Drupal Hosting
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group: Boston
tjholmes - Tue, 2007-08-21 17:58
I am starting to do research on finding a hosting site for Drupal.
My starting research has led me to a service called "siteground" that is supposedly #1 for Drupal hosting.
I have also looked at the Drupal main page for hosting sites and they list a few, but not SiteGround.
I could host a Drupal site at my home ... but I then have to modify Postfix on my Linux box to send out email via another SMTP Server.
Thanks!
Tom
Ical feed
site5
Man, i hate when sites say they're number 1. If you want shared hosting, I can't speak more highly of site5.com. For years I used the very reputable and reliable Dreamhost (probably '98-2002), but they got pricey. I switched to pair.com for a few years, which was also good, but then I was seduced by site5 back in '05-'06. They offer lots of cool things like multi-site hosting that makes it really easy to manage several domains (which i do). They also have fantastico (which has drupal, wordpress, and tons of other great one-click tools) and their customer support is great. I haven't experienced downtime or any weirdness access ftp. They generally have lots of good signup deals to entice you, too.
Site5
Site5 has the best control panel and features of any cheap host that I've used.
UPDATE: Do not use site5.com for hosting. The problems are chronic and there is no phone support, as well as lack of good communication through other methods.
I've had a few problems with them though. A couple of times I've gotten old servers with failing hard drives and my sites were down until they upgraded the hardware. There is no phone support. Once the hardware was replaced, everything was fine. As long as you don't get one of their old servers they are the best company for cheap hosting.Anyone worked with MediaTemple or Mosso?
MediaTemple's "grid-service" low end offering seems reasonable - no long term commitment and several higher performance offerings to move to if your site needs it. $20 per month seems like a good price to try them out.
Mosso seems nice, but there single $100 price point is a little too high for setting up just a few sites.
Anyone have any experience with these?
What about 1&1?
What about the well known and reputable 1&1? They've been around a long time and are one of the bigger hosting companies. My sites have been on their servers for quite a few years. I started out taking advantage of an unusual offer they once had for 3 free years of hosting. It was better than my paid plan with someone else at the time.
Now I'm on a $10/month plan with them. It's a LAMP setup. As it stands, I'm allowed up to 100 MySQL DBs and each one can be up to 100 MB in size each. MySQL comes in version 4 or 5. I've been hosting a number of Drupal sites using my 1&1 accounts (personal and business) and haven't had any trouble. My main personal site, http://www.jozefnagy.com is Drupal 4.7 and my business sites are Drupal 5.2. Gallery2 was recently installed on a Drupal 5 site and so far it's been working well.
As for 1&1, they're online utilities and overall web interface is top tier. One of my favorite things about them is their control panel for managing my domains, emails, security, etc. etc.
I've never had any problems with them so I can't say anything about their support. I did have a billing question once and received an email response back from them within 24 hours.
I wish I were getting paid to say this, but unfortunately for my bank account that's not the case. I'm just a very happy customer.
1&1 and Eapps
I'll agree, but only to a limited extent, with the 1&1 endorsement, and add another player.
I use 1&1 for all may domain names. They are reasonably inexpensive ($2.99 year 1, $5.99/year afterwards) for this. (Bulk domain registrars can be less, but....) And I, too, like their web interface for managing domains. (With one exception: once you're a customer, you must register one domain name at a time. WHen I have to register 5-10 at a time, it gets tedious.)
However, I have had to use their support, and have not been pleased. Their telephone support is outsourced to India, and I've had poor experience with it. The support personnel must be located in a region with a heavy accent, because I've had simple difficulty understanding the support person. The hold time is always somewhat long (e.g. 5-10 minutes), and often times the person has to go get help for the answers.
On the other hand, I've had excellent experience with eApps virtual hosts. With eApps, you get your own virtual CentOS server. You "configure" the server using a reasonably good web-based UI (they use a commercial product for this), but you also get ssh access to do the "real" stuff. You can use that web-based UI to "install" a bunch of supported applications, e.g. mailman, mysql 4/5, myphpadmin, etc. For those who want/need Java stuff, they offer a complete suite of Java stuff (Jboss, etc.) in that list of applications.
Eapps support is spectacular. They have qualified people who answer the phone on the first ring. They usually know answers quickly, and if they don't, there is no delay trying to find it out. They're dogged in getting things sorted out, and don't complain when it's a pilot-error (my) problem. I don't buy the 24x7 phone support, but when I've posted tickets on their support website at non-business-hours, I get a reply within an hour. I simply can't say enough about their support.
They aren't the least expensive alternative.... But you can run a "typical" Drupal site on their least-expensive ($10/month) service. Note that they do not support Drupal as one of their "supported" (web-installable) applications, sadly. (I'm working on convincing them otherwise.) So you'll have to install it via more "manual" interfaces (e.g. FTP the software up, use phpmyadmin to create the DB, etc.) (Or, of course, ssh.... ;-)
I don't use them for domains simply because they're not a registrar; they resell registrations, and their prices are too high.
Bottom line: I use 1&1 for domains, and (happily) use eApps for hosting.
Eapps Experience?
I've done a ton of hosting research, and I like the look of eApps. Just curious: are you still a fan? is your Drupal site fairly reponsive (care to share the URL?)? Thanks.
1and1 and Drupal
I use 1and1 for some of my domain registrations and also for some hosting. I don't like 1and1 for hosting. Email and stats are sub-standard. Customer support is overseas so it is sometimes hard to communicate in English with them over the phone. From my phone calls to them, their tech support is not always knowledgeable.
UPDATE: Don't use Site5 either... chronic problems and no phone support.
Site5 is only $5 to $10/month for hosting and the features are much better... (If you have a few domains, "multi-site" hosting is a good package.)multi-site hosting with Mosso
We actually do quite a bit hosting of with Mosso, and we're pleased with them, for the most part. We've got about 40 domains and subdomains hosted through them and we've managed quite well for this past year. They offer oodles of bandwidth and file space, which is great for a video-rich site.
Pros:
- $100/month for all the sites you can host within their generous bandwidth and a disk space limits
- customizable reseller plans so that you can bill your clients for hosting
- 24x7 customer support for your clients' sites
- friendly and knowledgeable tech support
Cons:
- the $100/month price tag doesn't make sense unless you're doing multiple sites
- Mosso hasn't exactly lived up to their 99.9% uptime on their PHP 5 cluster -- unless it's 99.9% of the time they're up.
- their documentation is appallingly thin. You'll probably find more on the Drupal boards than on Mosso's forums (let alone their knowledge base)
- setting up new sites and domains often requires some interaction with tech support
- the hosting control panel is awkward for the number of sites we host
Bryght
Have you checked out Bryght.com? They specialize in Drupal hosting.