Considering a Hosting Company Move
Posted October 31st, 2006 @ 09:54am by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm considering switching hosting companies. Interland's pricing - I have two VPS Root accounts - pales in comparison to, say, mediatemple's (dv) (("Dedicated Virtual")) hosting plans. I know Judi is happy with mediatemple (I feel odd not capitalizing the "m" and the "t"), and their (dv) plans (see above.
I'm looking to move for a few reasons:
- To save money. At $70 apiece, I'm spending $140/month to host what amounts to a few sites for me and my friends. I'd move The Sand Trap over as a test, then slowly add other sites where possible.
- HostPro became Interland ((Well, they were bought by Interland, anyway.)) and things were fine. But now Interland has become web.com and the focus seems to have shifted. No longer do they offer any plans "above" mine. That's not a good sign.
- I think the convenience of having everything running on one server - with room to spare and easy upgrades.
I suppose, worst case, I can sign up for an account for a few months and then drop them if they don't meet my needs.
Update: I have an account set up. Now it's a matter of figuring out how the hell "Plesk" works and what I can do to begin moving my sites over. DNS propagation for "barzeski.com" has begun - if you see orange text, that's on the new server.
Donate Life
Posted 01 Nov 2006 at 9:21am #
Have you considered Ev1?
I've used them for years and haven't had any real problems. I have two of their boxes: one for personal (friends, family, PTO, etc.) use and another for a business. Both run Red Hat Linux.
Their current cheapest *dedicated* server starts at $69 per month. It comes with a low end Intel box, whichever *nix you want and 750 GB of monthly bandwidth.
http://ev1servers.com/Dedicated/RTG/servers/valuextreme.aspx
It's worth a look.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 10:11am #
The main problem I have with mediatemple is that their "49.95 per month" plan is actually $89.95/month unless you pre-pay for two years of service.
With Interland, I was put on the two-year rate but paid monthly. If I left before those two years were up, the rate was pro-rated and I was billed the difference (I've been there for 5+ and 2+ years with my two accounts, so I'm "in the clear" now).
I'm a tad put off by the massive price cuts they advertise. I'll call and see if I can't work something out with them.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 11:17am #
Well, I'm not an expert, but I've been happy with Dreamhost for the last two years. I host my company web site there, and for no extra charge, host separate domains for my wife's blog and my church's site. It includes the standards, and actually makes many standard LAMP based software very easy to use (such as WordPress, phpBB and Joomia), I've found their tech support friendly and knowledgable and quick to respond, and their web interface for managing the sites fairly good. With the setup I've got, I am able to host up to something like 16 domains without paying extra. Been using them for about two years and I'm pretty happy with their service.
Chuck
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 11:39am #
[quote comment="20178"]Well, I'm not an expert, but I've been happy with Dreamhost for the last two years.[/quote]
Chuck, Dreamhost has really fallen from grace lately in the minds of many. One of those minds is mine. I'm glad you're happy, but I think your experience is more the exception than the rule lately.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 12:26pm #
I'm also a Dreamhost customer, and they had major, major problems a couple of months ago. Since they've fixed those and they moved my sites to a newer, lower-load server, things have been really good. They have insane disk quotas and bandwidth.
If you're already spending $140/month, why not look into a dedicated machine somewhere. You could probably stay in the same range with a company like 1and1 (www.1and1.com) or Westhost (http://dedicated.westhost.com/), and you'd have total control over things and you could consolidate everything into 1 server account. 1and1 dedicated machines start at $99/month.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 12:54pm #
Mike, I'm glad that Dreamhost has gotten their issues under control. This time. How do you know that it won't happen again, and if/when it does, who will you speak to get a straight answer about what's going on and when you can expect your site(s) to be working again? It's easy to give oodles of disk space and more bandwidth than a hundred sites will ever need, much harder to change your service and support model so you confidently stand behind every KB you dish out. Posting witty "mea culpea" entries on a blog doesn't cut it for me. That's why I'm no longer a Dreamhost customer.
That said, I've been happy with mediatemple. I was happy with Dreamhost in the beginning, too. However, I should point out that I know absolutely nothing about the dedicated virtual setups. I use their shared hosting (now grid-server) plan.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 1:26pm #
I host things across two boxes - one a real physical box at ServerPronto, cost $30/month, gives me a whole box all to myself. Service is great, they'll install plenty of operating systems. The box isn't the most powerful (Athlon XP 2000+ or something similar, 256MB of ram, 40GB hard drive), doesn't come with the most bandwidth ("only" 200GB/month), but it's cheap. They also have $69, $99 and even more if you're so inclined.
My other stuff is in a xen partition on a rented box a few friends and I share, about a third of the price of SP box, but then I don't get anywhere near the raw CPU time there.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 3:02pm #
I have been very happy with DreamHost, but don't have enough traffic to really know what would make a bad host.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 3:13pm #
Check out Joyent's $125 Solaris Container. Also check out #unixshell.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 4:44pm #
Been quite happy with Dreamhost, too. I've been with them for about a month or two now, and every time I've had an issue with them, I filed a support request through the panel. They've responded within 24 hours (most times within an hour or two).
I see a lot of people whining about things being down on their blog, but they didn't file support requests, so nobody gets back to them (the DH blog is not a support forum). I think they get a bad rep because most of the people who host with them can't seem to follow directions.
Heck, they even helped me setup something code-specific on the site. I could never ask another host for that kind of help. That's a big thing to me.
Otherwise, I'm also using Made2Own and they're pretty good. Downtime is kept to a minimum, and the prices are excellent for what they offer. I only host my blog there, and am quite happy thus far. I may drop Made2Own at some point in the future and move it to my DH account, though, so save some money.
Have heard pretty good things about Interland, a non-technie friend went with them and they seemed happy. I see a lot of the big bloggers using mediatemple, but I found them to be too pricey (although I bet it's worth the money).
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 4:45pm #
I appreciate the advice, but I'm not looking for suggestions on who to use. I'm just documenting my thought process.
Your advice may help others, so I'm leaving the comments here and you should feel free to continue posting comments. Just please know that I've chosen mediatemple and am going to give them a workout to see if I can do what I'd like to do with them.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 5:56pm #
I'm currently hosting with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ quite cheaply (about $20 / 8 months so far, for 5 sites ($20 for the lot that is, not $20 each)) but I'm looking to move to http://computechhosting.com/ when my next payday comes through.
Posted 31 Oct 2006 at 6:38pm #
How about any Mac based hosts?
Posted 01 Nov 2006 at 2:51am #
A word about Dreamhost... I use Dreamhost services since three years and I'm very happy with them. They are very communicative about the problems, that's pretty unusual. And very responsive too! Nobody's perfect, but at least with Dreamhost, you know what's going on.
I had bad experiences before with four providers, in Switzerland, in France and in the US. Offline sites, no reason given, server migration and access rights completly messed out, resetted password without a word, and many more.
Posted 14 Nov 2006 at 5:00pm #
I used to be with ConnecTech.Net (later bought by Interland), ConnecTech.Net was great, but once it was purchased by Interland, the service become worse.
Then, I left them.
Now, I am with The Planet for one dedicated server and DreamHost for a cheap shared hosting. Both are good.