Managed VPS hosting? or V semi-P S?

The extra dollars, the jump from $60 to $80, is worthwhile. One customer support call costs you $20 of time and the $80 VPS will save you several calls per month compared to the $60 reseller shared hosting.

I used US hosts for several projects and hated the overnight email support. Australian daytime email replies are worth the extra $15 it cost per month for an Australian replacement.

I use WHM/cPanel in one VPS because I can delegate some admin work to customers by giving them a dedicated account. For everything else I use the free open Webmin. I would switch completely to Webmin if I found a reasonably priced reliable Australian host supporting Webmin.

There are so many horror stories about bullet proof systems that die after the first shot. One host manager told me they connected to both Optus and Telstra for reliability with each connection exiting the building at a different point. The first time the Telstra link failed, the Optus link also failed because they connected into the same fibre a few metres up the street. NBN does not increase reliability because NBN is not adding another network. Instead NBN is merging a Telstra network with an Optus network to reduce the number of networks. I am tempted to return to using a US host who has four separate connections to the top four backbone networks in the continental US. That level of reliability is expensive in Australia.

The other really important consideration here is BACKUPS

They seem like a waste of time, but you try and explain to a customer that the site and all their data you have been hosting for the past few years is all gone!!

Things like you should have backed up yourself or the hosting provider was suppose to do that really do not cut the cake. So even at $80/mth for a good VPS and cPanel/WebMin .... add to that a good backup location. Both for disaster recovery and for human error recovery. S3 is always one option here. Remember, backups left on the server are not backups.

Hi,

I guess it would also help to understand what your clients are needing to access a web panel for at all ?

For instance, i have done many sites for clients small and large, we host them using the Aegir hosting system http://www.aegirproject.org/ (written in drupal for drupal) and we don't even give them access to that. Clients shouldn't really need to be adding/editing DB's, it sounds like your traffic requirements are minimal and you don't really need to be monitoring it at a client/site level, file uploads etc would be handled by the drupal site itself.

I would also steer away from US based sites, it might be acceptable for some sites to be slow, but you really will notice the latency differences on heavier sites. We were originally with Rackspace on a dedicated server and after moving to a VPS in a Sydney datacenter, there was a very noticeable speed increase (it also made the staging to live process quicker for us too). As far as cost goes - http://www.mammothvps.com.au/ have very reasonable pricing for VPS's and are based in Sydney. It's not managed, so it might not be suitable for you. Likewise i would offer to put you on my account with them under Aegir, but until I know the reasons that you need to give access to the panels, this may not be a suitable option for you either.

Regards,
Nik

HI, another company that offers great Australian Soloutions and is used by very large sites is http://www.netregistry.com.au/vps-hosting/ they offer great solutions and for example when i used them in the architecture for OLPC Au web solution they offered us a discount as they were a non for profit always love companies who acknowledge that.

Another one is Anchor they are well an industry standard in Australia and also sponsor alot of web related events/conferences etc (we love that) they live at http://www.anchor.com.au/

with the recent Distribute.it issue it is definetley i would not go with a company that does not have cloud/elastic services. The reason they went down was they had pshyical servers and the address blocks were attacked so something to consider. There are alot of Aussie hosting companies that still use physical boxes (shame shame) which are more vulberable to hacker attacks.

Also i would vouche for mammothvps re above comment they are great to and one of the gentlemen who designed there soloution i greatly respect ;)

There are lots of options mentioned for Sydney. Web24 is a good choice for Melbourne. Their problem response is excellent. They offer unmanaged, various levels of managed, and backup. You choose the combination you want.

They have only one datacentre, much like a lot of other options mentioned here. The ideal would be a company with a datacentre in Sydney and another in Melbourne so you can have a hot backup. Linode in the US offers four sites in USA and one in England. You can set up a server in LA to server the Pacific then set up a server somewhere else in USA to server your Web site when LA slides into the ocean then create another hot backup in England in case USA is subject to any one of the extreme scenarios popular in current literature.

After miserable issues with lots of reseller hosts who apply php patches and so on with no reference or care to their customers sites we manage all our own hosting with the help of OntheNet. We sell our space as drupal friendly and make sure that we provide whatever we need for the drupal sites of our clients. Our packages are very competitive compared to most australian hosters and we can scale up or down as needed. For example www.qldfloods.org was hosted by us initially and then OntheNet designed a server solution for us that met the massive traffic demand - Ryan was involved in that solution also and can speak up how amazing OntheNet are.

So for anybody looking for drupal friendly hosting with a personal touch feel free to talk to us.
Tim Miller
IT Integrity