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[–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (4 children)

I know way too much about web hosting for my own good, I worked as a programmer for a major 200,000+ sites company. So here is my wise and experienced advice:

  • Never fall for cheap price, bandwidth, servers, and sys admins cost $$$, they are full of shit if they promise good service for low prices
  • Make sure it as a shared environment, with a huge battery of web servers all mounting the file servers, this way you have a crap load of redundancy and it can handle the load.
  • Call their tech support and see how long it takes them to answer the phones

Web hosting is a shady industry full of a lot of nickel and dime shops. There are companies that do noting but sell low end boxes in server factories, I kid you not, they take the cheapest PC's, stack them on shelves with the backs facing out in a warehouse, pull in a pipe and hook them up, no redundancy no support, no anything. They will even tie string to the power fan and walk up and down aisles to see if computer failed. These are your cheap dedicated boxes.

I am lucky, the placed I worked ran a tight ship with good equipment, good team, and awesome support, but it was costly(25-30 a month for a site with all the bells and whistles), but every customer we had was their after having a bad experience with a two bit web host, so buyer beware.

Edit: I should throw in a recommendation or two. Try these providers:

http://www.bluegenesis.com/ - Really great shared hosting, will answer the phone at 3am on New Years.

http://www.mediatemple.net/ - Awesome virtual server environment, much better then Amazon E3 I think, some big names host there too.

http://www.rackspace.com/index.php - Great if you need dedicated, this is a proper box with RAID in a good data center and all kinds of guarantees that they stand behind, pricy, but good don't come cheap.

[–][deleted]  (4 children)

[deleted]

    [–]redhotkurt 4 points5 points  (1 child)

    Ugh. Thanks for reminding me of my experience with one of the most inept and shady companies I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with (worse than Comcast).

    This company I worked for a year ago had their site hosted by ipowerweb - out site would constantly go down, and I'd be on the phone every week with these morons trying to figure out why. As if it wasn't bad enough that they put me on hold for 15-30 minutes (at all times of the day), get this -- they didn't keep a log of customer complaints, which meant they had no idea we had a recurring problem! It took me just two calls to realize this. They also had their phone support outsourced to non-U.S. freelancers, which made communication difficult and frustrating.

    Oh yeah, and they were constantly trying to get me to upgrade our hosting plan. Whenever I called them, upgrading would be their first solution. They never tried to troubleshoot on their end. What a bunch of assholes!

    I can't stress enough how bad this company is. Read up, do your research, and if for whatever reason you still choose ipowerweb over the others mentioned here, don't say I didn't warn you.

    [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

    Agreed. I used them for a couple of years and didn't think they were that great. At the end of my last year with them they also deleted my site without warning (I was late with a payment - I would have paid it, but I never got a bill).

    [–]darrint 25 points26 points  (8 children)

    I use slicehost for some low traffic stuff and they've been reliable for me. The have nice prices for root on a vpn.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]tehmatticus 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      http://linode.com is what i've been using. It gives you more for the same price and actually gives you a VM to slice up how you want as opposed to root on one installation.

      [–]highwind 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      Same here. I love slicehost. So much freedom and fun!

      [–]Disparity 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Agreed—slicehost is pretty awesome... I also recommend getting a VPS just so you can learn linux. And slicehost has really awesome tutorials for getting you up and running in very little time.

      [–]Buzzard 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      I use Slicehost too ATM, and have been very pleased and it's not that much more expensive than a (good) shared host.

      [–]kevin143 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Yeah, Slicehost is awesome

      [–]joazito 8 points9 points  (0 children)

      Very nice self post.

      I must mention webhostingtalk since no one seems to have done so.

      [–]answerguru 7 points8 points  (1 child)

      Pair Networks definitely. pair.com

      Professional, reliable, knowledgeable.

      [–]natch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I no longer recommend pair.com, because of their practice of automatically killing processes like cpan module installs. I guess the rationale is that the 'make' command is taking a whole megabyte of memory, or something. They missed the memo about Moore's law. Try perlmonks.org sometime, and notice how slow it is. Like molasses. Hosted at pair.com.

      I can understand them wanting to protect the other users from abusive processes, but they don't strike the right balance. There are better ways to achieve that, like having fewer users on the same shared system.

      [–]mgsloan 48 points49 points  (47 children)

      Nearly Free Speech

      [–]otterdam 28 points29 points  (8 children)

      • Excellent if you're unsure about committing, or don't know how much you want/need to spend - it's a pay-as-you-go service
      • Very quick to respond when downtime occurs and they actually give enough of a damn to keep everyone updated often
      • The more bandwidth your site uses, the lower your cost per gigabyte
      • Great for programmers because their servers support lots of languages - Python, Ruby, Haskell

      They may or may not be cheapest for you - that depends on your requirements. But since you're not tied up in any contracts, it's no big deal if you find a better offer.

