Thread

I completely agree with the others above:
1. EngineHosting
2. EngineHosting
3. EngineHosting

Their customer support is phenomenal and they know EE.

I’ve used Dreamhost VPS which is fine for low traffic site, although CECache fixed performance issues I had with a Dreamhost hosted site.

As everyone else here seems to be saying Engine Hosting is top notch. They are my typical “go to” solution for EE sites.

I’ve also used custom built Rackspace Cloud servers for hosting as well. These have been rock solid, but it’s a solution that requires quite a bit more server knowledge, setup and maintenance. I’d say it’s a solution (a REALLY solid solution) only if you’re willing to take on the additional role of server admin.

So the easy solution is still probably Engine Hosting.

Most of my sites require PCI compliance, so I have private secure cloud servers with FireHost. I use a Rackspace cloud server for nightly off-site backups.

To the people praising EngineHosting, are you using shared hosting or VSC? I’ve been looking at their VSC solutions, but haven’t tried them yet.

I’ve used their shared hosting for the projects I’ve got there. I’ve spoken to them about a VSC solution for a possible project and was impressed by the responses to my questions though.

Yeah, I’ve spoke to them as well and they were indeed very helpful.

I’ve been using Dreamhost shared and VPS hosting for a few years and they’ve been great!  I’m sure Enginehosting is great, but for me and most of my clients (super-small businesses), the costs are a little high.

I’ve found Dreamhost’s pricing model to be great for the work that we do and I host lots of EE sites there.  You do have to optimize your code, especially if you’re running on a shared hosting package because you tend to be ‘shared’ with a lot of other sites… but you should be doing that anyway, no?  ;P

They had a few stability issues a while back as they undertook a several massive upgrades to their infrastructure, but I’ve never been with a hosting provider that didn’t have occasional outages.  Even GoDaddy and MediaTemple go down.  Other than a few small blips their service has been pretty solid, and their tech-support is excellent.

OK, here’s more information.  We are a fairly large corporation, that get’s a great deal of its customers via or website.  We current host in-house using Microsoft tech. :(

We’re reinventing our website and moving to LAMP.  Beside home-grown tools, EE will be our first CMS.

We can’t afford any downtime,  1 hour of downtime would cost us a great deal in lost sales.

We are looking for VPS or Dedicated and multiple server load balancing.

Also, we would be interested in finding a hosting provider what can support EE, so if there is a software problem, they have the expertise to fix it quickly.

If we were not using a planing on using a CMS, then we might be interested in a hosting provider like Rackspace or Media Temple.  Not that they couldn’t handle EE, it just that we don’t know EE we’ll so we need a hosting provider that does.

Thank you for considering us! Let us know if you have any questions about our services or anything at all. We are available 24/7 via chat, phone and Twitter! We hope you find what suits you best! Have a great day :}

Kat D.
(mt) Media Temple
Social Media Team

I’ve found Dreamhost’s pricing model to be great for the work that we do and I host lots of EE sites there.  You do have to optimize your code, especially if you’re running on a shared hosting package because you tend to be ‘shared’ with a lot of other sites… but you should be doing that anyway, no?  ;P

Hi Dehuszar,

I mentioned it mid-post in my earlier message in this thread, but CE Cache really helped my Dreamhost sites. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It tamed complex EE templates into manageable templates.

Also, I think another benefit of Dreamhost is how powerful their control panel is. It’s not the prettiest control panel I’ve seen, but you can do so much with it, I can overlook their lack of CSS skills in that area.

EngineHosting.

And not just because they humor me with my jokes.

...just wish they still offered EE license discounts.

We primarily use a Liquid Web VPS.  I would not recommend Liquid Web shared hosting for EE sites.  EE is not a popular enough CMS so we’ve had a lot of issues with default settings conflicting with EE’s needs (mostly mod_security).

We’ve used Media Temple with minimal issues.  Media Temples DV and GS plans are a bit different so scaling up from the smallest plan may not be the smoothest process if your site grows.

A Small Orange worked well for one site I had years ago, but I can’t speak to their latest service.

EngineHosting is definitely a solid company with good support but really annoying to work with if you like access to settings.  It can take you 6 hours to do a simple task like create a database and I’ve had support tickets on DNS issues go back and forth for 3 days.

In general, the biggest issues we’ve had trying to run EE with different hosting companies shared accounts are mod_security issues.  A lot of hosts have default settings that will think the entries you are trying to publish from EE are SQL injections and similar things (for example, if your client has an article with the words ‘select’ and ‘from’ somewhere in it the entry might throw a 404 and you get to chat with support to figure out which security settings need to be relaxed so that a client can manage their site from day to day without getting errors.

I assume, hosts like EngineHosting have all those settings sorted out and are planning for users to be using EE.  Many other hosts however, don’t have EE on their radar and you have to manually troubleshoot each of those errors as they are triggered.

EDIT: You may also want to sign up for this products notifications: http://atollapp.com/  (I hear it’s a thing by Joel Bradbury!)

If you’re in the US/North America, then definitely EngineHosting.

But if you’re in the UK/Europe, then I honestly can’t recommend them, during my year or so with them (admittedly a couple of years ago) I found that:

1) The extra latency compared to a EU based host adds ~100ms to each request, which really adds up when it comes to render time of an entire page.
2) EHs’ nightly’ backup scripts run at a time that may be at night if you’re in the US, but are bang smack in the middle of morning working hours if you’re on European time.

Personally I roll with a bunch of Linode VPS’s: UK data centre, insanely stable (as in no-downtime-at-all-in-2-years-stable), and cheap to boot. You do need to set things up yourself. But Linode’s stack scripts + enabling automatic security updates takes care of most of it, and once you have one box set up the way you want you can just clone it when you need more.

I’ve used Dreamhost VPS which is fine for low traffic site, although CECache fixed performance issues I had with a Dreamhost hosted site.

As everyone else here seems to be saying Engine Hosting is top notch. They are my typical “go to” solution for EE sites.

I’ve also used custom built Rackspace Cloud servers for hosting as well. These have been rock solid, but it’s a solution that requires quite a bit more server knowledge, setup and maintenance. I’d say it’s a solution (a REALLY solid solution) only if you’re willing to take on the additional role of server admin.

So the easy solution is still probably Engine Hosting.