2011 Hosting Survey (this is a WIKI - so please add your experiences by editing)

_
_

DON'T COMMENT TO ANSWER SURVEY. PLEASE EDIT. COMMENT ONLY IF YOU have a question, thought, or insights into the wiki.

Please put where you are hosting your Drupal sites, and categorize. Useful information includes site traffic (# of anonymous users per month / # of authenticated users per month), and/or server specs.

bvirtual - Peter Benjamin - http://www.vpscoop.org

I'm a co-founder along with 15 other original members of owning our own Dual Quad Core 2U running OpenVZ, with 32 gig of RAM - no RAM quota as we jointly own this RAM, and using 3-4 CPUs for several days... not a problem. Load average is under 1 most times, up to 3 or 4 daily for seconds. VE slices start at 10gb HD space, with 10gb additions. The hardware is located in Downtown LA. It's not managed, so you run your own VE with root admin access. Cost in 2011 is $185 per Year, not month. Renewal will go down as more members sign up.

thund3rbox

personal stuff: Hot Drupal, http://www.hotdrupal.com

Matt (edit: not sure of company. possibly matt2000 of ninjitsu?)

18 sites including ecommerce, personal, galleries, wikis and project collaboration on GoDaddy.com

• Stupidly cheap ($70/year for unlimited storage, databases and bandwidth), comes with 1 SSL certificate.
• Reasonable service and support from a long distance (AZ) number.
• Stupid corporate policy, like not allowing SFTP accounts in favor of FTP accounts for "security reasons".
• Shell access, but many standard Linux commands are restricted (ping, traceroute, ssh, etc.) again for "security reasons".
• Third party (as in free) SSL certificates not supported, must by GoDaddy certificates at $50 - $200/year per domain.

12 sites hosted on a dedicated server (quad core, 8G memory, 6TB disk)

• Behind my slow DSL connection so no bandwidth to speak of.
• Full control over the environment, no support hassles. Then again no support.
• No recurring monthly fees of any kind. Hardware was re-purposed from another project.

Christefano - Exaltation of Larks

• Exaltation of Larks hosts most of our sites (internal projects, dev and production sites for clients, etc.) on SoftLayer. Their "bare metal cloud" (BMC) offering is great. It's basically a dedicated server running on commodity hardware but with all their cloud management tools they offer for the "cloud computing instances" (CCIs). They also have:
  • RapidSSL single-domain SSL certificates at $35 for 2 years
  • IPv4 addresses for 50¢ each
  • free quarterly PCI compliance scans from McAfee
  • à la carte managed hosting (while they don't actually offer managed hosting, they do have "server administrative" supports tickets that are $3 each)
• SoftLayer is also LA Drupal's hosting sponsor and hosts drupalcampla.com, ddcla.org and ladrupal.org.
• I don't recommend Amazon EC2 unless it's for a large multi-tier infrastructure with a lot of redundancy built in. SoftLayer's cloud computing instances are not without flaws, but they're more reliable (in my experience) than EC2. We're moving off EC2 soon and I'm looking at SoftLayer, Rackspace and MidPhase.
• We also use Linode and RimuHosting for a few VPS sites. If I had to choose between the two I'd go with Rimu if only because of their unrivaled tech / customer support. I've written about this in the past.
• None of the webhosts we use offer shared hosting, but nearly all of our servers are set up in a shared hosting configuration using Virtualmin, an open source counterpart to Plesk or cPanel that's available in "GPL" and "Pro" versions. Highly recommended.

Cary Gordon - Cherry Hill Company

• The Cherry Hill Company maintains a data center in downtown Los Angeles

• We maintain a virtualized environment using Citrix XenServer

  • multiple dom0s
  • automatic failover and resource reallocation
  • domUs code on a dual interface SAN
  • temporal data -- home dirs, files -- on NAS
  • local and cloud backup

• discrete servers for DB hosts, high performance and legacy sites

• We use a variety of local and off-site monitoring tools

• We're a Dell shop

  • We have a remote KVM, but most of our servers now have DRAC cards for remote console access
  • these cards, as well as the KVM and other support tools, operate independently on their own private network

• We operate specialized shared hosting in a Drupal multisite environment for our smaller public library clients.

  • We are migrating those to Aegir management

• We operate a dedicated development environment

• We are working with OpenCloud based tools to create a seamless private cloud / public cloud infrastructure
• We love the command line and shell scripting!