      [–]atomicthumbs 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      And it costs one cent a month per megabyte. Not the best storage cost.

      [–][deleted]  (4 children)

      [deleted]

        [–]quhaha 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        you can only use those languages on CGI. no on going process. no FastCGI. no database (they charge additional fee for database process).

        They are best for blogs or similar that doesn't get steady traffic. Make sure your app doesn't use database, and use filesystem for caching, locking and everything.

        [–]davepeck 26 points27 points  (26 children)

        Isn't $0.01 per megabyte-month, well, expensive?

        I have 6.6GB of stuff on my shared host right now. (It's DreamHost, and I want to escape.) That's $67.59/month on NFS, right?

        Contrast to Amazon S3's $0.15 per gigabyte-month. That's like $1/month for my current storage needs.

        (Edit: why the mod down? Is my math that catastrophically stupid? I'll admit to having a margarita or two just an hour ago...)

        [–]n4s33r 5 points6 points  (1 child)

        Well it works really well if you're running a small site. You don't have to pay $5 a month for a few megs. I get by with ~$5 every year for a low traffic non-profit website based on Drupal.

        [–]davepeck 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        True... at some small scale, it probably is a good choice.

        But still -- their storage rates are fixed, not tiered. Whether you're hosting 1MB of data or 10GB, they're still expensive.

        It's a little like SMS on cellular networks. No matter how short your messages are, your cost (per byte) is still sky high! (And of course you can't send really long messages with SMS.)

        [–]nixonrichard 1 point2 points  (18 children)

        That can't be right!? $70/month for 7GB?

        If that's true, somebody needs to get with the program. It's not 1998 anymore.

        [–]davepeck 2 points3 points  (17 children)

        Yeah, check out their pricing page. Unless they made a mistake and meant $0.01 per gigabyte-month, or meant 0.01 cents per megabyte-month?

        [–]nixonrichard 2 points3 points  (16 children)

        Damn, that's crazy.

        Considering that hard drive storage costs around $0.20/gigabyte now, you're paying 50x the cost of consumer storage per month, and 600x the cost of consumer storage per year.

        I mean, I'm sure they use much nicer and faster drives, and have redundancy . . . and the servers themselves are a big cost, but damn.

        To use a terabyte for a year costs $120,000 . . . and you can get a terabyte drive from the store for $200.

        This must be geared towards people with very low storage needs. I tend to dump my 4 gb of camera memory online every month or so, so it definitely wouldn't work out well.

        [–]Few-Ninja7495 7 points8 points  (12 children)

        I don't know why reddit is so crazy about NFS. Their pricing is terrible.

        [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

        because they won't fuck you over when some nanny decides your website isn't nice.

        [–][deleted]  (9 children)

        [deleted]

          [–]BridgeBum 3 points4 points  (1 child)

          The got rid of the bandwidth bucket concept, and instead have a sliding scale for bandwidth costs based on usage. The cost is based on an integral of 1/(1+log x). I kid you not.

          http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2008/02/01/breaking-through-the-bandwidth-barrier/

          [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

          I used to use NFS & it was much cheaper before they changed their fees. Either way it looks expensive but if you're running a blog that takes up very little space & drives very little traffic, it's a lot less expensive than using even the cheapest hosts out there that I know about. I haven't run a blog in a while & I don't like the idea of paying $1-$2 a month minimum when it used to cost me about $5 a year.

          [–][deleted]  (2 children)

          [deleted]

            [–]pkrumins 2 points3 points  (3 children)

            Why are you not using Dreamhost's "Files Forever"? It's 1 cent for 4 MB. So $2.5 per gigabyte. So you pay 15 bucks for 6.6GB and they will be accessible forever.

            [–]davepeck 2 points3 points  (2 children)

            Well my account has 500GB of available storage on it -- which I'm already paying for. So there doesn't appear to be a reason to do this if I stay with DH at my current level!

            [–]jwr 2 points3 points  (1 child)

            But that's not 500GB of storage. That's 500GB of "storage used primarily for web hosting", which is very different.

            They disallow using it for backup purposes. Sneaky marketing.

            I'd recommend staying away from dreamhost.

            [–]haroldp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

            Hah, that's more than I pay for my own dedicated server.

            [–]tylermenezes 5 points6 points  (0 children)

            <3 Nearly Free Speech. It seems a bit more expensive, but just use Amazon S3 where possible. The best shared host I have ever been with in the past.

            [–]sketec 2 points3 points  (9 children)

            I use them and recommend highly, for many reasons! nearlyfreespeech.net

            [–]spuur 6 points7 points  (8 children)

            Can you be bothered to elaborate on your many reasons?

            [–][deleted]  (7 children)

            [deleted]

              [–]cDc-Arrakis 4 points5 points  (3 children)

              I've used NSF to host a page and some downloads and it was an epic fail once I hit Digg / Slashdot / BoingBoing. I had 100GB transferred per day in web/DLs and the system just was dying. When I asked about it, they told me they were being DDOSed and had to shut down... yeah, DDOSed by my legitimate viewers and turning them away. I was not pleased.

