Posted by UNarmed on August 25, 2010 at 7:47am
Hey guys mind posting the name of hosting companies you have used in the past and that you have found to be compatible with drupal.
I recently tried gridhost but they do not support clean urls so i will have to move my site to another host. Lets make this a general discussion about great SA hosting companies for drupal sites.
Comments
I've got all my sites with
I've got all my sites with Texo (www.texo.co.za) and I've had very few problems.
they use cPanel with Softaculous for Drupal installation - very handy
Hey thanks, do you know
Hey thanks, do you know whether they have mod_rewrite enabled?
yeah, they're totally Drupal
yeah, they're totally Drupal friendly, so clean URL's, etc all work
You can also chat to the guys and increase php memory, etc.
Web africa ... wtf?
We have a few sites with webafrica and besides there complete incompetence and lack of understanding of anything that is not microsoft , they also have a way about just deleting whole sites at random and excusing themselves by giving some half lame attempt while trying to solve the problem. I reckon if I had another host I would be alot better at drupal because of the time I would have spend using drupal instead of having to deal with these people. Support can only help with telling you the obvious like - "No sir i see the site in the files" not understanding that the site is offline if they just go to the url and check ..why .. who knows " Your php file is in the cgi-bin" - " o Really so thats why you delete my site .. cause that is the question I asked" .... I ask them for a trace of the activity .. no sorry cant do that ..why? ... because .....WTF!!!
Then just the other day 2 sites randomly went offline, so I phone support and wait about ten minutes before they decide they will phone me back ... 2 hours later " um .. err.. We had to upgrade apache on that server .. it should be ok now." - "So will you compensate me for the loss of business during that time " ... they just hung up .. no jokes.
It's driving me insane... Never again!
--Check out hetzner if you go to the basic package -> then click server ready apps -> the click the question mark by drupal ... kuk funny, and so true
Hi bukem I can imagine how
Hi bukem
I can imagine how frustrating receiving this level of service has been and this is not acceptable. Please note that your query has already been escalated to our Call Centre Manager and his Team Leader. They have indicated that they have sent you a private message (pm) requesting for more information on your account in order to investigate the matter urgently. You are also welcome to send me a private message (pm) with your client code and I will ensure that your query is dealt with as a matter of priority.
We strive to provide excellent client service and I apologise that you have not received this level of service.
I look forward to providing you with great service going forward.
Regards,
Ian Titus
Web Africa
Open source
You people do not promote open source enough. A major i issue I had with installing the drupal CMS on a microsoft sever and you people would not install the lastest rewrite module for IIS, which would mean my site would not have clean urls. So I move to a linux server .. and the trouble i had just getting there ... wow. I put money down that you are getting dinners from microsoft to promote thier crap. Just like they lost the browser warz they are losing the server and coding standard battles.
I will not be needing your service anymore, Well actually I think the account holder (my old boss) is sticking with you guys so , you not losing a client but you are not getting one either
I wish you all the best for your business.
nearly got me
Wow... I nearly signed up with these guys this morning. Thank goodness I didn't. It's an online business so the basic requirement is that it is online - 24/7/365. Using them sounds like it has fail written all over it. I'll be going with Hetzner.
Useless
It took webafrica about 5 days to increase a memory limit from 32MB to 64MB (their max). During the next two days or so, the site went down again and they restored the database with an 18 hour old backup.
Oh, and they had 4 people calling/emailing them just to get a memory limit raised.
Oh, and one more thing, their PHP/MySQL versions are ancient.
Texo
I have all my sites on www.texo.co.za. I had issues with hosting Drupal sites on Hetzner as they didnt want to increase the memory limit.
No issues at all with Texo. Also the support you get from Steve and Gaye from Texo are fantastic.
Mark Milligan
Web Design Cape Town
www.webdesigncapetown.co.za
http://twitter.com/webdesignct
Thanks all
I signed up with Hetzner after posting, but I will keep texo in mind should things not turn out so well. I have a few sites that I need to upload in the near future.
After I read "escalate" and "team leader" I ran.... I ran as fast as I could.
