My client is a NZ based financial services advisory company. We have been hosting their websites on a CentOS/cPanel Linux VPS at Web24 in Melbourne. This has been comletely satisfactory except for transient routing failures just inside their network, which is proving troublesome to get any traction on. As a result we are looking at moving host.
Can anyone recommend reasonably priced Linux VPS hosting that they have used to host Drupal sites, preferably in NZ (though we may consider offshore options). Shared hosting is not an option due to security concerns.
By way of comparison, their current VPS includes 512MB guaranteed RAM, 30G disk, 50G monthly traffic, managed hardware firewall, managed backups, and service monitoring. It is costing them around $100/month I believe.
Thanks.
Comments
Hosting Direct
Hi John,
We've been with Hosting Direct (hostingdirect.co.nz) for over two years now and successfully host over 100 drupal sites with great performance. We do have our own servers, but you can get great deals through them for Linux VPS hosting using the famous DirectAdmin control panel (probably the best on the market - we've found - after using all the CPs out there).
National traffic is free and uncapped (within reason of course - doing 1TB of traffic a month will surely be a little overboard!), and things just work... one of the main reasons we're still with them.
If the site in question is mainly focussed on NZ clients/businesses, then keeping it local also helps if there are ever any issues with the overseas pipe (which has happened a few times in the last couple of years).
Cheers,
Aaron M
Hmm. It appears Hosting
Hmm. It appears Hosting Direct are no longer offering a VPS service. Rimu Hosting have taken over their VPS hosting, and Rimu's site does not mention Direct Admin as an available option (Webmin/VirtualMin, or Plesk).
Hosting Direct
From what I've read on the NZPHPUG list, I'd point anyone considering their services to a search of the NZ PHP users group archives first.
I can't comment on the truth of any of what's said there, having not dealt with them directly myself, but I think it would be unkind to not draw it to your attention.
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Oh dear. I'd pretty much
Oh dear. I'd pretty much ruled them out anyway.
Great to see you looking at
Great to see you looking at something from 2 years ago to make your judgement. Would have thought better from members of this group. Little ashamed to be a part of it.
That's not why I made my
That's not why I made my decision, thanks. Hosting Direct do not appear to offer VPS accounts.
Nothing to be ashamed of
And for the record, that wasn't an attack on HD (or yourself for using their services), simply a pointer to discussion available in a public archive - one which someone might easily miss if shopping around. I apologise if I have upset or offended in any way; that wasn't my intention.You are right that some comments there are old. Remiss of me not to notice and point that out. I edited carefully to maintain what I felt was an NPOV, and avoided injecting any biased information. Post made it clear that I wasn't able to offer any comment because I had no direct experience. I've met Ben a few times, and he seems a lovely chap, but if I was about to sign a hosting contract with a company I'd want to do my own due diligence with as information from sources as wide as possible.Hosting is a regularly raised topic on NZ PHP UG, so I would hope a search for any provider's company name on there might return useful information for people considering hosting a PHP-based site in NZ?
Please allow me to rephrase -
If you are considering hosting a PHP-based site in NZ, an excellent resource (and one you should familiarise yourself if you haven't already) is the NZ PHP Users Group. It's on Google Groups, at http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug, and hosting is a regularly discussed topic. I recommend searching for specific mentions of providers by name; customer experience is the best guide you will find.
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We have a VPS with Net24 in
We have a VPS with Net24 in Christchurch, running CentOS/Virtuozzo. Very happy with the service and price. We're running over 50 Drupal sites. National traffic is free, international traffic limits depend on the plan you go with.
They have a half-price sale on at the moment:
http://www.net24.co.nz/vps_linux.php
Their VPS Max plan appears to compare favourably with the Web24 plan you mention at a cost of $89.95/month, although that doesn't include managed backups, which is available separately (also half-price, I think).
David
Attractive, but the thing
Attractive, but the thing that would put me off this is Plesk as the sole preconfigured control panel option. Ack.
sitehost
I recommend sitehost: http://www.sitehost.co.nz/
I've been with them for a couple of years. Very reasonably priced. Never goes down except when they are doing pre-planned alterations.
Kent Parker
Web development
+1 Sitehost
I have to agree with Kent on this one.
Sitehost is has been excellent partner for our Drupal hosting.
