By daniorama on

Hello,

I'm another Dreahost "victim", so I'm plannig to change my hosting. Right now it seems ANHosting and Site5 are the best options, the former is suppossed to be better for Drupal, but the lack of forums and wiki is a big issue, Site5 seems too good to be true but the reviews here are promising... Could anyone send some site addresses so we could test the real performance of these host providers?

Thanks

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

My site is hosted on AN Hosting. I think it's probably a good example to test against; I run a lot of complex modules and there's plenty of high-quality media to download. Give it a try.

Also, AN Hosting does have a forum.

--
John Forsythe

daniorama’s picture

daniorama commented

I know yours, it works really good, but I need some more examples... in dreamhost some people have really fast drupal sites but others are just horrible. I want to know if other companies have the same issues. It would be ok a site a bit slower than yours but I need to know if every site would perform roughtly the same.

Is this forum part of ANhosting? It seems from another company... By the way, has ANHosting some kind of wiki, or webpanel examples?

Thank you very much!

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

AN Hosting is actually owned by Midphase, they merged back in 2004. The forum supports both brands. AN Hosting uses CPanel, which is basically the industry standard these days, so it's easy to find info on Google. There's an official guide over here.

--
John Forsythe

WithoutaDoubt’s picture

WithoutaDoubt commented

ANHosting

John,
I too have run across your site in my search for FAST drupal hosting. Thank you for your contributions and help. I have some questions if you don't mind.
1)Does ANHosting allow you to modify the php.ini for larger uploads and more memory?
2)What kind of cpu and query limits have you found? Does your site have a lot of traffic?
3)Is it the same service as MidPhase or just owned by them? (bad reviews on MidPhase)

It seems like it may be confusing and complicated to use ANHosting because of the current setup. You have a MPCustomer login, right? But that doesn't control any domain functions just your dealings with MP.
I have been searching for so long my head hurts. Hosting companies better shape up. I want lots of CPU and lots of MySQL queries per hour and I want it affordable and I want it now!

I would like a hosting company that will refund unused portions of a prepaid account. I saw one somewhere and can't remember what company it was. I think that would be valuable because it always seems hosting companies are great for the first 30 days and then things go down hill. I have two accounts that I can't even use with drupal at all just sitting there because I prepaid and can't get a refund. I think it was Site5 with the good refund policy.

-1 Site5 for extreme AUP and RUP

Dani,
Unfortunately, Site5 is very restrictive in their Resource Usage Policy. I don't see how you could run even a low/medium traffic site on that. I could easily go over the usage just working on the site. 3000 queries and 1000 changes in an hour? My page loads can take 100 queries so I get 30 pages an hour... Many more limitations too. Their policy is kind of well hidden. I think they should have a link to it on their front page!
I have already tried Micfo, Dreamhost and Site5

I am very frustrated with hosting so if anybody has figured this beast out please share!
Thanks,
Tom

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

AN Hosting and Midphase are two brands from the same company. Most of the bad reviews you'll see for Midphase were back in 2006. The data center they were in had severe power outage issues, and it really hurt them. They moved to a better data center in 2007, and things are very stable now (my server hit 200 days uptime, for example).

Yes, you can use PHP.ini or .htaccess to override the PHP settings. They have MPCustomer, but I rarely use it. All the everyday stuff can be done in CPanel.

I had a story on the front page of LinuxToday.com that brought in thousands of hits in one day, and the server had no problem handling it. I've heard similar stories from other people. There are no fixed query limits that I know of. Basically, as long as you're not disrupting service for other people, you should be fine.

The server I'm on is a quad-cpu box with tons of ram. The newest servers are 8-core boxes, according to my friend who signed up a couple months ago.

--
John Forsythe

daniorama’s picture

daniorama commented

Hey Tom,

Thank you for telling me about the RUP... that makes Site5 a NO NO... I really love the wiki, forums and all that stuff, but I'd rather a reliable host than a place to discuss with other customers how bad is it.

So John, it seems we'll be neighbours... a few questions more:

Does ANHosting have any kind of strange RUP like Site5 and is it available? (ex: just one cronjob every 15min)
If your server is quad-cpu why do they say "Dual Core Dual Opteron Servers"? What does "Advertising credit" mean?
A thing I like from Dreamhost is that they offer making free subdomains in dreamhosters for testing purpouses, is that with ANHosting possible?
How does the multiple domains in an account work with them?
Is it possible to have multiple accounts dor the same user?
Any plans to offer VPS or dedicated?

I just hate myself for not checking ANhosting in Halloween... AAAARRRGGGG... As an long user, do you know if they offer this kind of things usually? Should we expect another one for Christmas?

Thanks both, you have brought light into the shared hosting darkness...

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

Running two dual-core Opterons gives the server 4 CPUs to work with.

The advertising credits can be used to buy text ads on Google or Yahoo.

AN Hosting's Terms of Service are pretty simple. Basically, as long as you're not monopolizing all the CPU or RAM, you shouldn't have any problems. They don't have any set limits on SQL queries per hour, for example.

Midphase does offer VPS, but I haven't tried it.

The Halloween sale is the only sale I've ever seen. Other than that, I've got a coupon code for 3 months off listed on my website.

Domains are set up via CPanel. Basically, each domain gets a folder on your FTP. You can set up 20 different domains on one account, and unlimited subdomains.

--
John Forsythe
Blamcast - Custom Drupal Themes and more...

nitrospectide’s picture

nitrospectide commented

I have been with Godaddy for about 3 years, and am looking to switch. They have been a convenient 1-stop shop for domains, hosting, and email, but my cms sites are running slow. That, and I hate their trashy advertising.

