Posted by greg_albright on July 29, 2008 at 3:07pm
Folks,
Just an update to my hosting challenges. Siteground is proving to be a big problem at this point. Started out good! Much better than GoDaddy, but issues plague my access and my site development nonetheless. As silly as it sounds, one of the biggest issues (besides technical) has been the lack of support. There's no one to call and their knowledge base is very limited. I have sent two support tickets and the responses have been pretty much the same. I can be more specific in our next "meet-up," but I am moving on to try the next provider - hostgator.com and will let you know how that goes as well.
Oh...the pain...Greg
Comments
I just got a hostgator account
I'll be interested to hear what you have to say on that. I recently got a reseller account with Host Gator. Not sure at this point what I would rate them, but I would be interested in your take on it as you're getting involved.
Hosting vendors...
Believe me, I will be reporting all my good times and bad with the hosting companies. It's been quite the ride so far.
Greg
Art is like life - be creative!
Greg, Sorry to hear that
Greg,
Sorry to hear that you're having trouble with Siteground. I'd be interested to chat sometime about what exactly is going on. Although we've had good luck with them, I'm always skeptical about what lies just around the corner.
Tony
Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC
Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC
Hosting
You know, I am sure everyone's experience is going to be different. Could be an ISP to Siteground thing right now, but I can't even login to their main website any longer! In fact, I am trying to login to their site as I sit here at my dentist's office and cannot! Either that or the Novocaine is messin' with my brain! I am having much better luck with Hostgator - so far...
On another note, I know we are not meeting at your place next week - are we still meeting somewhere, though?
Art is like life - be creative!
Greg, Looks like we are back
Greg,
Looks like we are back at the Library this week. Our office is getting re-carpeted in the evenings.
Tony
Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC
Tony Valle
Promethius Consulting, LLC
I plan to be there!
Looking forward to meeting everyone at the library again.
Art is like life - be creative!
Good luck so far
Good morning. Just an update for you on my account with HostGator.
First, I have not had any issues (thus far) installing and using Drupal. It seems as long as there is a cPanel, and we have complete control to change things like permissions and php.ini files, etc... our lives are made much easier. Although I haven't had a need to contact HostGator support either through email, phone or otherwise, I clearly have not had the need to do so - yet. That was not the case with Siteground. And, as I continue to try and work on the previous Drupal site on the Siteground server, I am still noticing issues with the service and the functionality of the server on which I loaded the site.
Conversely, I have tried to push the power of Drupal on the HostGator server with additional plug-ins, etc...and have not noticed any of the problems I had with SG. However, as Tony suggested in a recent post, you must always remain skeptical and know that things can change in a flash. But, so far I am very, very happy.
Clearly, all providers are different. On another client's web site (in which I had no control of choosing the host), I could not make any changes to the php.ini file - they strictly prohibited the changes by the user. Their memory_limit could go no larger than 16MB and file size uploads to no larger than 12MB. In fact, the host suggested that to use these limits, we would need to switch to a virtual private server environment.
It seems it pays to do your homework on what providers know and do not know about the open source environment on which we are trying to work.
Hope this helps.
Greg
Art is like life - be creative!
suPHP/CGI
FWIW, I switched to using suPHP for all my sites. It forces Apache to act as your local user, rather than root. I do it for the obvious security benefits.
suPHP requires that you run PHP as CGI rather than an Apache module. So you take a little performance hit (not noticeable for any of my apps), but with the added benefit that you can control your own php.ini per site. That's something I can't live without now. I have one site which creates ~ 20 page PDF files on the fly, and it needs much more memory than my other sites.
Ars Nova Interactive, Inc.
Ars Nova Interactive, Inc.
HostGator confirmed
OK - HostGator.com is where you want to go.
Here is the deal, get the Reseller account if you think you will ever have more than 2 sites.
I have over 50+ domains, and about 35 active sites.
Drupal works well on these sites, and there service and support is very good.
HostGator gives you a full WHM (Web Host Manager) panel where you can configure as many new accounts as you will want along the way too.
Every new domain you configure has a full blown cPanel account as well, which is way better than just a standard add-on type of account.
Check it out, I think you'll like what you see, www.HostGator.com. And besides, if you need any help in the future, I'll be glad to login and help you there as well.
The Indianapolis Drupal Solutions Provider
http://WebEasyMedia.com
Great info guys
This is great info. I've been using Godaddy and contemplating change. I set up my church under a different account on godaddy but will probably want to change their host after a while. I think they have used 1and1 in the past but I'm not sure if they actually did anything to maintain the content themselves. I currently have a few domains and will check out the reseller acct once I hear more feedback from Greg.
Tanisha
Linode
Linode. I went with them a while back, and I have never looked back. Rock solid, and complete control. You don't get a WHM or anything like that; so if you want a "windows/mac" like experiance to your hosting, then linode is not for you. But, if you know what you're doing, and just want a clean/fast box for a good price, then it's def. for you.
I use GoDaddy only to registrar my domain names, but I don't think I'd ever use them for hosting. Tried once, and didn't like it.
My 2 cents.
http://www.linode.com/
New Panel
Also, here's a link to the new hosting panel they released with their recent upgrade:
http://blog.linode.com/2008/05/15/new-linode-manager-released/
Nexcess.net
Before now, I've never been able to recommend an ISP, because I've had such bad experiences will every single one. And then I got a reseller account with Nexcess.net. They're wonderful. They are PHP developers themselves, and so getting modules installed, upgrades, etc. is a breeze. Only caveat is that they offer no phone support. But they're very fast and responsive to trouble tickets.
I now have a dedicated server with them, and it's going swimmingly.
Mark
PS- They are also the developers of Nodeworx, their control panel. I've never used other panels, so I don't know how it compares. I like it well enough, and I've found ways to accomplish via shell what the CP cannot do.
Ars Nova Interactive, Inc.
My past hosts
I know is an older topic but I thought I would through in my 2 cents.
Reseller accounts are great. They allow you to setup several different accounts. I had some setup just for testing purposes. It allows you to keep your clients separate along with the testing environment. The only downside is that you don't have complete control (this might be good if you don't want to be a server administrator).
I've used bluewho and jodohost. Both were excellent in customer service and performance.
http://bluewho.com specializes in reseller hosting and uses WHM/Cpanel. They ave a very active userbase in the forums. Any issue I had was fixed within a few hours.
http://jodohost.com has a wider variety. I had a reseller account with them also. The big advantage here is that they use H-Sphere control panel which allows your sites to be load balanced across several servers. They have server dedicated to handle mysql, apache, exchange, windows, mssql and oracle. This allows the server to be setup for the specific needs of the application.
I am currently sharing a VPS with a friend in Chicago from http://www.spry.com/ We wanted root access. We minimize our bandwidth and hard drive space by using Amazon S3 for our images. It works great. My blog is currently on this server http://techcook.net along with several other drupal and wordpress sites.
Cheers,
Neil
Neil Hastings
http://twitter.com/indytechcook