Hi
I've had a dedicated windows servers with Webfusion for a few years now and unfortunately they have to the worst company I've ever dealt with (I thought Fasthosts were bad but these really take the biscuit). Let's just say the support is pretty much non-existent (ticket response times are on average 2 days, some have taken a week) and the front line support generally consists of two people at any one time, one of which doesn't know his ars* from his elbow and the other is that busy he's unable to provide a resolution quick enough. Unfortunately, due to the amount of sites we've had with them over these years it's always been the 'devil you know' mentality due to the issues of moving across all the sites to a new host.
However, their latest mess-up has totally compromised their security systems and by total accident I was able to view other users support tickets which obviously had me worried about others accessing our own support tickets. I reported it with screen shots (over a week ago) and they've come back with the following non helpful/bullcr*p answer and I have heard nothing since:
"Thank you for highlighting the issue that you found within the support site. A recent change that was put through resulted in a cache applying in some extenuating circumstances and the information being displayed as you reported. This has only been reported by yourself, we have investigated to see if these unusual circumstances existed in other cases and are glad to say they have not. We have put in an update to prevent this from happening again in this manner in the future. Thank you once again for sending this through to our team, we appreciate the efforts to help us."
Anyway, to cut to the chase can anyone recommend a reliable, good host, with a good support to move across to. I'd like to keep the monthly bill down to around £100-£150 ex vat and we have about 12 small sites and around 4 large sites.
Ideally I need to support both Drupal based sites and several old ASP/Access sites (don't ask!)
I've tried Amazon Web Services but at the moment I think they're a little bit over my head (they look great but I wouldn't feel comfortable using them the moment) but admittedly the cloud idea sounds great (not sure about not knowing the monthly bill though).
I've also looked a dedicated and VPS for Hostgator (US based) which appear to have some quote good reviews at the moment.
Rackspace sound the best but totally unaffordable.
Any other suggestions?
Any help or advice would be most appreciated :-)
Stephen
Comments
I would recommend omega8.cc
I would recommend omega8.cc (http://omega8.cc). It does require you to get familiar with Aegir but it's very fast and quite easy to set up sites.
Alternatives are Pantheon (https://getpantheon.com/) and Acquia (http://www.acquia.com) is another one if you can afford it.
Vidahost
I've been using Vidahost https://www.vidahost.com/ (based in the UK) for some time, mainly for shared hosting - works great with Drupal. They have a whole host of virtual/dedicated services and they've recently started a Cloud hosting system too. Their support is superb.
While they are expensive (a
While they are expensive (a bit cheaper than rackspace and will give you the option to bargain if you take a rackspace price to them) we would totally recommend UKFast (ukfast.co.uk). They do windows which I'm not sure if other options above do.
Their support is second-to-none and their speeds are lightning fast.
In truth my feeling is you get what you pay for and for the budget you have and the number of sites you are running, I think you possibly need to re-evaluate hosting budgets. There is a ton of cheap stuff out there, but in my experience (12 years) the cheaper options always lack something, somewhere.
Trying to explain to clients why they need to pay decent money for hosting is tough, but it is the thing that keeps us running and so I feel its a good idea to invest where you can to ensure that you have a hassle free, reliable and fast server - even if you're not making profit from it.
Anyway - Would strongly recommend UKFast - and would suggest not going to the US unless you have US based clients. We used many US hosts in the past and while generally cheaper, the speeds rarely come close and the time difference can often be a real pain in terms of high-level support at the right times.
Operations Director at Consult and Design International
Co-ordinator of Drupal North East
Global Volunteer Co-ordinator for DrupalCon
I'd buy 2 Rackspace cloud
I'd buy 2 Rackspace cloud instances.
1 LAMP stack, 1,024MB instance £29.20pcm + bandwidth
Install ZendServer CE on it is probably easiest, works far better out the box then a typical PHP setup. It uses Apache etc so nothing cutting edge you can't find documentation on.
Alternatively you can go the Nginx, PHP5-FPM, Varnish, APC route and install Cacherouter on your drupal sites to make use of APC etc etc.
For you ASP sites put them on a 1,024MB Windows instance £37.06 pcm. If you wanted you could put the PHP apps on here but I prefer and get better performance on linux machines.
Not had any downtime on rackspace currently counting uptime in months, performance is pretty good, you can increase the resources as needed and your still under your £150pcm
Have a look at
Have a look at heartinternet.co.uk I've been with them for a few years now and have been very happy with every part of the system.
Prices are good, support is excellent.
They do it all, Shared, dedicated, virtual and cloud hosting.
Hope this helps.
Regards
Steve
ps windows and linux on the same reseller account.
Burst.net, BHost, Hostgator
I can't comment on Windows hosting but if you end up needing Linux-based hosting for some of your sites, in the past I've used Ubuntu VPS's from Burst.net in the USA and BHosts in the UK. Both great and both very cheap (~$5 to $10 per month), but my VPS's were only really used for development and staging rather than production so I didn't really need to worry too much about bandwidth or storage. Never really needed to use support on Burst.net but the support at BHosts was fine.
