acceptable, though there are frequently short periods where the sites are down or difficult to reach.

Based on the forums here and other sites, I also thought about www.asmallorange.com, but haven't tried them. Both dathorn and a smallorange seemed to get very good marks for reliability, though both are more expensive than lunarpages, etc.

---
Work: BioRAFT

more- lunarpages

pwolanin commented 22 June 2006 at 17:42

relatively recent comments in their forum don't suggest any problem:

http://www.lunarforums.com/forum/index.php?topic=31160.0

---
Work: BioRAFT

Lunarpages problems

kirkcaraway commented 22 June 2006 at 23:22

My problem was when I wanted to activate the clean urls and asked support for help. That was when they told me they no longer support Drupal because it puts too much strain on their servers. This only happened a couple of weeks ago, and I don't know when this change took effect. They didn't shut my site down or anything. It was just a warning that they wouldn't support it.

At this point, if they don't want Drupal on their servers, I don't want to spend any more time developing my sites there, only to move them. I'd rather do it now while they are still in development.

thanks

kirkcaraway commented 22 June 2006 at 23:38

I will try checking out dathorn. Yes, they are more expensive, but with no limit on domains, which is a big plus for what I am doing. Thanks.

Making a list

Michelle

she/her

English

Wisconsin, USA

commented 22 June 2006 at 19:28

The problem with making a list is that for every person that says their host is great another will say that host sucks. Site5 is a great example of this. I finally switched to it because more people said it was good than people who said it was bad. But that's not an overwhelming endorsement. So far, it's been working out pretty well, but it's only been a couple weeks. I moved here from A Small Orange, which I'm not terribly impressed with.

Unfortunately, it's very much you get what you pay for with cheap shared hosting. For those that have the bucks, there are a lot better options.

Michelle

I agree!

rivena commented 22 June 2006 at 21:32

I agree!

For the record, I will say I use IX. Their mail servers crashed a while ago and it caused me a lot of problems because I kept my mail on the server so I could access it from multiple computers. I keep using them because the technical specs are good, I shouldn't have trusted my mail to the idiots anyway, they didn't affect my gallery, and now my expectations are much much lower. ^.^

Plus, now I route all my email to a backup account and forward it to G-mail, a web mail that can actually read Japanese. ^.^

Anisa.
日本語が好きです！

-----------------------------------------------------------
Kindness builds stronger bonds than necessity.

www.animecards.org - 18,000 card scans and counting!
-----------------------------------------------------------

So true

kirkcaraway commented 22 June 2006 at 23:35

Quantifying web hosting is vey difficult. It relies on a lot of variables. I have found what I think are great hosts, only to find something in their service terms that is unacceptable, or read some horror story from a customer. And you can't always trust that disgruntled customers are right about everything. But it's also a field, because of the remote nature, where rip-off artists can flourish. I've had friends who thought that paying more for a host who was high quality was a great thing, only to find out that high-quality host was worse that the cheap hosts.

High price hosts

Michelle

she/her

English

Wisconsin, USA

commented 23 June 2006 at 01:36

Well, what I meant by higher priced ones are places like Bryght. They charge quite a bit more per month but you get a lot more for it as well. Another option for those with more money are dedicated servers so you don't have all the problems of shared hosting. Anyway, that's the sort of stuff I meant.

Michelle