Local hosting recommendations...

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mikeker's picture
Posted by mikeker on December 2, 2008 at 5:18am

Hey all,

I've been with Drupal Value Hosting for about a year and my account will renew for another year pretty soon. At first they were great: very Drupal-friendly setups, Seattle-based servers had wicked-short latency and I was happy. Lately, the Seattle servers regularly have loads > 50 which grinds even the most efficient site to a crawl and customer service has gone AWOL. Anyhow...

I'm looking to jump ship if I can find another local hosting option. What I'd like:

  • Seattle- or NW-based servers. I'd prefer to support a local company.
  • Allows all the usual methods of access: ftp, sftp, ssh
  • Allows .htaccess
  • Unlimited (or really high limits) domains, subdomains, email accounts, MySQL servers
  • Good customer service

I'm hoping to keep my annual hosting costs to around $150 (currently I'm at $120/year). Ideally, I'd like a hosting company that has an option for reseller accounts as that's the direction a lot of my business if moving towards. So, kind of a long-winded way of asking what hosting company people are using and are they happy with it.

Sorry, I should know better than to post after the second glass of wine...

Thanks for your help!

Categories:

Comments

Yeah, I'm ditching DVH as

Posted by nickvu2 on December 2, 2008 at 7:55am
nickvu2's picture

Yeah, I'm ditching DVH as well as soon as my term runs out. Early on, I was dissatisfied with both performance and support.

It looks like WebFaction will be my new home. I don't think they have regional servers though. May I ask why that's an important feature? (n00b question)

"# Seattle- or NW-based

Posted by rHOnDO on December 2, 2008 at 5:08pm
rHOnDO's picture

"# Seattle- or NW-based servers. I'd prefer to support a local company."

... a laudable philosophy.

Why local?

Posted by mikeker on December 2, 2008 at 5:59pm
mikeker's picture

Two reasons for wanting regionally based servers:

  1. Network latency is based on how far, both in distance and number of server hops, your client is from the server. (OK, there's a lot of other things that factor into latency, but client-server distance is the easiest for me to control). Most of my business is local so I want them to get the best performance out of their sites. 90% of their traffic comes from North America so a server in Asia, India or Europe will have greater latency than a local server. Considering the number of files that the average site fetches (even locally cached files require a round-trip to the server to check last-modified dates), this can start to add up.
  2. I'd prefer my money to stay local. Local servers means there's some local IT dude (or dudette?) who's got a job keeping the servers going and some local coffee shop keeping that IT dude(tte) going, etc. I figure I can afford an extra couple bucks a month in hosting costs to keep it local.

I'll take a look at WebFaction, thanks for the tip.

Any other recommendations out there?

Host Candidates for Drupal

Posted by jdwalling on December 3, 2008 at 1:45am
jdwalling's picture

If you find a Seattle host you can recommend, please post your findings here: Host Candidates for Drupal

Time for a dedicated, managed or co-located server?

Posted by AndrewBecherer on December 3, 2008 at 3:09am
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Hey Mike,

With the amount you are willing to pay have you considered a dedicated or managed server?

--
Andrew Becherer
http://andrew.becherer.org

--
Andrew Becherer
http://andrew.becherer.org

shameless plug:http://www.xotbox.com/content/no-hassle-hosting

Posted by kanani on December 3, 2008 at 4:01am
kanani's picture

I've started offering "managed hosting" to my clients. Its designed for those that don't need shell access and won't keep up with Drupal security updates on their own.

The colo is in Texas, but the guy that handles the sysadmin stuff on the server for me is in Japan ( 3mo vacation after working for zillow.com in Seattle).

Once again "local" is really a relative notion.

Datacenter local, company not

Posted by msteudel on December 7, 2008 at 5:06pm
msteudel's picture

I haven't actually used these guys yet, but they have a regional content delivery network that I think sounds really cool.

