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Can anyone suggest a web hosting company offering good support and awareness of EE.

There’s always http://www.enginehosting.com/ for EE specialized hosting!

I have had a mixed bag of experiences with various hosting companies and EE installations.  The only client site that has worked out OK was on FusedNetwork - most of the others have experienced ridiculously long page load times at various points.  I am in the early stages of moving my own site over to ExpressionEngine hosting - their prices have come down for basic services and it seems like an obvious choice for an EE site.

EngineHosting is great and they offer top-notch support.

I’m with EngineHosting too and no complaints at all. If you do a search you’ll find a few similar posts.

If you’re looking for a host with EE knowledge and expertise, EngineHosting is the only one who could genuinely claim this. However, it’s not really your host’s job to support your choice of software. I still have some clients on EH and they really are great, but unfortunately they don’t have a UK data centre. When I moved two sites to Clook’s UK servers from EH, as expected the speed increased, and even better, the google.co.uk rankings for both sites shot up (while the google.com ranking which was previously high went down… and before you ask, yes, I had already set the correct geo preferences in webmaster tools).

EngineHosting will be the way to go if you’re looking for a black box hosting solution.  If you want to get your hands a little dirty, other hosts will work just fine such as Rack Space and Media Temple.  We’re using the Media Temple DV service and are really diggin it.  We wrote a post about Media Temple and our experience with them if you are interested.

I have had really good experiences with Liquidweb/StormonDemand for my EE sites over the past couple of years.  EE has always run smoothly (both 1.6.9 & 2.1), and I have never had any issues with removing index.php.  For the first 18 months I was using Liquidweb’s premium VPS plan for my most popular site, but it was straining whenever we had decent social media traffic (20,000 - 30,000 unique visitors a day).

A couple of months ago we made the switch to Storm and performance has been flawless.  On Tuesday my site (running EE 1.6.9) had 47,000 uniques for the day thanks to a Reddit front page (averaging at one point 100 visitors to the site a minute), and we got by with zero downtime and relatively fast page loads the entire time.  The site does not use any third party caching tools, just a standard EE installation.

I have also used EngineHosting for clients and have been really happy with the quality of the hosting and their support is great too.

Can anyone suggest a web hosting company offering good support and awareness of EE.

As is evident from the other posts, it is VERY important to plan for the amount of traffic you might expect. A simple EE corporate or local business site might expect a maximum of 100-200 visitors a day. That is a long shot off from 20,000+

$20 a month might do you for the first, but you should probably spend $100-$400 a month for the later…that is, if you expect 20K plus visitors per day. At that point, you will want either a dedicated server or load balanced (like Engine Hosting)....or at the minimum a VPS with a decent percentage of the machine cycles.

It is also very important as to what part(s) of the site the traffic is expected to hit. We have seen 20,000+ with the heaviest use being our forum….that would seems to put vastly more load on the server than 20K or even 40K visits to a page which uses only a few mysql queries. For instance, many forum pages use 40 or more queries for a single page.

Summary - as with everything else, the word is Appropriate Technology….use what is needed for the job you need to do…..with maybe a little extra in reserve.

http://icdsoft.com/
I don’t see why you would need EE awareness. What would be a particular EE aware service?
L.

http://icdsoft.com/
I don’t see why you would need EE awareness. What would be a particular EE aware service?
L.

I don’t think you need EE awareness as much as you need “CMS mysql/php” awareness and a decent basic support level where you can make certain that someone can be emailed or talked to in the event of a problem.

Much of this depends on how “mission critical” your site is. If you are working for a big client who makes a lot of money from their site…or would be embarrassed if it was down, then you want to spend a little more and get a little more.

I think perhaps a better way to word this is…....if you can work with a host that others here (EE) have worked with in the past and had decent results, go for it! That is better than picking one out of a hat.

I would stay away from Windows servers…...which some do use!

Way back when, I heard decent things about this company:
http://www.pair.com/

They seem to be very “up” on the tech end of things.

+1 for EngineHosting.

I have two sites hosted with them, and I couldn’t ask for better support.

I’ve just switched to EH and am quite happy.  I do still have a lot of learning to do.

http://icdsoft.com/
I don’t see why you would need EE awareness. What would be a particular EE aware service?
L.

EE awareness just helps make troubleshooting easier. I’ve had hosts with different PHP settings, and it takes a bit more “maneuvering” to get the site to work properly. An example would be that with one host I used,  “Force URL query strings” had to be enabled in EE for the site to work properly. Since the host had no EE expertise, they didn’t know that such a simple setting could fix my problem. It took a lot of work/investigation on my part to find the issue.

Has anyone used crucialwebhost.com? Their own site is built in EE, which would have to be a good sign. My ideal would be an Australian web host with a good record for EE sites. Unfortunately I’m looking at the lower end of hosting packages, wherever I go.