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My company is getting ready to send out an RFP for the moving/hosting of our enterprise level website - we will require web and email hosting services. Other than Engine Hosting are there recommendations for rock solid hosts that are optimized for Expression Engine, have 24/7 real people phone support, don’t use Urchin for statistics and have an uptime policy of at least % 99.99

How bought Rackspace?
Sorry, just kidding 😉

At the “enterprise” level you should consider a couple of things…

1. Enterprises almost always use a specific web analytics package separate from hosting. Enterprise level stats packages typically start in the $1000-$3000 per month and scales significantly from there. Yes, that’s per month just for the stats package. Take, for example, Omniture. If that’s not your budget, you’re really not looking for enterprise grade hosting either. I’m not suggesting that you don’t need a super-powerful host, I’m just saying that’s what “enterprise” implies.

2. 99.99% uptime is just a marketing ploy. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t do research to make sure the host is as reliable as possible, but that percentage figure is just tossed as a marketing hook and typically has almost zero real-world meaning except maybe you’ll get a few bucks back on your hosting for the month. Check out Joel On Software’s The Five Whys.

Salandra…maybe you could define “enterprise” for us. Enterprise to me is Fortune 500 and above and in my experience, they have the staff to manage that themselves.

Just as a side note, EngineHosting is very capable at the enterprise level as well. Not all Fortune 500 companies host every project internally.

But yes, PXLated is exactly right. What kind of traffic and bandwidth are you talking about?

Didn’t mean to imply EH couldn’t handle enterprise…Let’s face it, Nevin has dealt with and been a top server dog for the #1 health complex in the country…Mayo

Rather than the term “Enterprise”, “SMB” would be a better choice.

To be more specific we are looking for a host that can provide reliable uptime.

Bandwidth usage is not that high, about 30-50 GB a month outgoing, though this will more than likely grow.

Storage space is again relatively small, about 50GB (again this will grow over time)

The biggest issue we have had with our current provider is the frequency of network outages.

I have actually looked into Rackspace, and they are on my current shortlist, as is EngineHosting.

The statistics tracking can be as simple a just counting page/file hits, IP, and referrer.  The big issue is being able to export that data into a DB2 database for internal analysis.

P.S. If anyone is wondering I’m the Network Admin at the company Salandra is referring to.

Web Hosting Talk is the place to go for hosting-related discussion (though the suggestions here are certainly good too of course). Have a search around there and you might dig up some more info (eg). If you’re the network admin then other things to consider are how ‘managed’ do you want the hosting, and what you need by way of control panel, if anything. Eg I’m not sure if this is still the case, but Engine Hosting required you to email support to get a new database or email address set up, which I guess is/was the trade off for super lean and mean hosting.

Another thing to keep in mind is that while most providers use bandwidth and storage as the relevant specs for their hosting packages, more often than not you’ll run into CPU limitations *well* before you hit bandwidth usage limits, so it’s a good idea to know how hard you’ll be pushing the machine in terms of cpu/DB load etc.