Hope this isn't politically incorrect. I'm planning a Drupal site for a film I will be marketing in a few months. I'm currently hosted (multiple simple HTML-CSS sites) at Godaddy as a simple "shared" site on Linux. I'm concerned that if I start to have success in the form of 20 to 120 people a day creating logins, logging in to comment, upload pictures, etc., that my current hosting will become a huge performance bottleneck. Moving to the dedicated hosting or the virtual dedicated hosting is expensive (for me) but might be a necessity.
I'd appreciate any suggestions about load and shared hosting, other hosting services, etc. While I've built and maintained a bunch of very very simple web sites, I'm a drupal newbie. Responses direct to me at jim at turnipvideo dot com would be fine if we don't want to mention specific products or services on the discussion list.
Thanks.
Comments
These days I use and recommend
These days I use and recommend Slicehost, Linode, RimuHosting and SoftLayer. I've also been playing around with ChunkHost, which is currently free but has no track record in terms of customer support or long-term reliability as far as I can tell.
Slicehost is somewhere in the middle in terms of price and has always been rock solid. They were also sponsors of DrupalCamp LA 2009 and the Drupal Design Camp in Boston. I recently gave one of the founders a hard time about their prices and was told that their prices may be changing soon.
Linode is the cheapest and I've been very happy with them. My guess is that they're probably the right webhost for you.
Rimu costs more than Linode and Slicehost but the thing is that their support is simply outstanding. It's so good that I can't tell the difference between their technical support and customer support. Every question has been answered within minutes and always includes the details I need. If you can afford it, go with Rimu.
SoftLayer starts at $99 a month and therefore costs the most but it's the cheapest in the long run if you need a lot of additional IPs, tons of storage or things like a CDN or transcoding service. The speed of their network has to be seen to believed. I did a speed test a few months ago and SoftLayer's network was 10x faster than Linode and Rimu, who have data centers in the same city I was testing.
An important thing to consider is that Linode, Rimu and SoftLayer offer 32- and 64-bit architectures while Slicehost only has 64-bit. To make your money go further, it might make sense to get a 32-bit system because the memory usage will be somewhat lower.
We're new, but give us a try!
Hey, thanks for mentioning ChunkHost!
We're new, but we're cheap & good!
chunkhost.com
Drupal Hosting in North Carolina
If you don't want to be your own admin, and like supporting other businesses in North Carolina, we are a North Carolina based business (which is why we are in this group) near Asheville.
We sponsored DrupalCamp LA 2008, DrupalCon DC 2009, and have been Org Members of the Drupal Assoc for two years. We plan on being DrupalCon SF 2010 sponsors as well.
We have shared hosting style plans but offer higher end plans for those who want a VPS like share of resources, but don't want to be system admins.
All of our servers are owned by us, and located in a non-profit data center in NC which puts money back into the local area by providing support to schools and higher institutions.
Steve
hotdrupal.com
Thanks!
Thanks Steve for calling your service to my attention. A quick look at your site has me interested. You look to understand the things which I am worrying about but with a very reasonable starting price. I'll contact you directly with some other questions.
cheers, Jim McQuaid
Turnip
www.eightlessons.com
www.turnipvideo.com
Great customer service
I haven't used all that many different hosting services, but I have been using HotDrupal for a while now. Their customer service has been great. They're prompt in responding and knowledgeable about Drupal. The latter is something many generic hosting sites don't have. And while they may not be the cheapest hosting around, they're prices are pretty competitive and you can't beat the customer service.
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@foggyperspectiv | foggyperspective.com (blog)
Yes they ROCK! I've had a
Yes they ROCK! I've had a dedicated server with hotdrupal for a while now and have loved every minute of it. To us the most important factor was that it was a local Asheville company, were big believers in supporting the local options as much as possible. Of course it also helps that they are a great company too and they give back and support the local community. All around you wont be sorry you went with them, I havnt a single complaint.
I was also interested in a
I was also interested in a local (NC) company providing hosting that caters to the Drupal CMS. They were helpful at first setting me up with a trial account so I could compare them to Hostmonster. Very helpful.
This past Saturday morning the site crashed? I emailed them at 9am on Saturday morning, it is now 10am on Tuesday and I've yet to hear back from them. The site will not load and I cannot log in to Control Panel.