I also have a reseller account on Hostgator shared hosting. I think that costs something like $250 per year. It's good for very small Drupal sites but the fact it's shared hosting can be a bit restrictive (by design). If you use Drush at the command line it can be quirky to set up using jailbreak shell. Support on Hostgator is something of a mixed bag: I find you can always quickly get someone on the phone or into a chat session for support, but the level of knowledge between different technicians can vary quite a lot. It's mostly good though (maybe three quarters of the time), and I don't pay too much for the hosting, so I don't really mind.
Looked at
Looked at www.elastichosts.com?
We are hosting Drupal (and Magento) all on Linux with a company called Elastic Hosts. They are purely VPS and you can customise your server to your spec. You basically subscribe and pay for the amount of resource you use (CPU, memory, bandwidth and diskspace).
There support is good but you will have to get your hands dirty with managing your own OS and they offer good advice. They do provide pre installations of Linux and Windows though to get you up and running. The good thing is you have full control over your own VPS as if it actually was a dedicated server and you actually can VNC into the console.
Costwise not the cheapest but will work out cheaper than Rackspace. They have US & UK data centres too. Worth a look. For the price you are talking you could run two servers one Linux and Windows if required.
Ben
Masters Allen
Thanks everyone
Thanks to everyone for advice :-)
Hi everyone, nice thread, I
Hi everyone, nice thread, I use nativespave at the moment for hosting, it's only a shared account as it's all I need right now.
My question may seem a bit basic but I don't know the answer! If I buy VPS hosting, does that mean that I have to run everything? ie install cpanel, wampserver, do the whole lot? I'm not clued up on the server side of things, only building and making websites look good. Will obviously be learning about servers in much more depth during my IT degree but right now I can find my way around cpanel etc no probs but probably couldn't handle running the whole show myself. Have time factors too.
If anyone could offer any advice it would be most appreciated about what VPS actually entails. My hosts do offer it at about £35 a month for the 'basic' VPS. I'm not so sure about cloud hosting, it's like pay as you go internet when I would rather be able to budget from the get go.
Sam.
Yes generally if you run a
Yes generally if you run a VPS you are in charge of the whole server (as if it was a bare metal dedicated server). That means the whole OS and LAMP/WAMP stack including upgrades and backups. Some VPS providers over semi-managed services but that generally still means the onus is on you to maintain the server. The VPS provider maintains the hardware and the infrastructure which gets you connected but the server is down to you.
Now that I have scared you witless ;) let me say that it is a good experience if you wish to expand your knowledge of these things and there are plenty of writeups to help you (both drupal specific and general wamp/lamp). I currently use the excellent BOA scripts to setup Barracuda / Octopus Aegir instances on my VPS and they take a lot of the hard work out of this and also setup a highly tuned / optimised nginx environment.
Couple of points I would note:
-Installing cpanel and plesk incurs licensing fees and also interfere's with the lamp stack in ways Aegir does not like so best to avoid. If you want a gui admin then try webmin (BOA can set this up). Bear in mind that these GUI panels do take up resources on the VPS this may be an issues dependant on the size of the VPS you opt for.
-Offload your email to a separate service (google apps etc) - most shared hosting actually use separate dedicated mailservers and have it setup to maximise security and minimise false SPAM allegations (the decent shared hosts that is). If you try and use your VPS for mail server as well as websites you are opening yourself up for a world of headaches around mail server admin which you are best to avoid.
To be honest I went the VPS route as a learning experience and also for setting up a relatively cheap aegir multi-site dev environment however it has evolved to including a few prod sites and that can be hairy at times - if the site goes down you need to react for the prod sites. Make sure you factor that into client pricing etc. If all you want to do is develop websites then I'd recommend you look at omega8.cc (creators of BOA scripts), drupalgardens / Acquia, or pantheon. The next client that comes to me asking for a simple cheap site with only basic requirements I am sorely tempted to use drupal gardens and let them look after the servers.
HTH,
JamieT
Drupal Host: Omega8.cc
I highly recommend Omega8 as well. I can say enough about them. Their hosting is configured specifically for Drupal, including amazing speed and performance. Sites are managed through Aegir hosting system, one-click create/backups/restore/clone/migrate. Drupal distros are available to you as well as Vanilla Drupal installs: Drupal Commons, Acquia Drupal, Open Atrium, Feature Server, Prosepoint, Open Outreach, Nodestream, Ubercart, Drupal Commerce, Conference, Open Deals, Open Church, Open Enterprise, OpenScholar, OpenPublic, Videola, CiviCRM/Drupal. More distros are added regularly. Devel, Staging, and Production instances are available for each install. Check out their website for more specifics, it's pretty incredible. They also offer an option to install on your server as well.
Hi, thanks for the
Hi, thanks for the feedback.
Moving hosts isn't really an option at the moment. So, in order to expand, I would have to:
(a) take over the hosting setup i.e. with vps or dedicated
(b) go a specialist drupal route i.e.omega8
(c) buy loads of extra resources on the shared hosting
I am currently running 2 small sites (ike 20 pages each) via multisite on a shared host but of course still interested in future planning. It sounds like a great idea for the future, say I wanted to move my entire setup to omega8, would that be simple/possible?
