32 replies to this topic

[mikef]

The company I currently use for hosting my sites is closing down shortly, so I need to find a new hosting company urgently.

I manage about ten sites currently, using Etomite, phpBB, and Wordpress, and am considering trying to expand this, so I'm looking for a small 'entry level' reseller type package. There seem to be few suitable options in the UK -
does anyone have any experience of Daily.co.uk or jabwebsolutions.co.uk
alternatively, maybe its time to look at US offerings, so does anyone have any recommendations for what I should look for there?

what minimum versions of PHP and MySQL should I be checking for?
what are the disadvantages of running etomite, wordpress and phpBB from a single database? (I've always kept them in separate databases so far, but i find odd restrictions get placed on some packages)

thanks for any help!

mike

[Ralph]

Hi Mike... I'm not familiar with UK based hosting but have been looking at afew here in the US... I've always been leary of hosting companies and have dealt with several over the years on behalf of my customers... I guess it depends on exactly what servies you need aside from hosting Etomite sites...

As far as using a single database for all applications, there shouldn't be an issue... Most packages allow for application specific table prefixs and MySQl will provide plenty of handles for the various applications to make use of for queries...

My customers needs are simple so most basic *nix hosting packages should suffice... I look for PHP > 5.0, MySQL > 5.x, and Apache > 2.x... I don't need bleeding edge, but I don't want archaic software hosting either...

[Dean]

For UK, I'd give UK2 a look, I had used them in the past myself, and past the teething troubles of getting the account setup I didn't really have any problems.
Other than that, I'd suggest giving RapidVPS a look (these are my preferred service provider) - they offer shared hosting solutions based in the US (you need to dig on the services page to find it) - Don't let the fact that it's in the US put you off, their support staff work 24x7.

Personally, I keep everything separate database-wise. If your PHPBB install gets compromised, then you can kiss your data goodbye.

[Ralph]

Backups help a lot... I had been pretty lax in backing up my MySQL database until this past weekend... Sure, I do an rsync of files from from my main server onto my backup server, but rarely got around to backing up MySQL... One bonehead click without reading the prompt caused MySQL to DROP the entire database I was using for development of the new code base instead of several unwanted tables... Everything... Data structures, sample data, snippets, chunks - everything... I don't like that sick feeling in the pit of my stomache... Luckily, because I have full access to the server, because it's onsite, I was able to use mysqlbinlog to regenerate the SQL needed to re-create the database, after a small bit of editing... Now I'm gonna start making better use of MySQLDumper and phpMyBackupPro...

[mikef]

Thanks Ralph for the versions - I wasn't sure what the sensible versions were for MySQL. I definitely don't want PHP 4!

Thanks Dean, especially for the warning about phpBB - I can separate that by giving it its own domain.

UK2 is no use, unfortunately - the starter reseller package is too crippled (only 5 databases), and the next one up more expensive than I want!

I'll have a look at RapidVPS but at first glance their only shared hosting offerings are single site - I don't want to set up a self managed VPS!

I've sent Daily some queries, will see how long they take to respond!

[darren]

i've had very good service at site5, not sure if their reseller accounts are what you need but worth a look...

[Dean]

Also, give Dreamhost a try - I've heard of some horror stories, *but* I've not really experienced problems as I've only got basic sites on there (use discount code ETOMITEDOMAIN to get a free domain).
All I've ever heard about Site5 is bad...

Also, check the offers forums over at WHT to see what special offers there are..

[darren]

if dean's heard nothing but bad things about site5, stay clear of them...i've set up 4 or 5 sites there without issue but i could be the exception. go ahead and disregard my last comment.
Dean, weren't you offering hosting a while back?

[Dean]

if dean's heard nothing but bad things about site5, stay clear of them...i've set up 4 or 5 sites there without issue but i could be the exception. go ahead and disregard my last comment.
Dean, weren't you offering hosting a while back?

You were lucky then - I've heard some real horror stories about site5 in the past, maybe they've improved, but I wouldn't recommend them. Every host can't please everyone, so maybe they got on top of things?
Yeah, but I've had to give it up due to illness and unable to give the time to it that I needed to.

[mikef]

Yes, Dean saved me from having to go through this about this time last year, put together a package to suit my requirements and it worked very well!

Site5 seems to have had problems in the past, but under new management from early this year. No recent problem reports on http://www.webhostin...eb-Hosting.html so I've not written them off.
Hostgator is also a possible (recommended by Sitepoint (on their newsletter) a while back)
innohosting.com is a possible too - strange company - registered in UK, hosting in either UK or US (different prices) charges in dollars regardless and no VAT for UK customers using UK hosting. and it has a free UK phone number for support

Have been trying to set up and add-on domain on cpanel to see if I could just use RapidVPS shared hosting and reminded myself of the joys of changing nameservers in the process. It doesn't work if you use the wrong nameservers, and when you finally put it right you then have to wait for ages for it to propagate back to the UK. I think my ISP only updates their DNS servers 3rd Friday of every month or something. (I think last time I temporarily switched my router to use OpenDNS rather than wait for them.) I'm not sure I like the idea of having each domain also appear as a subdomain of the host account though (and checkDNS reports 'Your main page redirects to another location. Several search engines will be unable to index your site' which is definitely undesirable if true)

[mikef]

I finally chose to go with Inno-hosting (US).