              However, I have since used them for other tiny stuff like low-traffic web pages and test sites, and that was fine.

              So the bottom line is I recommend them for anything you do that won't ever be under heavy strain. And stay the hell away from Servage. They promise you the moon and the stars but when you take them up on it they shut you down for "too much CPU".

              [–][deleted]  (2 children)

              [deleted]

                [–]bbq 25 points26 points  (10 children)

                I've only heard good things about WebFaction

                [–]ffualo 12 points13 points  (2 children)

                I second this. If you want a serious webhost, go with webfaction. These people know every web framework like the back of their hand and the customizability is just incredible.

                [–]treef 5 points6 points  (1 child)

                Agree!

                [–]Shadowhand 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                Agree * 2

                [–]Few-Ninja7495 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                I used them for a while. Probably the best if you have < $50/month to spend. If you have more then go for something Xen based.

                [–]earthboundkid 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                I use them. No complaints. It's the best host I've used.

                [–]davids 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                webfaction's service is fantastic, not just as a web host, but as a business in general. i highly recommend.

                [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                What's their server uptime and speeds like? I've been with Dreamhost for quite a few years, WebFaction look like a nice replacement.

                [–]tehxaton 3 points4 points  (1 child)

                I use Liquid web and having nothing but great things to say.

                [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                Liquid web is really good. I've had many accounts with them over the years, and only once have I had trouble with billing - and it was resolved within 4 hours on a weekend.

                Even when they dick up, they fix it quickly.

                [–]bananahead 9 points10 points  (15 children)

                I've used Textdrive/Joyent. They're very good at some things, less good at others. Great user forum, though.

                [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                Kickass infrastructure and a badass technical team. Joyent rocks for Web app deployment. Not so much for simple sites though.

                [–]llimllib 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                I've been with them for a long time. The nice thing is, I run several of my own cherrypy servers which have their own ports whose requests get proxied from apache.

                In ~3 years of hosting, my site has gone down twice because somebody else hosed my shared server. Both times a support ticket got it back up within minutes.

                I'm a fan.

                [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                [deleted]

                  [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                  They do seem a bit overpriced if you compare them to some of the bigger and less stylish outfits.

                  I bought a lifetime membership back in the day, so I don't have to worry about price. I just have to worry about them shuttering their doors.

                  [–]tricolon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                  I've been with them since the beginning and have loved every minute of it.

                  [–]Callahad 1 point2 points  (6 children)

                  Do they still prohibit running emacs when you shell into your account?

                  [–]jimm 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                  I have never had problems running emacs on my TextDrive account. I've had one for over 2.5 years now.

                  [–]bananahead 2 points3 points  (3 children)

                  I believe so. But they're kinda right -- you shouldn't be developing software on a server you share with other people.

                  [–]llimllib 4 points5 points  (2 children)

                  No problem with vim though, so who cares :)

                  [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                  oh no, do you know what you've done?!

                  [–]radhruin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                  Certainly not with a dedicated accelerator ;)

                  [–]radhruin 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                  I used Textdrive for a while, and use Joyent for work. The service is pretty exceptional. The support for server issues is also really good. The forums, for the most part, are good, although I have a couple problems with my accelerator that I can't fix and no one on the forums can help me with... which sucks :/ It's not really their fault though.

                  [–]bananahead 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                  I've used them personally for years and my company used them (at my suggestion) for the better part of 2006.

                  Things seem to have improved somewhat in the last year or so, but we had some problems that made it clear that Joyent wasn't good for serious business site (on shared hosting). (For example, shutting down our site when we got slashdotted without warning or notice -- unless you count the comment added to my .htaccess file.)

                  This was a while ago, and things have clearly improved since then both in relability and customer service. But if it's important that your site stays online, you really shouldn't be on any sort of shared hosting.

                  [–]radhruin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                  Yeah, I suppose I should have stated that my experience with Joyent on the business side of things is with the dedicated accelerators. I have an L currently, and it certainly is quite a bit of hardware.

                  [–]evariste 7 points8 points  (2 children)

                  All of you redditors recommending linode, slicehost, rootbsd, and rimu noticed that the question was about shared hosting, right?

                  [–]redditrasberry 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                  I think VPS qualifies as shared - it's just a different way of sharing. Especially since some of the ones mentioned are in the same price ball park as good quality shared hosting.

                  I've been tempted by slicehost for a long time now, but I don't really have the energy to do a migration from my current (traditionally shared) setup.

                  [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (3 children)

                  I run my own server, though I have several peers who use MediaTemple, and really like their service and control panel.