Kevin Kaland - WizOne Solutions

I don't host any clients, but here's my setup:
* WizOne Solutions is self-hosted on an old box now running Linux. Specs are nothing to write home about, but the box is primarily a dev box. It may become entirely one rather soon...there's no good reason to self-host anymore that I have VPS. But anyway, I use DynDNS for the name resolution, since obviously it's on a dynamic IP. Avoid self-hosting unless the site isn't really that important cuz it's easy for it to go down, and time-consuming. But man oh man, you learn a lot and have full control.
* A few sites run on MidPhase shared hosting. I started using them by accident as part of a "Web site in a box" package thing when I was all excited about affiliate marketing in the beginning. Embarrassing but true. Anyway, they've been quite reliable and with decent support, to tell the truth. Can't complain. My language blog, blangblog.com, is the main site on there.
* Finally, this month I started renting a few unmanaged VPS from Immediate VPS. Quite good...it's unmanaged, so not that expensive, but the support is top-notch. They even tweet at me and stuff. Good guys. Their servers are in Falkenstein, Germany, and their offices are in the UK. They are not running a cloud; they use OpenVZ. No downtime so far, choice of OSes, the price is right. I use one for a dev box, one for a repository server (git, bzr so far), and one is going to be a production box. <--- That's probably where I'll move my site once it's set up. Again, they're in Europe, so keep that in mind and plan accordingly in terms of CDNs or what have you if you're using it for production. Also, I've only been using them for 2 weeks, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I've hardly left the candy store.

Nicole Bluto - Intrinsic Web Designs

• I have used godaddy shared hosting and have had very slow sites with lots of issues.
• I currently host some of my sites on Hot Drupal shared hosting and have for about 4 years. I have NEVER had any issues with them. They are really nice and responsive to support tickets.
• I have my own VPS on Linode. It runs great but I have to admit I don't like being my own sys admin.
• I have used Rackspace Cloud Sites and it was horrible. I would constantly get WSOD and wierd "node not found" messages. I would not recommend using Rackspace Cloud Sites for Drupal.
• I do have a VPS on the Rackspace Cloud that works fine. I have no complaints about that at all.
• I am currently exploring Web Enabled for development and production hosting

Laura Scott - PINGV

• PINGV uses a variety of hosts, depending upon need.

  • Linode. We use Linode for staging sites during development. It's easy to spin up new instances, shut them down, as needed. By keeping them discrete, we isolate each site from others, which gives us ease and flexibility when it comes to server configuration, php versions, Varnish and Solr setups. We also use Linode for our own sites. Linode has been a very reliable host, with a responsive support team that responds to tickets usually within a half hour or so.
• Pantheon. We have started placing client sites (for clients willing, ready and able to brave a beta-stage hosting environment) on Pantheon. Their entire setup, with server administration tools for easy deployment between dev, test and live instances, has been a nice experience so far. Having Solr, Memcache, Drush and Varnish preconfigured is a nice plus. We also enjoy working with Josh, Zack, David and Matt.
• AWS. Our experiences with AWS have been decidedly mixed. Their servers are generally fast, and there are terrific community resources. However, the recent crash left two of our volumes corrupted, and rendered a RAID-10 database useless. (RAID-10 in the cloud might be a mis-labeling, as it's not really offering the redundancy of RAID-10 on dedicated drives.) Like many companies out there, our current thinking is that maybe AWS is not the place for any primary or critical business systems. AWS also can run up a bill on you very fast, so it's worth monitoring your usage as you go.
• Voxel. We placed one client site on Voxel, and after some bumps during launch thing have been working pretty well.
• Rackspace Dedicated. We don't currently have any Rackspace dedicated servers running, but my experience with them in the past has been quite good.
• Rackspace Cloud. This is a host we are looking at for future projects.
• Rackspace Apps. We've found that splitting out email services from the website can have many positive benefits, one of which is that you don't have to worry about migrating email when you change hosts. Another popular solution for this approach is GMail, but we found that when it comes to business email, there's more peace of mind working with a company that responds to support tickets and addresses technical issues (something Google really doesn't do, in our experience, even on the paid business plans).

Migrated comments into wiki.

chellman

For the cheap stuff

I'm a long-time user of Pair Networks offerings, both at pair.com (for eight or more years) and more recently (for a couple years) at pairlite.com. I've tried a lot of shared hosts for low-traffic sites, and all of Pair's offerings that support Drupal at all do it very well. Really solid. They seem to do a better job than other shared hosts at not overselling grossly, and keeping the bad neighbor effect at bay. Based in Pittsburgh, PA.