My thanks to Dean and them for making the transfer efficient and almost problem free. Most sites are now operating from there (there is a drawback to clients managing their own domain names!)

[mikef]

Up until today, the transfer has gone well.

Now, having checked with yslow I discovered that they weren't doing any compression on HTML pages (or CSS and javascript though thats of less concern - I could probably get more benefits from tidying them up than from compression!) so tried to set up compression with no success.
Exchanged a few emails with first level support trying to sort out what and why, now transferred to second level support.

On the plus side, with some other hosting companies I'd probably still be waiting for first level support (not Dean! - other companies I used before)

..................

ten minutes later - level 2 have passed it up to the admins to have a look at what they can do.
... and admin have decided they'll recompile apache and php to include mod_deflate

I like the attitude that they'll fix things where reasonably possible (also increasing memory allowance on a case by case basis where there's a legitimate need ... wordpress auto updates in my case)

Edited by mikef, 04 December 2009 - 05:25 PM.

[mikef]

Up until today, the transfer has gone well.

Now, having checked with yslow I discovered that they weren't doing any compression on HTML pages (or CSS and javascript though thats of less concern - I could probably get more benefits from tidying them up than from compression!) so tried to set up compression with no success.
Exchanged a few emails with first level support trying to sort out what and why, now transferred to second level support.

On the plus side, with some other hosting companies I'd probably still be waiting for first level support (not Dean! - other companies I used before)

..................

ten minutes later - level 2 have passed it up to the admins to have a look at what they can do.
... and admin have decided they'll recompile apache and php to include mod_deflate

I like the attitude that they'll fix things where reasonably possible (also increasing memory allowance on a case by case basis where there's a legitimate need ... wordpress auto updates in my case)

and it was sorted early this morning

[mikef]

forget the nice things I said about Innohosting.

For some reason someone decided to change the way they calculate the bandwidth utilised for a domain.

They now calculate the total bandwidth utilised by a domain and then add on to it the bandwidth utilised by a subdomain. Even third level support doesn't understand the difference between a domain and a subdomain. As in this case the subdomain is responsible for 75% of the total domain traffic the traffic reported by their nice new algorithm nearly doubles my supposed usage - and took the site over its allowed bandwidth and resulted in it getting shut down for a while.

[Dean]

Wow! Bummer!
If they're using cPanel, shouldn't each *account* have it's own bandwidth limit / usage??



*account* means sub1.domain is separate to sub2.domain or even .domain, as long as they are on different user accounts?

[mikef]

Wow! Bummer!
If they're using cPanel, shouldn't each *account* have it's own bandwidth limit / usage??



*account* means sub1.domain is separate to sub2.domain or even .domain, as long as they are on different user accounts?

In this case the subdomain is in the same account, and directs to a subdirectory in the account (it was set up the same way when hosted with you). I had been considering switching it to a separate account as above or even moving it into its own domain (which would be better for SEO too) as its now the only active part of that domain.
They've now updated their reporting again, separating out utilisation by http domain, ftp, smtp, pop3 and Imap and this is once again correct, with the total bandwidth dropping sharply, so clearly one of the technicians got something wrong yesterday and it has now been corrected and enhanced.
waiting to see if I get an apology ....

[Dean]

It may be that the cPanel update broke something, and then the next update fixed it?

[m0rt1l]

If your still looking for a host we can help.

www.xpress-media.co.uk/web-hosting

[mikef]

On current experience, I wouldn't recommend RapidVPS for shared hosting. Two and half days in, after me accepting their offer to migrate in one of my sites, I have an inaccessible account. I should have declined the offer - I'd probably have it up and running by now if I had.

The first support person dealing with it said 'don't make any changes to Cpanel until I've finished as they'll just get overwritten' ... and that was the last I heard from him.

The second support person dealing with it, when I complained a day later, said it was done, and gave me a new cpanel password ... which didn't work. Using the original cpanel account details I could see the site - he'd copied one gzipped tarball across and that was it. Complained again.

This morning, told they'd fixed it again, that I needed to use the new set of login details, which they've tested. New account login still doesn't work, but now the old details don't either. Nor does access via ftp.

(and the account management panel is full of obviously irrelevant tools - reboot server, reset root password etc. - which could confuse someone new to hosting and just wanting a reliable hosted service.)

[mikef]

well RapidVPS shared hosting has worked after the setting up troubles ... until this week

I'm now getting increasingly frequent Error 500 messages, and when I manage to login on the restricted Cpanel that they give me it typically shows an overloaded server (15 or more of 4 CPUs used and sometimes errors showing that it has failed to spawn new processes.) I've given them the logged time of one recent occurrence, and they aren't interested unless I can give them a step by step reproducible way of generating the 500 error - impossible when its a random error caused by a periodically seriously overloaded server. Looking at the server logs to see what caused the overloading is beyond them. Other users of the sites I operate are now seeing similar errors in normal use.

So much for "We do not oversell our Shared Hosting servers. We are profitable without making your website crawl." - they don't make it crawl, just randomly inaccessible