Thanks for that lol i will
Thanks for that lol i will make a mental note not to even bother with trying them. I think i am going to give www.texo.co.za a try when i put another project online. Last thing i want from a host is hassles!
Anyone else have any good hosts worth trying? Only good hosting experience i have ever had was with dataflame but they are a uk host and not south african. Uploaded site, imported database and changes settings.php and WHAM everything just worked =] No asking support for a thing.
RSAWeb
Oh, just one thing with Texo, is that the servers are in the UK, although the company is in Cape Town - useful for an international site, but not that great if your market is SA orientated.
Another great company that I've dealt with recently is RSAWeb - you can choose to have your site on SA or US servers, so if you have an account with them one site may be local, another international. They're also moving into the Cloud server/hosting market in a big way, and all sorts of other tech stuff - well worth checking them out. A very professional bunch of guys, that offer great support and understand the needs of a Drupal site. A bit more pricey than Texo, but if you're planning on building a large site it's probably worth the extra 50bucks for the support, etc.
Thanks for the kind words,
Thanks for the kind words, inky3d. We've been offering local (Cape Town) hosting for more than a year, so if you'd like to have any of your sites migrated to CT, please let me know.
Great!
Ah, texo, that's good to know - am surprised I missed that memo in your communications.
Since my last comment in August, I wouldn't recommend RSAWeb as much anymore. Their service doesn't compare to Texo, and an out-of-the-box basic hosting package for a Drupal site always seems to need settings to be changed - which requires contacting their help centre.
The control panel at RSAWeb is a custom build and i don't find it very intuitive. cPanel is by far better.
Hetzner.co.za is the one that
Hetzner.co.za is the one that gets recommended the most in my experience.
I've also successfully hosted Drupal sites with Afrihost.
I agree with Hetzner.
Although their Konsole DM is not Cpanel, but you get by soon enough.
On shared hosting. script timeout is a bit low as well as memory limit (use Drupal tweaks module :) ). Also file uploads and dbase uploads are limited to 5Mb, but this is only a problem if you are moving a site. And there are other ways to do it with them like with SSL.
And I myself have a horror story from them.
On one of the sites, they decided they are going to change the server for the database.
I am set up as Technical contact, webmaster as authoritive contact, and the person who pays the bill is the owner.
They only send notification to the owner about this. And she was out of the country at the time.
2 Weeks later, bang. Site down. No Database.
They just shrugged.
Sometimes I think Tech support think they are God.
Anyway, thanks to Backup and migrate, manage to restore.
Quentin
Working around a host
Like hetzer and a few other companies they tend to not want to provide that much memory . Like Max_headroom said konsole DM does not allow for much memory. I think its 55.
I havnt used the drupal tweaks module but I found that just adding
ini_set('memory_limit', '100M'); in the index.php on the root will sort out your memory_limits.
The ini_set does pretty much any set to the .ini file which i have found most hosts dont want you to touch and have to request the damn thing.
Web Africa still a big no no..
With all being said about Web Africa. I decided to just ask them about their Drupal hosting seeing as my client has hosting with them.( being nice giving the benefit of the doubt)
The response was jaw droping... I was told by the sales rep that he does no know much about their Drupal hosting. He does know they have a one click install... and maybe I should just youtube it. ...
With this being said it just goes to show you the level of poor service they have when it comes to Drupal hosting not to add the lack of care for it.
Thanks to all for pointing out the true better hosting companies.
Web Africa is a joke!
Hetzner is the way forward Web Africa is a joke I would not trust these guys as far as I can throw them rubbish absolute vomit.
Get the hell out of there as quick as you can.
Why not create our own hosting
I've been looking at the possibility of rolling out a multi-server Aegir installation. If a few of us can pull resources together we might be able to come up with our own solution, completely geared for Drupal.
Would there be anyone here
Would there be anyone here interested in sharing a dedicated server? Helderberg or Cape Town area only please, naturally we would need to meet in person.
Dedicated Server
If you have a dedicated server with Hetzner you can go in yourself and increase the memory limit for each domain along with many other php functions. I guess it all depends on what package you are on. We host multiple sites so for us paying for a dedicated server works for us.