Hosting services

My recent club client saved $30/mo. with HostGator managed VPS over the cost of Pantheon (because Pantheon charges $30/mo for an SSL certificate).

Did you read about HostGator being down for a day last week? "Firmware bug in their routers" they say. My club's site was down for 17+ hours. Based on sales records, they missed out on several hundred, maybe even a thousand dollars in revenue... which is not peanuts to the club.

Also, it took HG more than a day to update the OS to fix Heartbleed.

Sorry, your question included "...and like", I guess this is off the topic. ;-)

Come with me now as we troll through the swamps of the low priced hosting services...

Long ago, maybe 2006, I opened an account with GoDaddy. Everyone hates on them because their past support of SOPA -- the river of business flowing away from them caused them to retract it within a week -- and especially their sexist ads. I admit to being lazy and, because changing hosting providers is a PITA, I never moved.

However, I've never had a problem with them from a technical standpoint. Whenever I've called their support, I've reached them within a few minutes. (Even the day after the Heartbleed story broke, I was able to call in and talk about a different issue within about 3 minutes. They were pretty proud of having upgraded their servers on the day the story broke.)

When I have talked to them, they have never failed to give me a good answer to a problem, or mostly, just gone and fixed it for me.

My technical calls are all to do with issues about their platform, DNS, email and things like SSL certs. They won't talk to you about your website if you aren't on a managed plan. They know nothing about Drupal so far as I can tell.

I have an unmanaged VPS server for my business and a couple clients are also on them. If you wait until they're offering a special deal to sign up or renew, their prices are good for a bare hosting plan. Their managed plans are expensive. They also charge extra to have Plesk loaded on the server, so for the least cost, you need to be willing to do everything via ssh and the command line.

I just renewed a VPS plan with 2Gb memory, 8 cores and 60Gb of disk for $32/mo (had to buy a year's worth to get this price). I've never had any unscheduled downtime with them, unlike my recent experience with HostGator.

I wouldn't try to run a Drupal site on their shared service unless it was unusually light weight. If your site needs many scores of modules and has more than a very few content types, it is going to be slow and, worse, unreliable. They run their databases on remote servers and my eperience about 3 years ago was that they were overloaded.

Is this a recommendation? Yes, but a half hearted one. If you have a client that can manage their own hosting, I would recommend them, if they otherwise met the client's need.

But nearly all of my clients can't be on an unmanaged server. If your clients need to be on a managed server, so far as I can tell, you just can't beat Pantheon if you are just supplying a Drupal website. But to do this they don't give you direct access to the server.

Linode is also a good provider, they will manage any plan for $100 above the base plan cost per month. They are more traditional and you get full control over the server.