I saw your site a while back, with the AN hosting recommendation, and I am quite interested, now that I have read through this thread. Do you know of anyone who has switched from Godaddy to AN? I am curious how things compare. One thing I have really liked with Godaddy is the 24/7 sales and support that connects with a U.S. call center.

I plan to dig into the AN service description.... but your mention of a spike in heavy site activity raises a question for me. about a year ago, my cousin and I posted a site that got a double whammy from a Webmonkey interview with us, and subsequent Digg frenzy. Only then, did we discover that Godaddy had a policy (buried somewhere, not advertised) of capping concurrent user sessions at 100 on shared hosting. I spent time on the phone with president's office trying to get satisfaction on that one - to no avail. That turned the Digg post into a snowball of bad PR as people started flaming about how our site was down. Do you know AN's policy on concurrent users?

Also, I have gotten spoiled having my domains, email and hosting under one roof. Is it a pain the butt having to handle domains separately?

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

Domains are pretty simple, you just log into your registrar (I use NameCheap, rather than GoDaddy), and type in the DNS server that AN Hosting gives you. Takes about 2 minutes.

AN Hosting has a 24/7 1-800 number, but I've never needed to call it.

I've yet to make the front page of Digg, but I know someone who has. They actually moved him to a faster server to help handle the load. However, I wouldn't count on any shared hosting to withstand Digg, that site can kill even dedicated servers!

--
John Forsythe
Blamcast - Custom Drupal Themes and more...

nitrospectide’s picture

nitrospectide commented

I am not familiar with setting up cron, and the variations thereof.

Can you comment on this in regards to AN Hosting?
(paragraph 2: http://drupal.org/node/110531#comment-620772)

And as mentioned in that post, I have seen some recent posts with people mentioning sites down recently on AN. Any thoughts or knowledge regarding such things??

Oh... and just because I have to ask... what's your relationship with AN Hosting?

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

Cron is done through CPanel, it's not difficult to set up. If you need help, take a look at these posts.

I can't comment on why that particular server was having problems. Sometimes your neighbors will get on Digg with a terribly unoptimized wordpress blog, or sometimes a site will be flooded by spammers. My experience with AN has been positive in that they're very quick to stem the tide when these kinds of problems occur. My site is my business, so if downtime was a problem, I wouldn't be hosting there.

I'm not an employee, but the links on my website are affiliate links, so if you buy through my page, it helps me out. That said, I wouldn't promote a service I didn't like and use myself. :)

--
John Forsythe
Blamcast - Custom Drupal Themes and more...

andespeople’s picture

andespeople commented

Hi, stay away from Site5, i used to like their service but lately the service has gone down, my drupal sites are slow and right now i am dealing with ftp service down. i am currently hosted on server (helium)
and it has been down on and off for two days. I have writing them about the problem but they dont seem to get it together. I am up for renewal on December and i am already trying href="http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=jolure1">hostgator.com
I saw some reviews about it, ftp seems to be fast as well as the reseller servers. They have a 30 day moneyback, i can update you on my findings.
Good luck.

roundboy’s picture

roundboy commented

I use Anhosting. When it is running fine it's perfect. Loading speed is super fast and no problem with
Drupal.

I have about 700~900 visitors per day with 6000~8000 page view per day.

But when I first started using Anhosting which is about 3 weeks ago. My server went down 4 times in a week.
I happen to be in problematic server. It was brand new server and they had it misconfigured and hard time fixing it. so I asked them to move mine to different server(more stable older one but still good) and so far didn't had any problem.

Unless you end up in problematic server, you'll be fine with Anhosting.

Sooki’s picture

Sooki commented

I've just registered to AnHosting, their customer services is really quick, around 15min to response.
What kills me one day after I've registered they came out with this Thanks Giving deal, 4.95 (instead 6.95) and 1TB (instead of 250GB) and bunch of other stuff. The though of using the 30day money back and re-registering even crossed my mind.

Anyway I only there for couple of days but meanwhile I'm very satisfied.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

Usually if someone registers within a day or so of a new special, they'll go ahead and give you the deal if you ask.

~silverwing

___________________________
MisguidedThoughts | tvTonight

Sooki’s picture

Sooki commented

I just wanted to share my recent experience with AnHosting support. I had some problems with my Gallery2 installation, got error 500 when uploading images. I asked their support to help me to set error logs so I can take it to the Gallery2 forums. Instead they actually helped me in solving my problem configuring some stuff in Gallery2 that solved it all(I gave them username and password for admin account) and it wasn't even something on their own side, just some configuration that weren't set. I only used 2 hosting companies before AnHosting and I must say none of them never thouched outside software ('we can't help you, ask for help in X forums' response). Furthermore, their response time was really quick between 5 and 15min (the whole thing took less than an hour)

DrupalValueHosting’s picture

DrupalValueHosting commented

This is probably because they are running outdated servers with limited resources... or may be too much profit focused :)

Also they never reveal their server hardware and software configuration, which is very important.

The shared hosts should provide:
1. Upfront server configuration
2. Realtime server load tracking
3. Test file downloads to check bandwidth port speed

For example, on my company's website The above can be checked by all visitors in real time, any time of the day!

These things should be transparent to the customers for all hosts.

Steve,
steve@DrupalValueHosting.com

JohnForsythe’s picture

JohnForsythe commented

Your response has no relevance to the previous post, and appears just to be spam.

mayjune2004’s picture

mayjune2004 commented

My client used anhosting but they had to switch to another host because they couldn't get adequate technical support.

anhosting (at that time which was about 8 mos ago) gave little or no support.
They would not respond to e-mail most of the time.
If they did respond, they were rude and arrogant.

I'm glad to see they must have improved since then.

hanzahar’s picture

hanzahar commented

server is good customer support is bad

4th day customer,3 days no FTP access

how frustrating... in 45 mins time if my FTP is still down i'm requesting refund