I know Steve from HotDrupal will probably read this, I feel like I have given time for a response and have to be fair to the community in making this public. A big part of shared hosting is customer service, and me sharing with them my "The server at www.mysite.com is taking too long to respond" / "Problem loading page" problem should have been an indication that I needed immediate help. Fortunately for me, this is a test site, a copy of a production site. I'd hate to think if this were a client's live site though.
There's a big difference
There's a big difference between sending one employee a personal e-mail telling them you have an issue, on the free account which you have paid nothing for to try out a service, versus opening a support ticket through the client area.
You sent me one personal e-mail stating you had a temporary issue, and that's it. No second e-mail saying "hey did you miss this," no phone call or voice mail, no second e-mail saying the issue had moved from being temporary to permanent, and no attempt at going through the normal support ticketing system which is monitored 24x7, and also no other customers having any issues.
Your e-mail stated that you noticed a temporary issue, and that you were "just trying to help you diagnose if needed."
Given you were having issues with the site design itself I assumed the issue, being temporary (as in not continuing) was related to the issues you had with your site design and/or some messed up SQL queries.
No where in your single e-mail did you state you had a permanent issue with being able to connect. There was no follow-up e-mail stating that it was more serious than a temporary issue. And if this were the case, I would hope you would open a support ticket rather than e-mail a single person.
Steve
Sorry to hear you had a bad
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. I would recommend to anyone using a service that they use the provided ticket system for any issues. Personal emails are not always the best to follow up on for various reasons and a ticket system helps keep things in check. I've submitted a handful of tickets with hotdrupal for help and questions and always had a response within the hour.
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@foggyperspectiv | foggyperspective.com (blog)
Hosting
I use Hostmonster.com
I like it b/c I can easily update Drupal core using SimpleScripts. Just click a button and boom! (as John Madden would say) it's updated. It's also only about $6 a month. They have the best CP I've ever seen.
Also you can host unlimited domains and basically unlimited everything. That said, I am always interested in bigger and better. Will look myself at hotdrupal.com. I'm open minded :)
Was just on chat support with
Was just on chat support with Hostmonster, full transcript follows:
Brandon [9:57:25 AM]: I have been struggling with this problem for over a week now. I think I need my time avail to execute cron (write to db) increased. I'm using Drupal btw.
ndickson [9:58:53 AM]: the default time for all processes on the shared ip is 5 minutes.
[9:59:06 AM]: If you need to run processes longer than that you will need to purchase a dedicated ip.
Brandon [10:00:07 AM]: wow, 5 minutes should be plenty of time
Brandon [10:00:28 AM]: do you see anything unusual, any error msgs or anything eating memory?
ndickson [10:07:05 AM]: No, I do not see anything unusual you asked me about increasing execution time for your cron. I answered that question.
"you asked me about increasing execution time for your cron. I answered that question."
Yeah, I don't appreciate that response.
Going to see if HotDrupal works better when I properly use their ticketing system.
Drupal is so finicky! :\
Yes their systems are geared
Yes their systems are geared specifically towards Drupal and they are fellow Drupalers which is a big bonus. I have no control panel with my account (dedicated server) so I couldn't speak to that, I prefer the command line anyhow. Plus now I use Aegir which handles all the cron stuff for me so I've not had to think about that for a while now and Aegir makes core updates a breeze too.
The uber big shared hosting companies like hostmonster (i used to be on dreamhost) leave a lot to be desired & are highly inflexible! Any time I have been in need of assistance HotDrupal was knowledgeable, prompt and helpful; and I'm not just saying that. I had some troubles when I first got my dedicated server with them .. I was used to the crutch of a control panel & they helped me adjust and pointed me to the proper resources to bring me up to speed.
Good luck! You should definitely give them a chance IMO.
FatCow
Has anyone tried FatCow? http://www.fatcow.com/ They are green-powered and about $5 per month.
I had a client once who used
I had a client once who used FatCow. I wasn't blown away by their service nor that they ran PHP as CGI at the time. Not even FastCGI. Drupal was pretty slow. They also didn't allow cron so I had to use the poormanscron module.
Was a couple of years ago so I am not sure if they have changed anything since.
Hope that helps..
Thanks!
Thank you for the tips!
When in doubt search drupal.org
fyi, just found this: http://drupal.org/hosting
also sceo recommends http://icdsoft.com/ as well.