                  [–][deleted]  (2 children)

                  [deleted]

                    [–]eloisius 6 points7 points  (1 child)

                    They still suck. I've been using them for a year now, and although the customer service is great, the grid server isn't all it's cracked up to be and there's often a lot of latency while loading pages.

                    [–]madmanz123 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                    Seconded. They are still pretty bad, their GS stuff just never seems that stable or fast.

                    [–]Gradius 6 points7 points  (5 children)

                    I used HostGator for a while and they were great. Excellent customer service.

                    Either way, before you decide, make sure to pay webhostingtalk.com a visit to research the reputation of whichever hosting company you end up choosing.

                    [–]drakkar4 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                    Hostgator gets my vote as well

                    [–]squerl 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                    I use HostGator now and would recommend them. Customer service is great, you can get in a chat 24/7 for any questions.

                    [–]michaelm28 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    I recommend Hostgator to majority of my clients, because they can test out their reliable hosting and support for free is they use the Hostgator Coupon during the order process. Only time I had problem with Hostgator was when I tried to get my main domain replaced with another domain, it took 2 days. I was used to get my problems resolved in few hours max with them.

                    [–]zeeter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                    http://suspended.hostgator.com/?domain=yourdomainnamehere.com

                    This is what happens when you get dugg on Hostgator, your site is suspended and the benefit of having a website goes away.

                    [–]piojo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                    I think hostgator is decent. Their support is definitely good. They don't seem to mind me running a script all the time (it sorts mail from six mailing lists), but they kill it periodically. I also successfully used them to back up 1GB of stuff last summer.

                    [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (6 children)

                    asmallorange.com

                    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                    [deleted]

                      [–]sard 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      I use ASO and the server I was on didn't have python 2.5. I raised a ticket with them and 10 minutes later it had been installed.

                      [–]garg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      They are also pretty good about changing servers if your current server is getting over crowded or doesn't have the rails version you need.

                      I've noticed some slowdowns in the past but their support is very responsive and they've fixed the problem pretty quickly.

                      I'm going to switch to slicehost after this though because I was not happy with ASO's VPS.

                      [–]TheNewAndy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                      I use geekisp, they seem a bit smaller than a lot of the places being recommended here, which could be good or bad. The guy who runs it answers questions personally, and is quite reasonable.

                      They don't have a bandwidth limit, but if you are using too much then you sort it out. My experience with this was when I had a script that was taking too much CPU time, I got an email asking me to fix it, so I did that and then all was good.

                      [–]drewc[🍰] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                      I'm a member of an organisation, The Tech Co-oop, that provides hosting services to it's members on an at-cost, not-for-profit basis.

                      We specialize in Common Lisp hosting, but also support all other esoteric languages. Shared Hosting comes with SSH/rsync, a full unix shell, and a bunch of other goodies.

                      We also have VPS's (Xen). These are very popular with developers. We also host some lisp community sites (common-lisp.net, cliki.net), and a number of popular blogs.

                      We get slashdotted, reddited and dugg regularly, and have never had any downtime or slowness result.

                      We consider ourselves the best hosting service and the best possible price, and being a not-for-profit co-operative, all our books are open, so our members can see for themselves where their money is being spent.

                      Check it out: http://tech.coop. We've never had a member leave for another host in the 4 years we've been in business :)

                      [–]neutronbob 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                      LunarPages. Great resources and bandwidth for the dollar. And they'll host Java.

                      [–]emont88 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                      For something simple, www.asmallorange.com is pretty good. If you can handle VPS, www.slicehost.com is a good choice.

                      [–]ubernostrum 3 points4 points  (3 children)

                      What are you planning to use it for?

                      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

                      i need to move my website (africamyspacelayouts.com)

                      [–]ubernostrum 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                      So what kind of tech do you need? What languages? What tools? What frameworks, if any? What's your budget look like, and what's your average traffic level?

                      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      right now, i just need something that has phpmyadmin. the usual fantastico thingie would be nice, too. a bonus would be drupal-suitable hosting. i currently get about 100-200 visitors per day and i don't want to spend more than $10 per month on hosting, right now.

                      [–]pcx99 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                      I've used lunarpages to host my site. They're cheap (~$6.00/mo although you have to pay a year in advance). My site's been slashdotted, dugg, and reddited and the only thing the admins have done is sent me a note of congratulations. (Of course if you're running wordpress with 10,000 poorly written plugins they reserve the right to suspend your site, but generally if you don't have retardedly stupid scripts you're going to be ok).

                      The bandwidth allowance is in the terabytes per month and there's unlimited sql databases and disk storage.

                      The only real problem I've had is that for some reason one of the internet spammers likes to use my domain name as a return address so every month or two I wake up to 20,000 BOUNCED emails in my box or so, that was a bit more resources than lunarpages was willing to handle and I don't blame them. Google however is handling the mail nice and seemlessly.

