Hivemind: hosting

[prog]

Jmac.org web & email has gotta move again, and soon. daerr has been my latest kind host, but his machine is falling apart and he's planning on bailing soon. I figure that, after more than eight years of hoboing this domain around, it's finally time to move it off of FriendlyNet and into the realm of paid-for hosting.

Any recommendations for hosting solutions? I am assuming that, since I want me own MySQL tables and Mason-based websites, I am too much of a control freak for Dreamhost, but feel free to tell me otherwise. (I don't need mod_perl, so long as Mason works.)

I am leaning towards getting a virtual user-mode Linux thing somewhere. They're more expensive, but you can go crazy on them. OTOH you have to do your own sysadminning, and enh.

I politely decline in advance offers to host on your own server or your friend's server or whatnot, thank you anyway. (Unless your friend runs a legit hosting business.) This will support, among other things, my professional identity. I need to be able to yell at someone when it falls over, without feeling like I'm stretching a personal favor thin.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I use Tera-Byte for my business hosting:

http://web.tera-byte.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=services.shared

Their 4U shared account is your basic Linux shared hosting thingy with all the usual stuff, although IIRC you have to ask 'em nicely to turn on MySQL. Cost is 99 USD per year.

I've been with them one way or another for four years, and had about one hour unscheduled downtime, a few hours of scheduled downtime, no other major issues, and very good responsiveness from their tech support.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I always hear good things about dreamhost, but then I'm not sure what you need. They did actually answer a friend of mine when she had very technical questions regarding their services, so you might be able to negotiate more control.

[daerr.livejournal.com]

They're (usually) very friendly and responsive but they are not very helpful with hosted applications... that is, they support FastCGI but have undocumented memory limits. They're undocumented and they won't discuss them but they will 'kill -9' your processes if they feel you've exceeded them. What's more, they're not fixed but dynamic in some way, so what's ok one day isn't the next.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Ooh, sexy. Well, I'll add that to my file on them...

[kyroraz.livejournal.com]

Dreamhost has been generally good for me, but I actually am going to be getting a futurehost (http://www.futurehost.biz/vps.htm) account so that I can run some higher end applications such as Firebrat and other things that I know will eventually kill Dreamhost. Dreamhost is kinda picky on the ram thing -- it's the only negative thing I've heard about them and daerr is the only one that has had the conflict with them on that level, I've not had processes killed yet. So, right now, from a hosting perspective, big stuff on futurehost, small stuff on dreamhost.

[daerr.livejournal.com]

And yes, I have a futurehost account too. Thus far it's seemed pretty nice to me. I haven't tried it fully loaded yet though. I'll have more to say in the next weeks and months.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

I have a rimuhosting.net VPS in speed of light land. It works fine. I am likely to transition my own personal stuff to a VPS "eventually".

my personal stuff is still running on an ancient machine (Pentium Pro 200 wih 128MB) with a questionable boot drive. Fortunately for me (and the sites I host) they are all static HTML, no SQL at all. Otherwise, the machine would have fallen over years ago (still do about 75GB/month of traffic).

The real issue is figuring out how much RAM you need. I don't think you site gets enough traffic to worry about CPU or transfer.

[daerr.livejournal.com]

I looked at Rimuhosting but for the memory you get, futurehost is way way cheaper.

For your pure static HTML, personally I'd just do Dreamhost. For static hosting they seem pretty good.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Scream at Dreamhost all you like -- it won't do any good. They go down a lot. If you can live with that, I highly recommend them.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

Jeffrey likes http://www.dyndns.com/ I think.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

I can honestly recommend tektonic.net for vhosting. I have two of them at present and while they won't (cannot) set me up on physically separate machines for me (they are both on the same physical host - i.e. server).

They do occasional reboots without announcing, but they always come back quickly enough. And vhosts are nice, cause they reboot in about 10 seconds flat - no, not an exaggeration.

I don't know if I would get a referral, but am not worry about it. They've been pretty good and set their machines up when you tell them to.

I like

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I am in the middle of a Dreamhost experience, as you know. I have reached the point where Django/FastCGI is pretty much working -- but that's taken five days of trying every random remedy I could google up. Most of which were pure placeco effect, and I could tell that even as I was trying them.

The last remedy I tried was (a) in the documentation and (b) offered to me by the support staff. And now my site is working. So that's circumstantial evidence that Dreamhost is acceptable... except that things were *kind of* working *before* I tried that remedy. So maybe it's just another placebo.

For added fun, I have two virtual hosts (of the form "NAME.com" and "test.NAME.com") and I can only get FastCGI to work on "NAME.com", despite *identical* configuration. Also, each one of their web hosts is configured slightly differently (!) so whoever you go to for help can offer only imperfect advice. (My two hosts are on the same server, so that's not it.)

Basically, there are an unnerving number of Dreamhost stories out on the web of the form "It stopped working, and I don't know why, and later it started working again, and I don't know why." I guess if it doesn't start again, the person bails on Dreamhost and goes somewhere else.

It's working for me. If it stops working, I'll bail.