Net24 and maybe ZeroOne
Hi, I've been using Net24 for over 10 years, 2+ years for Drupal hosting (probably 30+ drupal sites, some shared hosting and some on a VPS). Thier VPS are great and good pricing. You basically get a VPS with your flavour of OS and it's up to you to set up Apache, php, mysql, etc. Or you can pay them to do it I think.... at the time of writing this, $29.95 per month for a 5GB VPS is pretty sweet, $59 for 15GB. Also, the guys are very helpful and responsive. http://www.net24.co.nz/vps_linux.php
The Only other company I've used is ZeroOne ( http://www.zeroone.co.nz/ ). Thier site doesn't look like much but thier VPS is pretty fast. They had only PHP running on Windows but set up a Linux VPS for us which we've had no problems with. They set up a VPS with CPanel and we went from there... bit more pricey than Net24 though.
Sitehost
Just a +1 for cas8 and Kent's comments above. Sitehost are great providers, have been very happy with them for a few years, host dedicated servers with them and maintain a few VPS and dedicated systems there for people I work with also.
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Thanks for all the
Thanks for all the comments.
For those of you using sitehost's VPS:
Are you rolling your own setup, security hardening the OS and doing your own admin from their base install? From shell, or have you installed a web-based control panel?
Or are you using their managed service and working within the confines of their control panel and account-local SSH? How have you found their willingness to make custom tweaks to the likes of php.ini and httpd.conf if so?
I'm leaning towards the latter, server admin isn't where I want to spend my time if I can avoid it.
self-drive for me
BUT I'd definitely be interested to hear recommendations on control panels which you can drop over the top of a stock Debian setup.
I have a couple of customers who are savvy enough to look after their own box 90% of the time, especially if they have an interface to deploy sites. I usually flick them a few shell scripts to deploy sites (total poor-man's aegir - anyone got a link to @skwashd's talk on that? - just because aegir wasn't around at the time I needed them). Hardly pretty but does the trick.
Aegir is an obvious contender here (esp combined with SH's nice control panels for DNS etc), but I'm sure there are others ... some folks want to run other setups than just Drupal ... let's not stop to wonder why :)
But I'm sure there are others. So yeah - keen to hear what other people are rolling, either for customer VPS or their own site admin.
@johnpitcairn - as you say, server admin is not a profit-heavy place to spend time. but for me it's quick and minimal, and installing web-based control panels introduces the chance that some nasty kid's gonna add an ugly task or two to my TODO without my say-so, hence i rarely dedicate time to digging for good options.
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But Chris - we like adding
But Chris - we like adding ugly tasks to your TODO.....
@eileen - LOL
@eileen - LOL. I was thinking of the sort of script kids who like to find holes in web-based tools - not you!
That's the reason I've never been able to answer your questions on what a good web-based control panel is. I've never yet met one I took a shine to (in defense of web-based cpanels, I stopped trying to meet new ones a while ago).
If my comments have helped you, please pay it forward!
Use issue queues to discuss module issues - this will help your questions assist others (including yourself!) in future.
No - that would be Pete
No - that would be Pete asking about cpanels - I just want aegir....
I just want what eileen wants
I just want what eileen wants
pete davis : fuzion : connect + campaign + communicate
We had an Aegir server. It's
We had an Aegir server. It's still very new, and if you're not into performing admin yourself then stay clear. Quite a time-spender.
DirectAdmin for the CP is the best you can get. Drop on Debian and away you go. Covers off every aspect of Drupal development/hosting and there is no problem at all spending $$ on something you can rely on.
Webmin?
We kinda like Webmin here. Still do a lot of stuff in the shell using putty, but Webmin simplifies some tasks.
I've used webmin on my own
I've used webmin on my own VPS at Sitehost.
It's great for managing apache virtual hosts, dbs, etc (ie. the virtualmin part) But I find the rest kind of overkill. I still do any other configuration via ssh.
Something like aegir, but set up to deploy non drupal sites too and a nice virtual host manager would be great.
I used rimuhosting for
I used rimuhosting for several years, and found them to be a really great crowd - knowledgable, helpful, and thoroughly local. The have datacenters/space in NZ and overseas - http://rimuhosting.com/datacenters.jsp
Internationally, I've used both linode and slicehost, both are good.
Simon Roberts
Taniwha Solutions
Thanks for all the comments.
Thanks for all the comments. We'll be going with a managed VPS at sitehost, and sharing it among several sites. Spares me the pain of ongoing low level server admin.