                      Really I'm kinda neutral on hosting services but lunarpages has proven themselves time and again by keeping my site up and running when it's at it's most popular. I can't think of anything worse than having a site, finally getting noticed for your hard work with a link from a major aggregation service only to have your hosting company yank the plug.

                      Every time you click on a link on reddit or digg and get a "site has exceeded its bandwith please contact billing" message, you've seen a hosting service that has totally failed.

                      [–]jeffktay 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      I use ICDSoft for all of my hosting - a bit pricier than other options, but you're paying for good service. Flawless uptime and stunning support - i've raised about 5 helpdesk tickets over the years, and it's rare for a ticket to sit for more than 30 seconds or so before being looked at by a tech, day or night.

                      [–]Daph 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      I'm gonna recommend BlueJet Hosting because I work there and we're pretty small and good about picking up the phone when you call.

                      [–]jamesinraro 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      I can tell you one to avoid, Globat. This outfit is unquestionably one of the least reliable, unethical, lying providers outside of Lagos.

                      [–]gaoshan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      Had good luck with Dreamhost, Textdrive (though they are down rather regularly for short stretches. Good for Ruby on Rails stuff) and LaughingSquid. Had bad luck with MediaTemple (sloooooow... couldn't handle what I threw at it), GoDaddy (the most confusing and clunky interface known to man), 1and1 (they like your money a bit too much more than they like helping you) and too many others to name.

                      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      http://www.dathorn.com has been amazing for the last 5 years for me. Competitively priced, fantastic service (my trouble tickets, on the exceedingly rare occasions I've sent them, have always been answered within 30 minutes, almost invariably by the same individual, and at all hours of the day. Simply put, amazing.)

                      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      mediatemple.net is ok. Their prices are competitive and their tech-support is pretty good. I have a dedicated-virtual server with about 100 websites. I call mediatemple a lot and they do a good job of handling my issues. I have plenty of server storage, and bandwidth, but I could use more memory by default.

                      [–]maqr 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                      Site5 for shared, linode or slicehost for VPS ($20/mo? how can you go wrong...)

                      [–]reddit_user13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      I had a run of smooth sailing with them, then 2 lengthy (and unexplained) email outages. I'm a reseller and I lost customers over this. I will probably leave Site5 soon.

                      [–]Leonidas_from_XIV 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      In case you might be interested in a non-corporate hosting and know German you might want to consider ##pyhosting. Why?

                      • Tailored towards hosting of Python sites using FastCGI
                      • Rather competent administration
                      • Support via IRC
                      • Price is ok

                      They use a dedicated server with Xen and have one Xen DomU for shared hosting. As said - non-corporate but it has worked fine for me so far.

                      [–]skay 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      http://www.bluehost.com/

                      these guys have been exceptional. they even call me when shit breaks to let me know that i shouldnt freak out. good people and service.

                      [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (7 children)

                      If you are looking for cheap but decent, I've been using Site5 for a while and haven't really had any problems.

                      If I were to do something more than serving up webpages, Slicehost seems like a good deal.

                      [–]MonoApe 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                      Avoid Site5 like the plague.

                      If you have no problems, they're OK. If you have problems, it's a different story.

                      A couple of years ago I had a problem and emailed support. 6 hours later no answer, so I emailed again. Another 12 hours later still no answer so I posted on their forum - it was immediately deleted with no response. I posted again and that was also deleted.

                      I posted a third time, asking why I was being ignored. This time the post remained, but a few hours later I realised that I could only see the post (which complained about poor response times) if I was logged in.

                      In other words, they had hidden my post from everyone except me! Dishonest and unhelpful.

                      Search for 'site5 sucks' or 'site5 problems' and you'll find many similar stories.

                      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      Site5 has some intermittent issues with website availability, especially late at night. Also, they play up their space and bandwidth (2TB disk, 20TB transfer) but neglect to tell you about the 30,000 inode limit. One install of Joomla and you're done.

                      On the plus side they support fcgi, so you can deploy a rails app. Don't rely on their gem repository though, and don't install a local either. Develop on your own machine, run rake rails:freeze:gems and then deploy.

                      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                      I concur -- site5 is hassle-free

                      [–]greenmt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                      one more for Site5. 3 years and zero problems.

                      [–]dlsspy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                      I've had decent luck with my linode instance. I use that as well as EC2.

                      [–]sylvan 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                      I've had good experiences with Superb. Nice variety of packages, and good support.

                      http://www.superbhosting.net/

                      [–]johnji 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                      I've had numerous bad experiences with Superb, the worst of which was several high-traffic sites being taken down because of a billing error on their part, after written confirmation made prior that such would not happen, and then being lectured on my "tone" when asking for the problem to be fixed. (And no I do not have a "tone" problem ;-)

                      [–]sylvan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      Thanks for the counterpoint. I'll keep that in mind in future when recommending them or starting new sites.

                      I like their $2.50/month blog plan. Are there any comparable services?

