Thread

@bramme
i have ordered a justforfun account at webhoster.ag and maaaaan its damned fast and the mon.itor.us was just a smooth line for now. 25Gigs for 2,99 EUR only, they go php5 and performance, wow. my 200eur 1and1 dedicated server is not faster, but its dedicated to me 😉

webhoster.ag also hands out a free testaccount.

another cheap thing with european server base is goneo.de - they do not have too good recommendations, i have not any trouble forabout 2 years there, runs absolutely fast and solid, never had a downtime. nice admin panel, own dns records can point to anywhere.

hosteurope.de and domainfactory.de and their cheaper product domaingo.de are always rock solid recommendations.

dreamhost seems to have some hard downtimes - many nice features, but uptime rulez!

if you are from belgium, do not host at oversea companies (google).

I have used Bluehost, 1and1, and dreamhost and I like 1and1.com the best. My 1and1 server has 300 sites on it yet it is very fast. My Dreamhost server only has like 18 but it is 2x or 3x slower.

Dreamhost Benchmarks for PHP5

This is only “Shared Hosting” though. I only have to deal with 1-3 million page-views a year.

I’m glad you mentioned 1and1 xeoncross…

I have had a dedicated server with them for over 18 months now and it’s been great. The only problems I have had have been my own making but the control you have over the server with the serial interface, re-imageing and so on make things easy to fix when you mess up.

I’ve heard many tales of woe about 1and1 but they all seem support related. If you can manage your server by yourself, they’re hard to beat in my opinion. That said, I’m playing around with the ‘cloud’ concept at the moment and thinking of moving away from dedicated hosting entirely once I’m up to speed.

I’ve heard many tales of woe about 1and1 but they all seem support related.

Yep, I have heard a lot of complaints from them - but I have used them for years and other than a weird FTP problem I have at home (but not from work) their servers seem to be the fastest.

It is kind of like walmart, 1and1 is the largest hosting company in the world. While they may not have some custom setup you want - they are well equipped to serve the majority of the people.

try hostgator. been with them for 2 years and haven’t really got any major problem with them. I also use their reseller hosting.

Despite ALL of the whining, bitching, and moaning I have read about 1and1, they are the best web host I’ve ever been on.

The company that I work for relies very heavily on e-mails, and we bounced from MediaTemple (GS), to Atlantic.net, to HostGator, and finally to 1and1. 

Every company, except 1and1, had numerous e-mail problems.  We called or opened up support tickets to MediaTemple on a daily basis, Atlantic.net had a 50mb limit on e-mail inboxes (yes, 50mb…lame), HostGator constantly had e-mail problems where it would take 12 hours for an e-mail to come through…

Finally, I said I was sick of switching hosts and gave 1and1 a shot, even though I had my doubts about them being able to handle our incoming/outgoing e-mail.

Since switching to 1and1, we’ve gone down probably once…maybe twice. I called support and got a guy named “Chuck” from India…but he told me what the problem was and when it’d be fixed. That’s all I needed to know.

So, for me, It’s 1and1.  I did have a dedicated host set up on RealWebHost for other purposes, and their support has been superb!

they are the best web host I’ve ever been on.

The company I stated out with was on Network solutions (which is the worst host on the planet) and then we switched over to 1and1 - then we got greedy and moved to google apps so we could have 7GB gmail accounts. 😉

From what I have seen though - it is the luck of the draw with web hosts. Each server is different and you might be on a cheap hunk from the 90’s or a new Intel C2Q. You might have 18 people on your server - or you might have 1000.

They really need to standardize their servers so that people don’t have these problems.

we use 1and managed dedicated servers for more than 4 years and its tremendous cpu-power and uptime is a substantial part of our success in some ecommerce projects.

unfortunately, the do not have php5 as apache-module but as cgi - and the mysql 4.0 (!) does not support subqueries, they deactivated mod_proxy some months ago which did some handy tricks for me.

I used to have a reseller account at HostDime.com, moved to a VPS, and then moved to a dedicated server.

All have been extremely unreliable. The VPS kept falling over constantly because they couldn’t configure the FireWall properly, and one of the best excuses I’ve ever heard for why a site stopped working was because ‘The C Compiler is broken, so we need to recompile it’. I’m not really sure how they’d do that without a C compiler!

I’ve just done lots of research on various hosting companies, and hands down, I would now recommend LiquidWeb.com to anyone.

The machines are fast and their support is second to none. I’m seeing averages of 5 minute response times to tickets, regardless of the time of night or day.

I’m currently paying $90 a month for their top-end VPS plan, and so far, I’m loving it!

They’ve installed everything I’ve asked (pdo_MySQL, PHP 5.2.6, svn) in a matter of minutes, and continue to astound me with their level of support!

Go check them out!

I’m considering switching to slicehost next year, when my shared hosting plan ends. However, I’ve got minimal experience with Linux and none whatsoever with server management (except for installing WAMP on my local machine). Do any of you know any ebooks/sites/manuals I could read to catch up on this, so that when I get a VPS, I’ll actually know what to do.

Thanks in advance!

Get yourself Sun Virtual box on your local pc and install a linux distro of your choice, and then play with it through ssh. Thats how I learnt.

I’ve got VMWare Workstation running with Ubuntu on it. But what’s that ssh thing you’re talking about? See, I’m that much of a noob, but I’d love to learn more!

I’ve got VMWare Workstation running with Ubuntu on it. But what’s that ssh thing you’re talking about? See, I’m that much of a noob, but I’d love to learn more!

Can you access a the virtual machine from out side it, eg on the host machine calling it’s ip from a web browser?

If you can you will need an ssh client to be able to access the linux commands from the host pc. The host pc will then act a s the client to the SSH connection with the virtual being the server(remote vps on slice host.). you can then start using ssh commands to control the virtual machine remotely as you would at slice host. search google for set commands and what you would like to do.

I’ve got absolutely no idea if that’s possible… I’d better turn my acronym against myself. JFGI

SSH stands for Secure Shell.  It is a protocol (HTTP is an example of another protocol) that allows for data to be exchanged between two computers over a secure channel.  If you are hosted on a remote server, you will most likely need to administer it using SSH.  There are control panels, e.g. Plesk, that ease administration, but if you are running your own server, you will most likely need more fine grained control than what these software packages offer.  The servers at Slicehost are bare bones Linux installs, and they don’t offer licenses for any control panel software, so you really need to have some understanding of how to administer a Unix system to get things working.  Based on what Linux distro you are using, installing packages like PHP are made easy through package tools like Yum or Aptitude.  However, the installs will be default and you will need a thorough understanding of how to configure these packages if you want to run an efficient and secure server.  The Slicehost community is helpful and has a bunch of articles set up to get you started from scratch.  For someone like you, these will help you get started with Unix.  That being said, if all you have ever done is installed WAMP and have never explored Apache, MySQL, or PHP under the hood, than I don’t think Slicehost or really any dedicated server is right for you at the moment.

FYI, if you are on a Mac, you are already running Unix and can play in the terminal.  If you are on Windows, you should download CYGWIN.  Either way, I suggest you install a Linux variant on your machine and use it to play around with the command line.  If you kill it, who cares.  Just wipe it and install again.