Searching for a New Hosting Company

Wow!! I've been thinking over this VPS hosting issue for about a week now (to be my first move from shared hosting) - your post (more like a review in a computer magazine) is JUST-IN-TIME for me. THANK YOU Nancy.

Appreciate the objective reporting and analysis of the Hosting providers!

We are now offering our BlowoutPackage at 50% discount coupons exclusively at drupal forums.
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It also includes one free domain name!

Hence, one year hosting at $5/month with 2000Gb Space and 9000Gb monthly bandwidth + 1 domain name free!

More details about the offer here :
http://drupal.org/node/201606

PS: the link above also includes server infrastructure details which is our main USP

Some customer testimonials here:
http://drupal.org/node/201606#comment-662214
http://drupal.org/node/110531#comment-641231

Regards,
Steve

steve@DrupalValueHosting.com

Although response can be a reflection on the company as a whole, remember that those responding may just be sales people who have nothing to do with support later. So take that into account.

Another important factor on a VPS is how much RAM do you have. This determines how many apache processes you can fit in memory, and that becomes more crucial as you have more and more modules. It is even more crucial when you have multisite, and just ONE site has 100+ modules enabled, while all the others have 20 or so. Apache will be bloated regardless.

For VPS (and dedicated), I always recommend rimuhosting.com to clients and have never been disappointed. They are not the cheapest, but their support is top notch, and they know what they are doing.
--
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com

As I love christmas presents I made one to myself and ordered a drupalvaluehosting package on dec 23rd. My first impressions after 2 days of testing and playing around:

- support center anwsers quickly and helpfully
- cpanel is excellent
- drupal works like a charm (so as some others I tested like phplist, lifetype, b2evo, my old osc-demo loves globals on, so I couldn't test it yet)
- connection speed is nice

I am happy and its worth the price.

regards
Peter

PS: I should not advertise this host, so it stays my own perfect speed ;)

I'm personally trying to stay away from companies that offer "unlimited" or really high space and bandwidth (especially if they're 'larger' companies.)

Asking about resource/system usage and database connections - and when they'll unplug your site - is more important to me than bandwidth/diskspace. Especially with resource intensive scripts.

~silverwing

___________________________
MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

Can I know why you didn't contact Dreamhost ?

Thanks.

First, none of what is below is meant as a commentary on any of the hosting companies listed above. I just wanted to throw out some of the major items to consider when evaluating hosting plans. There is no best answer to anybody's particular hosting needs so pick the hoster that most suits your needs and budget.

For a much shorter version, silverwings post is a good one to look at.

Where specific server/plan numbers and prices are listed, those are just ones I pulled out of the air as examples and are typical of things I have come across, not a reflection of any actual plans or any specific hosting company.

Just a few quick notes on RAID and servers:
RAID 0 is technically not raid because there is no redundancy, even though it is a valid Raid level. It is just striping of data across the array, which helps on read/write speed. Loss of data will occur should there be a drive failure. This is usually used in environments where disk I/O speed is of concern but data integrity/loss is not an issue.

RAID 1 is mirrored drives. Depending on how this is set up, it can offer superior performance. It generally has better read performance with a slight hit on the write side. It is also expensive to run because the available storage is (drive capacity *N)/2 where N is the number of drives, which needs to be even and drive capacity is the storage capacity of the smallest drive, should different sized drives be used for some reason.

RAID 5, the most common, stripes the data across the drives, including parity data. Loss of a single drive will not cause data loss but there will be performance hit due to the need to calculate the loss data values on the fly until the drive is replaced. Available data storage is disk capacity * (N - 1) where N is the number of drives and the drive capacity is the storage capacity of the smallest drive, should different sized drives be used for some reason.

Any 2 digit RAID is the combination of the digits, e.g. RAID10 is actually 2 arrays mirrored with each array using RAID 0.

There is no answer as to what is the best since it depends on many variables.

An important issue is whether RAID is being done at the software level or hardware level. Hardware based RAID should be preferred and the performance of that depends on the RAID hardware, along with the drives being used. Software based RAID is slower and can consume a lot of CPU power, which means less CPU available to do the things you expect it to do.