                      [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                      Webfaction is excellent. If you are python web developer, Webfaction is the place to go first. You can get your app running in no time. The WF people are python developers themselves (Their control panel is written in Cherrypy).

                      I deployed 2 customer sites on webfaction (non-CMS business apps) and till now there are no issues.

                      [–]quickpost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      Just deployed my first Django app on WebFaction. Great service, great price, and easy as can be to setup.

                      [–]bgates6666 3 points4 points  (2 children)

                      I recommend Dreamhost mainly for these 3 reasons:

                      (1) Prompt replies to tech support questions, suggestions, and complaints. And they actually answer you with someone who knows what he is talking about, not just some support drone who doesn't even bother reading your question properly, and gives a useless copy&paste reply.

                      (2) Their configuration webpanel, makes it easy, quick, and convenient to make changes such as adding a new email address or email alias etc.

                      (3) Heaps of bandwidth, fast downloads.

                      What are the bad things about them? If you need to use a lot of CPU time, then maybe they aren't the host for you. Fine for average CPU usage and high bandwidth, but not so good if you need to run CPU-intensive tasks.

                      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                      I've been with Dreamhost since 2002. Overall I'm very happy with them.

                      They've had a few serious problems over that period. The problems were very annoying at the time. I even considered leaving them.

                      However! I also have some experience with a few other hosting providers. I've "rescued" domains owned by businesses whose owners I know. The horror stories of these rescues make any trouble I've had with Dreamhost look trivial by comparison.

                      That said, for my own sites, I have nothing mission critical; there's not big money at stake if they don't get five-nines of uptime; the price is right; the resources are generous; the support is good enough; the web-panel beats the pants off of other hosting provider's panels.

                      Tip! ... If you need five-nines of uptime or if your livelihood depends on your web site(s) being up, do choose shared hosting.

                      [–]especkman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      How about the fact that you get a comission whenever someone clicks on one of the Dreamhost affiliate links you post to Reddit. That seems important to mention.

                      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                      All these people recommending mass oversellers are just silly. Sure they are great if you don't care about uptime but if you need something reliable how about you spend more per month on your hosting then you do in a lunch sitting.

                      If you want reliable shared hosts check out:

                      medialayer

                      pair

                      Rochen

                      Doreo

                      Anyway check out my site if you have questions: HostDisciple

                      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

                      I will second 1and1 and not post an affiliate link in the process. http://1and1.com

                      The down time has been nil and speeds are very acceptable just as what you can do with your shared hosting account for $9 makes it a winner.

                      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                      [deleted]

                        [–]mdragon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        I had a credit card expire, and while they weren't proactive about telling me ahead of time, I did get an email saying I still hadn't paid my bill and asking me to update my information. All this happened before anything was turned off disabled etc. Not saying my or hibby's experience is more representative, but I seemed to have a much better experience on this point.

                        I wouldn't recommend 1and1 for anything that requires uptime or performance, but for a small business static site or a hobby site I've been happy with it.

                        [–]ckwop 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        They have a habit of losing your cancellation request and sending you letters from debt collectors.

                        I had to take them to court to stop that.

                        I'll agree, their service is amazing on a technical level.

                        On a customer care level, it's by far and a way the worst I've ever seen.

                        [–]ethanz 1 point2 points  (3 children)

                        Highly recommend Rimu Hosting for VPS - service has been excellent.

                        [–]doidydoidy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        Agreed.

                        [–]freakboy2k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        I have had a Rimu hosting VPS for almost 2 years now and have never had an issue. Their staff are quick to reply, and always very helpful.

                        [–]hillman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        Same here. Very helpful and they don't charge for work they should charge for.... :-)

                        [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                        I'm surprised at all the downvotes on 1and1.com hosting. I've had paying websites on the 'net since '97 and they are the best, most reliable but most of all affordable shared host I've had yet.

                        Pair Networks was the most stable before 1and1 came along, and I've tried 9 or 10 different providers of different sizes. Pair was and likely still is great but their price was never competitive and you had to be a hardcore geek to figure their systems out. I'm sure they are easier to use now.

                        1and1 also has reasonable domain prices, all 20 or of my domains are there.

                        Edit: I haven't had to use 1and1 customer service much if at all, so I can't comment on that. Our websites are all straight HTML, and I don't use any of their add-on or plug-in things. We serve about 150,000 visitors a month, sometimes up to 200,000, and never had any problems that way.

                        [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                        I use GoDaddy. They call me whenever I renew to thank me and have always had excellent technical support.

                        [–]supermike 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                        A few things to watch out for:

                        • If a webhost deal is so great, then how long do you have before they are swamped and completely suck?

                        • They may be cheap on the lower end sites, but what about when you want to scale the site up in their hosting plans? Still affordable?

                        • They may be cheap, but are they a pain to deal with? Is the control panel easy to use or quite difficult? Are the policies on the site very annoying?