The company is called SoftLayer. They have a content delivery system around the world that can pull in your site and deliver content regionaly, so if your user is in Seattle, the seattle datacenter serves the content. If the user is on the east coast, the east coast datacenter serves the content. This service is called CDNlayer. They even have some web services to manage their services. It's about 20bucks for 200gb worth of transfer.

Again I haven't actually used it but have been searching for content delivery network for a heavy flash video streaming project. I don't know how it would work with drupal. AND it's not a a local company.

Mark

Quick update...

Posted by mikeker on December 7, 2008 at 7:39pm
mikeker's picture

A few things I've looked into:

  • I checked out SoftLayer but their plans start at $139/mo., which is out of my budget. You can then add a CDN for an additional $20/mo. They do have some resellers that offer virtual servers (three mentioned to me were www.zipservers.com, www.excellenthost.com/hosting/vps, http://www.serverintellect.com but I haven't investigated farther).
  • I looked at some VPS options which can go as low as $20/mo. But that tends to be for the entry level 256 MB RAM accounts, and Drupal is memory intensive. From what I've read, it's hard to get more than one or two sites on a 256 MB account. If you do go the VPS route, look for companies that use Xen Virtualization. If I understand it correctly, the Xen setup does not allow the servers to be oversold. www.slicehost.com looked like a very interesting option along those lines and has a strong community forum where you can get lots of help. This is good since you'll be doing all your own sys-admin work...
  • Amazon EC2 seems to have fixed most of the issues (persistent storage, static IP address) that Drupal'ers initially poo-pooed it for. Again, the problem is cost: ~$75/mo. Compared to a VPS, you're getting more RAM (1.75G vs 1G for similarly priced accounts) but the big advantage is the ability to scale up as more traffic hits your site. If you get Slashdotted, you add another server instance for a day or so and then release it when the traffic slows. It's a pay-for-what-you-use system so you pay only for the compute hours that you actually use. Since it's all API-based, you could use the Throttle module to do this automatically. Alas, a website is going to be running 24x7 which means you've got a minimum of 720 compute-hours/month at their current rate of $.10 leaves you with a monthly rate of $72, plus a little bit for storage and bandwidth.

Bottom line is that, for now, I'm still looking at shared hosting, along with all the headaches that come with it. VPS with enough memory to host a few Drupal sites is going to be out of my budget. Amazon's Cloud offerings are the most interesting -- when I get enough business to warrant a VPS, I think I'll skip straight to EC2. The worst thing you can do is get written up in the NYTimes and have a billion visitors cripple your site.

Thank you for all the helpful comments. Still searching...

Regarding Softlayer, do you

Posted by msteudel on December 7, 2008 at 10:05pm
msteudel's picture

Regarding Softlayer, do you need to have a hosting account with them in order to utilize CDN? I hadn't gotten around to asking this yet ... My thought was to use a cheaper VPS option and then tie in CDN, but if you can't use it without having a hosting account with them then thats sorta lame ...

It was my impression that

Posted by mikeker on December 8, 2008 at 5:57am
mikeker's picture

It was my impression that their CDN was only available for site they hosted, though I didn't ask them specifically. They have a live chat option and were very prompt to reply to the questions I posted there.

Please let us know if you find their CDN is available for sites hosted elsewhere. That could solve half the "local" issue.

Thanks.

no go

Posted by msteudel on December 8, 2008 at 7:31pm
msteudel's picture

I chatted with them and they said that you need to utilize their hosting plan ... lamo.

A2 Hosting offers an

Posted by robert458 on July 4, 2009 at 5:09am
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A2 Hosting offers an up-to-date version of Drupal as a one-click install with the Fantastico module. If you'd like to install the latest development release, Some web hosting packages come loaded with everything you need - Apache 2.2, MySQL 5, PostgreSQL 8 and PHP 5 compiled as an Apache module with access to php.ini settings through .htaccess. And would be best in performance.

great blog

Posted by robert458 on July 4, 2009 at 5:10am
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great blog

Seattle

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