Drupal Hosting

Hi Alex,

I didn't attend the meeting where this was discussed, but I did carefully read the recommendations.

Rackforce was listed in the recommedations, and about 8 months ago, I signed up for their base Linux VPS plus Tivoli backups.
At the moment, I have 15 Drupal sites running.

All service requests I have made, were answered and solved within a few hours. So far up time is 100%, and I don't think I've ever had to reboot the server.

I give RackForce 2 thumbs up :-)

Cheers,

I've been running a few sites with viaVerio few different VPSs - They used to be great a few years ago but I've been getting more and more outages and problems. All I can do is recommend against this one. I'm posting two suggestions as I've been researching myself and thought this may be helpful.

Two companies I thought looked interesting as their replacements are wiredtree.com (chicago) and vpsvilla.ca (which is run out of Toronto in the Front St Data center). Both are small teams of linux geeks as far as I can tell.

Pro: They probably care when their equipment isn't running and let's face it - Linux geeks are exactly the kind of person I want running my servers - They like their jobs and hopefully will go the extra mile for support.

Con: Not all startup hosting companies make it... And that would be one major problem if your host disappeared one day or was bought by some larger company who will then give you poor service.

I'm going with an MPS from Widedtree. The sales guy knew his stuff inside and out. I would probably go with vpsvilla if I wanted VPS (their Semi-dedicated plan looks interesting with a full CPU core for your VPS) but I'm sick of someone else's accounts affecting mine.

Also there's a promo for wiredtree 10OFFDEDICATED gets you 10% MPS hosting for life.

Check out my pre-sales question response with VPSvilla where I was asking a few details not on their site.
http://www.vpsville.ca/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=90&start=0&S=78b796693d7...

Coming from Verio where they told me to optimize my database when their server load balancer was failing (resulting in 20 second page draws on my drupal sites) I can't say I'm exactly excited to move all my sites somewhere new, but I am excited to not have to be one the phone with support for something failing every week!

I'm struggling with the same dilemma. I feel a bit misled...sure you can run Drupal on a cheap shared hosting solution for a few bucks a month...they all seem to support PHP & MySQL these days so sure Drupal installs.

But maybe I'm addicted to modules too much but I feel to get any sort of decent functionality going with Drupal, you have to install a lot of modules....and then the shared hoster tells you you're hogging too much CPU and are threatening to shut your site down or upgrade to a VPS for $100+ a month (a managed, pre-installed VPS).

I like the idea of these "slices" or blank VPSs that you can get for $20-$40 a month but they are all empty and un-managed and I am not into learning how to install let alone maintain it all (Apache, MySQL, PHP, mail, spam, etc).

Are there any sysadmins out there that would be for hire to install it all on a VPS slice? Ball-park cost? And what about expected maintenance costs?

And how many semi-robust (60+ modules) Drupal sites do you think could be hosted on a single VPS (say 512MB)? Visits would probably be in the sub-1000 per day.