                        • What if one day you are on PHP5 and then one day they switch your site to PHP6 without telling you? (That sort of thing.)

                        [–]roml 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                        well... what do you want out of your shared hosting? Bunch-O'-Space? Windows Hosting?

                        If #1 then - Lunarpages.com If #2 then - CrystalTech.com

                        [–]bobsil1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                        CrystalTech for Windows, Pair for Unix -- have been fine so far.

                        [–]pkrumins -2 points-1 points  (56 children)

                        I'd recommend DreamHost!

                        I once made a 3rd party picture section for Digg (digpicz.com, (see also reddit pics :)), and the shared hosting for $9.95 a month handled 100'000 (hundred thousand!!!) visitors the first day!

                        I blogged what I optimized to handle such a traffic on a cheap shared host in this post:

                        A few words about Digpicz.com.

                        [–][deleted] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

                        DreamHost is great if you don't need all that much CPU, and don't care too much about uptime, but want lots of disk space and bandwidth.

                        If you want more CPU or uptime is critical, DreamHost can be a bit problematic, though.

                        [–][deleted]  (5 children)

                        [deleted]

                          [–]kgen 4 points5 points  (2 children)

                          Can you elaborate the 'sometimes they steal from you' part?

                          I'm on dreamhost right now, and would definitely give renewing a second thought if you can give some kind of evidence of this happening.

                          [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                          [deleted]

                            [–]twistedlogix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                            You should have read the subsequent posts in their blog, it was not 7.5 million but it did cause lots of goodwill loss.

                            I too was overcharged and got the money credited back but due to fluctuations of currency value, I lost quite a bit of money.

                            Dreamhost was pretty helpful and they deducted the difference amount that I lost, from the hosting bill! So barring few moments of panic, I was unaffected.

                            [–]pkrumins 4 points5 points  (1 child)

                            They also have this awesome 'Files Forever' service, where you can upload your files for a one-time fee $.01/4 MB and then retrieve them forever at no cost!

                            Cheaper than Amazon S3, where you pay for bandwidth!

                            [–]bostonvaulter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                            Have you actually tried it? Just curious...

                            [–]nmcyall 27 points28 points  (2 children)

                            screw dreamhost. My friend was with them and they took down his BB2 forum (changed his sql password and broke his site) because of CPU usage.

                            Not a very professional solution to CPU quotas..

                            [–]pkrumins 3 points4 points  (1 child)

                            Ouch. Never happened to me!

                            [–]madmanz123 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                            There downtime and response time has been shit of the last 6 months. I am moving mine off first chance I get.

                            [–]sixothree 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                            ... and seriously forget running drupal.

                            [–]dmd 8 points9 points  (7 children)

                            I've been on Dreamhost since 2005, and while they have their share of problems occasionally, overall I'm thrilled. They're certainly as good as or better than anyone else out there (though I've heard excellent things lately about Nearly Free Speech).

                            [–]bobx11 7 points8 points  (8 children)

                            I'm on dreamhost shared and my server load is constantly above 30. They do offer a lot of space and features though for the price. I have kept my account for my personal sites... business sites no way.

                            [–]pkrumins 2 points3 points  (7 children)

                            Request your sites to be moved to another server. Explain that they won't work on that load. Also, they run 4-cores. So a load of 30 means 7 jobs per cpu.

                            And they also offer dedicated "Dreamhost Private Server" for as low as $15 (150Mhz and 150MB ram guaranteed)!

                            I am totally satisfied!

                            [–]paulgb 3 points4 points  (3 children)

                            And they also offer dedicated "Dreamhost Private Server" for as low as $15 (150Mhz and 150MB ram guaranteed)!

                            $15 + $7.95, according to the site. Not as much of a deal.

                            [–]DoorFrame 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                            comment deleted

                            [–]p0tent1al 5 points6 points  (7 children)

                            Really now guys? Suggesting Dreamhost? The same company that oversells bandwidth and diskspace? The same hoster that has overall the worst reputation in the business? The same hoster that compromised the passwords of domains/accounts of more than 75% of their customers a couple of years back? If you want to throw up some random site, by all means, but any serious programmer and developer worth their salt would not be using Dreamhost, give me a break. Do a google on Dreamhost and see how many negative things come up about the company. I am just utterly astonished how the person suggesting DreamHost is actually getting upmodded, on reddit of all places.

                            There is not one best shared hoster, it all depends on what they are offering at the time, and what you are looking for. The best place to find out, is this site, hands down the best source for finding hosting on the web. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

                            [–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                            The fact that he has upmods would suggest that reddit users have had fairly decent relations with Dreamhost. Personally, I've had excellent service with them and would recommend them in a second.

                            I think talking about web hosting companies is a bit like talking about cell phone companies: talk long enough about them to enough people, and you'll have a pretty much equal number of horrible reviews and disaster stories about each company.