I've also recently been using A2 Hosting (a2hosting.com) with some projects. They're very inexpensive, but Drupal runs very well on their servers too. I don't have as much experience with them, but in the past 6 or 8 months that folks I work with have been using them, the experience has been good. Based in Ann Arbor, MI.

heyrocker - Thu, 2011-04-28 00:50

>  I am also a longtime Pair customer and highly recommend them. Their pricing is not the cheapest, but you get shell access and their email support is absolutely top notch, even for the lowest hosting plans. Fast response time, knowledgeable techs. Great company.  

Mile23 - Fri, 2011-04-22 12:04

>  +1 for pair.com.

drifter - Thu, 2011-04-21 04:02

managed aegir hosting
I went with omega8. They're offering managed VPS servers with aegir pre-installed. You can easily create or clone sites in the interface, you get SSH access, git and drush are included.

They are an opinionated company, so, Drupal only, no e-mail hosting (use Google Apps or your registrar's mail service), Pressflow only for Drupal 6, etc. But this also means they are focusing on one thing only: making your drupal sites perform fast and stable.

The marketing speak on their site could use some improvement but here's the basic deal:

http://omega8.cc/hosted-aegir

Working well so far...

margritlb - Thu, 2011-04-21 07:11

Shared Hosting

I've been using www.BlueHost.com (shared hosting) for many years for my clients, and feel very confident with them for lower traffic sites. It's very reasonable cost at less than $100/yr, includes 1 free domain, email hosting and a ton of other features. Great support, available any time through online chat or their 1-800 number. You can even host multiple domains on 1 account. The backend is very flexible (SSH, custom php.ini, override .htaccess, custom cron, etc.)

cgrant3d - Thu, 2011-04-21 11:11

I'm using http://www.hotdrupal.com as well am really happy with their support & performance. They say they have a "hybrid vps" - not sure exactly what that entails from a technical standpoint but I know they manage their servers which is a good thing for me. The last thing I need is to be responsible for server security / updates so for my needs they've been great.

Some context - I've been using hotdrupal for a couple years now with a site that gets 550K page views, 150K visits and 75K absolute uniques every month.

mherchel - Tue, 2011-04-26 05:46

I'm using HotDrupal.com on www.GatorTailgating.com, and it's doing great there!

Occasionally we have stories that are picked up by major media and we get traffic spikes, but we've never had an issue with slowness or downtime.

+1

BTMash - Fri, 2011-04-22 12:16

My circumstances are different since the university I work at has its own server room (some old servers, some new, all eventually phasing into a large, proper server rack. I've been using linode for my own site for the past couple of months and I'm pretty happy with it so far; granted, I don't get a lot of hits but I like being able to work about on my own server and do what I like. In the past, I've used serverbeach for their servers and while their service is not too bad, its pretty much all on you (they do NOT offer managed hosting) so it was a good learning experience for me to say the least. With that said, the specs on their servers were pretty fantastic for the price. On their lower end servers, we were hosting a site with well over 1m page views / month (this was a site with nearly 250k registered users at the time). Scaling horizontally at serverbeach was a bit of a pain as we did have to duplicate our server setup with the various server software over and over so that was one (fairly big) downpoint.

realEuph - Tue, 2011-04-26 11:16

I lease a server from LiquidWeb (Detriot). I providing hosting only for my clients as I am not in the hosting business. The server is not partitioned. I am hosting a number of sites that use a variety of technologies from static pages to Drupal to complete custom work. There server is not overloaded and no site receives a huge number of visitors.

I went with LiquidWeb because their prices were reasonable and their customer service was (and continues to be) fantastic.

OldCode101 - Wed, 2011-04-27 06:27

Media Temple - gs (Grid Server)
I know its shared hosting but for a small applications I can pair off a new grid server or upgrade to a VPS depending on the project. At $16/mo per gs I can't complain.

Recently I found how to activate PHP 5.3 on a per folder basis, so a drupal7 install is in the works.

davidgibbens - Sat, 2011-04-30 02:08

My low volume website http://www.ehnetwork.org.uk runs well on hotdrupal. Support has been excellent. It seems to be a small outfit that is definitely dedicated to what it's doing. The site generates about 450 emails a day through the notify module. That'll probably be a good chunk of the usage - I don't have any analytics at the moment so can't report in any more detail. I have one or two other more personal domains hitched onto my account too.