Thanks for all your help.
Sam.
I've been looking in to
I've been looking in to migrating to omega8 recently as well. They have a guide (http://omega8.cc/import-your-sites-to-aegir-in-8-easy-steps-109) that shows you how to migrate sites to Aegir.
I still haven't migrated to them, but reckon that's next. I just want to take the stress of managing our own server away as I'm not a linux sysadmin.
Wow.
Can't believe no-one has recommended Linode! They're amazing, DNS, backups, online documentation for almost everything, totally brilliant. I've not even used support as far as I recall, but I hear very impressive things about that also.
They're at: http://www.linode.com/?r=a53380656e7f9d48aa5dbaf9e2b167569b60284f (this is a referral link, but why not)
Also I've used Clustered, they have a great amount of machine for the money and I've had a pleasant experience with them too.
They're here: https://clustered.net/aff.php?aff=062 (yes that's a referral link too)
There are plenty of Drupal UK users who would recommend either of these providers for a decent bare bones VPS. They're both scalable and affordable with good support. Linode especially has gained a great deal of traction in Drupal of late, I can think of at least half a dozen people I know personally who use them. Also, they both offer referral bonuses!! ;)
Web Development in Nottingham, UK by Kineta Systems / Follow me on Twitter! @NikLP
@NikLP - Since you have used
@NikLP - Since you have used Linode and Clustered whats your opinion/preference as to which is best??
I currently use Linode and have no issues and like their control panel etc. but as you say clustered offer pretty good resource levels for the price and by the sound of it run a pretty high quality setup which are two things that don't often come together..
Does the clustered control panel have all the functionality of Linode?
I've been looking at omega8
I've been looking at omega8 and Aegir, and I still don't really understand what it is? I mean I use standard hosting, cpanel, ftp... I upload stuff into public_html as per normal. How is this system of doing things different? Do you still upload via ftp?
The 'about' explains how awesome it is without actually explaining much so I'm still a bit confused as to what it is. Can anyone expand for me? It does look awesome indeed but could do with knowing a bit more first.
I presume I register a domain... and I get that you use that registrar for your email, but then what?!
Any help is very much appreciated :)
Sam.
Aegir is a "Drupal Only"
Aegir is a "Drupal Only" control panel.. You con't copy any files anywhere.. Using the control panel (itself a customised version of drupal 6) it "generates" the new site by copying and creating all the files according to the installation profile.. From there you manage the site directly from the front end..
The Aegir project page may
The Aegir project page may explain what it does.
http://www.aegirproject.org/
You may need to see it in action to truly understand what it does. The key points are that it manages multiple Drupal sites including backup & deployment between dev/stage/live. It also taps into other parts of the server system to add virtual hosts files to manage domain names etc.
You could probably still use ftp on the server but it is not how Aegir is intended to work. It is a managed environment, one copy of Drupal 6 saves the metadata for the other sites.
Further to this, omega8 offer
Further to this, omega8 offer a demo for you to try it out, so might be worth a look. Check out http://omega8.cc for more information.
Linode
Just thought I'd update everyone. Thanks again for all the comments as they have been very helpful.
Eventually I chose to go with Linode.com on their VPS system (sorry nikLP I hadn't noticed your link or else I would have used it) and even though I'm a bit of a newbie in regards to server configuration etc have found the process of working on the VPS pretty painless. Linode have such a good support system it's pretty unbelievable. So far I've submitted around 9 support tickets over the past few days at various times and everyone of them have been answer within a couple of minutes (if not seconds). Not only have they been quick to respond, they're communications are excellent with all the information that you should require from your support request. Additionally, I have posted some real 'newbie/I really should know this' type requests and they have always helped without issue and without questioning my knowledge.
I only took the basic package to start with and it's actually better than my dedicated server on Webfusion. I'll be porting everything across very quickly. I really cannot recommend them enough.
They would be an excellent choice for both pro's and newbies. As a newbie in terms of learning Linux/Ubuntu and SSH/command line, their documentation and support has already got me to pretty proficient level of which I'm now supplementing with a lot of additional book reading to streamline the server setup :-)
Stephen
If you are looking for a way
If you are looking for a way to create a performance tuned heavily optimised server then I can recommend the Barracuda and Octopus scripts. This enables you to quickly create new drupal websites based on aegir platforms and can really help you scale the websites you can support on one server. These scripts are the backbone of the omega8.cc offering (obviously the omega8.cc service manages the server admin side for you - whereas with your own VPS you are on your own). The scripts can really streamline the ongoing server upgrade and maintenance tasks
HTH's.
JamieT
Getting started with Context?
For some of the hosting options, did you just jump right into their site?
Or did you use the Context info to get started? Just kind of confused.
I found Acquia https://drupal.org/project/context_acquia and Pantheon https://drupal.org/project/context_pantheon here, but not sure if I even need this. Thanks!