Servers mean a lot of things to a lot of people with some hosters offering cheap servers that are basically a desktop computer put in a datacenter. Those are the offers you see saying you can have your own Pentium computer with 1GB RAM and 100GB IDE drive for $80 or whatever. Some hosters may use that kind of equipment as their actual servers to host shared plans. I'm just saying that your $5.99 a month with 500GB storage and 2Terabytes of monthly transfer may be run on a computer like above with a 1Mbit connection, which can only do about 300GB/month of throughput when maxed out or it may be on a nice 4way quad core box with 16GB or more of RAM and dual 1Gb network connections.

The performance you get from a shared plan can be impacted by other users that are sharing the same server. If one of them gets slashdotted, your sites may be impacted until that account gets suspended due to exceeding various limits. A VPS or your own server offers protection from that.

If you are reselling a hosting plan, then a large spike in traffic will affect all other clients you are hosting, since everybody is sharing. Its a smaller scale version of what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. This holds true for reselling VPS too.

The disk space and monthly transfer advertised are generally meaningless, as shown in the 1Mb connection example, they are there for marketing reasons because you will run generally run into limits listed in the fine print before you run out of the storage/transfer your plan advertises. What kind of limits? Inodes, for *nix boxes, cpu consumption, memory consumption, the bandwidth available to your server, e.g. is it a 1Mbit connection, 10Mbit, etc.

Other factors to look at:
-Do they own their own servers or are they resellers. Nothing wrong with resellers and some may provide superior help to the companies whose services they are reselling.
-Where is(are) the datacenters.
-What kind of pipes (data) are connected to the datacenter, the number of providers providing those pipes, etc.
-Security of the data center, because you don't want the servers your sites are hosted on to vanish and data center break ins do happen: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/02/chicaco_datacenter_breaches/
-What kind of electricity backup do they have: this is important for two reasons, HVAC and the continued operation of your servers. There have been several notable datacenter failures in the last year due to failure of the electrical backup systems, one of which brought down several notable sites including Craigslist.com

That's just a short list, there are more things to look at and everything should be evaluated against your actual needs and budget but the greater your needs, the more expensive its going to get. High quality data environment and technical expertise are expensive, at least in America. If the technical is being off-shored then those costs drop dramatically.

If price is your primary concern, then be prepared to lower your expectations.

BTW, ANHosting is a company that MidPhase bought and continue to operate as a seperate marketing brand, from what I understand. Their support, sales, etc are from MidPhase. They have excellent technical support and the clients I have that use MidPhase have excellent performance on their site with Drupal + Ubercar. Those clients have fairly low traffic levels. I do not use MidPhase, or any of their brands, myself because I had different needs and not because of any dissatisfaction with them. If you do use them, make sure you enter the secret code. There is a link to it on their home page.

I've been with Site5 reseller account for a few months now and the uptime has been excellent, including the speed. Just to clarify they do support both PHP 4 and 5.2 at the moment and you have the option to switch between them using your .htaccess file.

I will admit their support is a little slow and if you want a faster response, then i think you need to pay a dollar each time.

There have been some people who haven't had much luck with them especially on the issue of installing Drupal under PHP 5. This kinds of baffles me because i have not had any issues. Maybe, it's dependent on which server you are on?

Good luck,

P.S. Try to avoid using Fantastico to install applications, they don't always provide the latest versions.

DVH continues to surprise me. Not only they solved all my problems during free trial period (SSL settings, multiple hostnames), they now provide SSH access.
Support was always very fast and constructive.
Now I'm on BlowoutPackage2008 package with 50% discount ( details here: http://drupal.org/node/201606 ).
Again, thanks for your post, because it was one of milestones of my 'conversion' to DVH :)

i have had very good experiences with SteadFast Networks

Bluehost Blues

Nice research job Nancy. This post was the most helpful one I have read related to Drupal Hosting.

My preferences would be to utilize servers that reside in the US, so that rules out DVH. As a night owl 27/7 support is huge for me, so that rules out Site5.

This will be my first venture into a VPS service, so can I ask for a weigh-in first on how well managed VPS services are in general, and how widely does it vary? Do they take care of all server maintenance, patches, and upgrades? As a guy who went to art-school server upkeep is not my strong point.

Then specifically a weigh-in on Crucial Paradigm and their ability to handle the above?

Thanks again for all the thought that went into your research, and your willingness to share. How has DVH been working out for you?

Drupal Indianapolis Web Design

Have you looked into A Small Orange? I've used them for three years and couldn't be happier. They are stable, reliable, and quick to answer questions. Any email I've sent to them has been responded to in less than 5 minutes.

http://asmallorange.com/services/hosting/