20070612|Administrative: Have a web host suggestion?

[chrisdanford]

We've had a lot of outages due to being disabled by our web hosting company. I think that the web host is hinting that we've outgrown our welcome with their shared hosting service.

Does anyone have suggestions for a good shared web host? Being able to handle our traffic, uptime, and responsive support are the most important factors.
|
icon=gear

[chrisdanford]

I'm leaning toward www.dreamhost.com because they've been serving some of the StepMania files for a couple months with no problems. Their control panel is very good, and their support information and wiki are also great. I have no experience with their support though, and I'm a kind of worried by some of the mixed reviews about their uptime.

[derangedKitten]

The hosting service I use, Qualisar Hosting, is really good for me. They are pretty cheap and have great resources (good CP, lots of features.etc with unlimited sub-domains, parked domains and addon domains, unlimited email accounts).
They have great uptime aswell.
Im not too sure on the support, but I've never really had to use it.

With pricing you have to negotiate with the CEO.

Contact Finley (sir_finley@chaoticgaming.net) to talk about it.

"If you can prove your worthiness
I'll make it free"

[Archer]

Chris, what kind of server space and bandwidth would the site be needing? That information would be helpful for people who are going to make suggestions.

[drkansm]

Just do not use godaddy. They would probably rip you off the most and then make it a living hell to cancel.

[Lyth]

Considering the size of the StepMania community and website, I think a dedicated server would be your ideal solution.

Otherwise, two shared hosts I recommend are Blue Host and Media Temple. Both have excellent uptime, experience, and service. Their plans differ a bit, so you might want to check both of them out.

[jeffrey1790]

IXWEBHOSTING
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.ph...anBusinessPlus

By the way BLUEHOST sucks balls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (its almost as bad as godaddy)

[chrisdanford]

Originally Posted by Archer

Chris, what kind of server space and bandwidth would the site be needing? That information would be helpful for people who are going to make suggestions.

The site doesn't use much bandwidth (~4GB/day) and doesn't need much disk space (~3GB). Server resource usage seems to be the bigger problem. The host says that the reason for being disabled is the number of simultaneous HTTP requests and because of the amount of database usage.

The main web server does about 1 mil hits / 600K files a day, plus about 200K database queries per day. Not many hosts seem that have an explicit policy about number of files served or number of database queries. In my experience though, stated numbers limits are pretty worthless - I've been disabled by a few different hosts over the years even without violating stated resource limits.


And thanks for the suggestions! I'm looking into all of them.

[donaldGuy]

Hey Chris

My personal site is over at dreamhost.com .. other than some outages due to power problems at their datacenters (which aren't really their fault) .. I've thought it great .. the extras are nice too .. for example, if you wanted to you could host your own Subversion rather than solely using SF's CVS servers. The amount of bandwidth and storage they (theoretically) give you is ridiculous .. I've been very happy with it

Back when the SMMix project was shopping for hosting (we're still going by the way .. over at smmix.com.. getting closer to done, could always use more help/steppers/testers/etc </plug> ) and Prnc asked me I told him dreamhost or bluehost based on what I'd found from research. He'd been having problems on his old host so good customer service was important to him, he went with blue host .. and he's reported being very happy with them!

Both hosts have given free upgrades at various points for no reason and are very nice to their customers

I'd say .. if customer service is a priority or you are married to cPanel (keep in mind that Dreamhost's custom panel is VERY well designed and I find just as functional if not more) go with bluehost, otherwise dreamhost is a GREAT choice

One more plug .. I'm hurting for hosting payments for next year .. so if anyone wants to be nice and sign up with my referrer link http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?220836 (or enter referrer as phoenix9@gmail.com) .. I'd love you forever .. or at least several hours .. .

anyway, regardless, hope your hosting search works out

Peace,
~ Donald Guy (aka Phoenix9)

[diwu2003]

I would probably recommend media temple like the one before.

Media temple is a clustered shared environment.