What would you want in a web host??

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wipeout_dude's picture
Posted by wipeout_dude on March 25, 2012 at 11:45am

If you could find an ideal web host what features would it have for you to run Drupal effectively for yourself or your customers?

I'm not talking about the Pantheon type development/drupal only hosts but the more general hosts that provide email etc. as well..

I have been looking around and cant find the "perfect" host, most seem to simply overload their servers, so looking at potentially setting up a service myself.. So thought this would be a good place to get a "wish list" of features..

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I think a good drupal hosting

Posted by hejazee on March 25, 2012 at 12:07pm
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I think a good drupal hosting should have the following features:
APC
uploadprogress
Open basedir disabled
An option to enable wildcard dns
MySQL and pgSQL and SQLlite enabled
Access to httpd.conf and php.ini customization if possible
SSH Access
Drush installed
Gzip support in webserver

...
A nice control-panel like DirectAdmin or Cpanel or Webmin
...

Visit my website @ http://www.hejazee.ir/
Learn computer science @ http://www.tolooco.com/

I think this is a great "stone soup" recipe builder thread.

Posted by redhatmatt on March 25, 2012 at 10:56pm
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APC
Uploadprogress
Open basedir disabled
An option to enable wildcard dns
MySQL and pgSQL and SQLlite enabled
w/ the option of PerconaDB, MariaDB or PostgreSQL.
Choice between mod_suphp, fastcgi or straight Apache
Access to httpd.conf and php.ini customization if possible
SSH Access
Drush installed
Gzip support in webserver
Varnish pre-setup (to a point and explain where it's at)
Munin and Monit
1 click supported FFMPEG and other encoders.

I'm getting rediculous here but as an option: Cassandra and HipHop.

SSD!

A nice control-panel like DirectAdmin or Cpanel or Webmin OR Plesk
(Vagrant ;))

An optional Aegir install (but that's at omega8.cc!)

Webform survey

Posted by jdwalling on March 26, 2012 at 5:05am
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Once you get a nominal wish list, use a survey like http://webform.com/ to see what percentage of people want the different ingredients for a web host. The survey results would be useful to many in the Drupal community.

Great.. That gives me some

Posted by wipeout_dude on March 27, 2012 at 7:38am
wipeout_dude's picture

Great.. That gives me some stuff to work on at least.. :)

Toratek set up a hosting

Posted by John_B on April 8, 2012 at 9:09am
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Toratek set up a Drupal hosting service, then moved to providing VPSs. The problem is that buyers of hosting services are used to very low prices, where the average resources consumed by each account are low. I know a host in UK which does not overload servers, and they work really well (though I use them for WP, I always put Drupal on customised VPS), but I suspect that if all their clients put Drupal sites on the cheap accounts, the model would not work. Where most clients run static or WP probably very few of them are using all the resources available, and clients who do hammer the database (which a well-used Drupal site will) get suspended. I provide hosting accounts to a few clients on a VPS I set up for Drupal, but the prices I charge are far higher than any normal hosting company claiming to be able to host Drupal (but far better value than running their own adequately set up VPS), so it only works for clients whom I have told that hosting Drupal well is expensive, and who accept that. I do encourage budget clients onto Wordpress, rather than try to shoe-horn a Drupal site onto cheap hosting, and have to suffer from speed problems.

@john_B I agree with

Posted by wipeout_dude on April 8, 2012 at 10:31am
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@john_B
I agree with everything you have said and its been my finding as well.. On many shared hosting providers running a CMS of just about any description doesn't perform very well..

The issues you have presented are the same as what I have experienced so I am trying to create a facility for CMS hosting (with a bias towards Drupal) that addresses these issues hopefully at a reasonable price..

Obviously chasing the mass shared hosting market is pointless, anyone who hosts a site on any of these "unlimited" type hosts really doesn't want any level of performance for their site..

I think CMS traffic is something the mass web hosting places are battling with as well because it reduces the capacity of the servers by a massive amount compared to the old static sites.. I think that's why the need to OS's like Cloud Linux arose to try and isolate the loads..

This is definitely an interesting exercise..