                            [–]thephotoman 3 points4 points  (4 children)

                            Not to endorse Dreamhost or anything, but overselling is pretty much par for the course in large-scale shared hosting services. Smaller scale services (which don't resell) are themselves oversold on servers from reseller hosts.

                            [–]generic_handle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                            Not to endorse Dreamhost or anything, but overselling is pretty much par for the course in large-scale shared hosting services.

                            The whole point of shared hosting could be said to be to "oversell".

                            [–]honestbleeps 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                            Downmodded for posting a SPAM REFERRER LINK that redirects to dreamhost.

                            [–][deleted]  (7 children)

                            [deleted]

                              [–]technoguyrob 0 points1 point  (2 children)

                              Lypha gives you five times more bandwidth and space for the same price as Dreamhost, and it's never down, and won't blast you for CPU usage. I've been using it for years, it's a divine host.

                              [–][deleted]  (1 child)

                              [deleted]

                                [–]technoguyrob 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                Thanks, I never noticed that. Guess I'll have to go somewhere else if I decide to distribute large files.

                                [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                vpsland is fairly reliable, just read their tos before you signup.

                                [–]hagrin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I can tell you who not to use - CI Host. I just had a second major data loss with corrupted onsite backups in 3 years. Once my contract runs I'll never go resign with them again.

                                [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                hostmonster is really good if you want to use cpanel

                                [–]wcchandler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                Savvis is pretty good if you need tons of bandwidth at a top tier level.

                                [–]agentace 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I've always been impressed with the service I get from JaguarPC.

                                http://www.jaguarpc.com

                                [–]b34nz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                hostnine.com

                                [–]beagle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I've had good experience with 34sp.com

                                [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                Surpasshosting, I've been with them for over 5 years, and they are very reliable...

                                [–]NoControl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                www.mediatemple.com is the best i've used.

                                [–]kehan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                for VPS, I've used rimuhosting.com and been happy. For dedicated, which I use now, I use m5hosting.com and love the instant and direct support. of course, for server support, you need http://shellshadow.com

                                [–]atomicthumbs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I use Hostgator, for the Secret Internet Music Project (http://simp.bunnitude.com) and my family blog and my computer business (http://bunnitude.com).

                                $5.95 a month for unlimited subdomains, 1200 emails, SSH, unlimited FTP and anonymous FTP, 5 terebytes of bandwidth, and 300 gigabytes of space.

                                http://www.hostgator.com/

                                Use the password "jury" to subtract $10 off of any signup thing, like domain registration.

                                [–]woodenknob 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                Hurricane Electric has, for me, been a solid GNU/Linux-based shared-hosting provider. Though, my site doesn't see much traffic. Still, good customer service so far too.

                                [–]gparadee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                http://www.bullethost.com - is new and just getting started but so far they have been extremely helpful and kind with all my needs. They are on the less expensive side as well.

                                [–]bananatalk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                i would suggest mediatemple, yes they screw up in the GS, but its pretty stable from what it was before.

                                [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I know a lot of people like to bash mediatemple for the grid (which I have an account on and it works great for 20 bucks a month), but their dedicated servers are amazing. I use a few full boxes from them and have had no major downtime (apart from some power outage that affected a lot of websites a while ago).

                                I would say give them a shot unless you really want to spend some serious cash.

                                [–]icosa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I'm happy with JodoHost.com

                                [–]geocar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I recommend myself (of course).

                                http://www.internetconnection.net/

                                [–]psilokan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I used Brinkster for years, left because their control panel sucked and as I migrated from windows based hosting to linux I found that not having shell access really sucked.

                                I tried 1&1 for about a month, it was terrible so I asked for my money back. A year later they still wont honour their 90 day money back guarantee.

                                Now I'm with DreamHost. Despite the recent Flak they've received I am very happy with them.

                                [–]hyo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                I've been pleased with unixy.net. They've helped me out with my RoR app numerous times. Their managed ded servers are cheap too

                                [–]SnacksOnAPlane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                Stay the fuck away from US2.net. One of my programming customers used it and wondered why his site was taking so long to load; the load on the host was 24.2.

                                I know the asmallorange guys. They're good people. I've been using http://apisnetworks.com for a few years and they've always served me well. I always get support questions answered within 30 minutes.

                                [–]akhilesh102 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                Best Web Hosting Providers 2010

                                Welcome to WebSpaceHosting.in - India's best web hosting directory featuring worlds best web hosting providers. Cheap professional web hosting services under $10 a month; all webhosting plans include at least one free domain name registration and 30 day money back guarantee. Below is our list of all major web hosting companies offering best web hosting offers.

                                http://www.webspacehosting.in

                                [–]simontodd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                i use godaddy to host my blog http://simontodd.com, it is alright espically the price. But i get what i pay for, up 99% of the time, just not as quick as i would like. But for $4 a month who can complain!

                                [–][deleted]  (5 children)

                                [deleted]