Looking for a fast, reliable webhoster

By ryooki on 5 Nov 2005 at 14:30 UTC

I've been surfing the web for a fast, reliable webserver. I took a look at there posts: http://drupal.org/node/19674, http://drupal.org/node/11736, http://drupal.org/node/20803, along with a couple of others.

I haven't been able to figure anything out yet. I'm currently on IXWebhosting. I love the amount of space, price point, support, etc that I get. The problem is my site runs very slowly at times. I'm opened mulitple trouble tickets about, and the issue has yet to be answered. I always get a "it looks fast from our end" reply. I want pages to load in a couple of seconds (3-5), not 15-20 or 3-4min as sometimes happens. The faster, the better. I've read that it's better to have the database on the same server as the site over having it on another server, and I've heard it the other way around. I'm not really sure which is better.

Basically, what I want, in order of importance, is:

Fast sever - with a willingness to optimize memory/accelerators/...
at least 1GB space & comparable bandwidth
Good customer support (24/7 support in some form)
web-based control panel
in-expensive
US based? I don't know if that is important to help my speed or not, but it'll definately make paying less of a headache for me

I read a lot of posts saying this or that server is good. Examples would be helpful for me to make my decision.

Comments

1and1.com

warrenonline commented 5 November 2005 at 17:59

I've been with 1and1.com for over a year now and it's been good. They have a new " Home " account with 5 GB of space, 10 MySQL databases, 250 GB traffic and a load of other features for $5.00 / month. My site speed seems good and they have phone support. US based as well....

Warren
http://www.warrenonline.ca

Thanks for the reply. On

ryooki commented 5 November 2005 at 20:10

Thanks for the reply. I'll keep check on your site to see how it's doing. On another note... how did you get your clean url's to work with gallery? Are you using Gallery 1 or 2 or something else?

Gallery 2

warrenonline commented 6 November 2005 at 17:40

I'm using Gallery 2 and disabled all the rules in Gallery URL Rewrite Administration except Show Item which I set to gallery/%path% . Drupal took over the work for clean URL after that.

Warren
http://www.warrenonline.ca

Hehe

webwright commented 5 November 2005 at 19:03

Sounds like you want a "great but cheap" host. Not real common. Hosting is a utility-style business-- the less they charge the less money they have for infrastructure and support staff... Soooo, you get what you pay for (unless you can find a host that has found a magical way to economize that none of the others have stumbled upon).

That being said, one of the better compromises I've found is Dreamhost.com. For your disk space needs, a $15/month account would do the trick. Though 1gig of disk space seems like a lot-- I have half a dozen sites on their 7.95/month plan.

In terms of your speed issue,... If it does indeed "look fast from their end", then the issue might not lie with your hosting company. Bottlenecks for hosting speed can include the server speed, the # of active sites on the shared server where yer site lives, who their upstream providers are in terms of bandwidth, the quality of code/data on your site, your ISP, etc.

Sooooo, if you find a host that seems faster for you, they could be quite a bit slower for the majority of your users.

Can you post the URL of your site? Where are you located (geographically)? Where is your hosting company?

-t

___________________________________--
Tony Wright
Travel Guides (Drupal Site)
Google Adsense Keywords

yeah, I know you get what

ryooki commented 5 November 2005 at 20:05

yeah, I know you get what you pay for, which is why in-expensive is lower on my priorty list. There are 2 sites I'm working on right now: www.liberalthinkers.org and www.herringimages.com.
The liberalthinkers.org website is my own personal pet-project, and so it needs to be cheaper. It also doesn't need lots of speed, but my own friends aren't going to the site b/c they complain about the long load times. It's running a ton of modules, and I thought that was the main issue initially until I started working on the second site. It doesn't need a whole lot of space right now, but who knows if that will change.

The herringimages.com site is a commercial site that needs to run quickly, but is running the bare minimum modules that I can use. Since it's a site that has a lot of photographs, it needs more space. This site, tho, also had problems with slowness intermittently from the get-go, even with little content and few modules enabled. Now, it's considerably more complex and running Drupal & Gallery.

I live in VA, and IXwebhosting is in KY. Not that far away (physically at least).

As for them replying that everything is OK on their end, I know it's probably OK on their end. The site is usually OK in speed, but intermittently, it's slow, slow, slow. I tried to chat with someone when I was having a problem (>3min load time for my pages... "waiting for a response"), but the 2 times I tried, the problem resolved itself before the chat person responded. It's hard to know when to bug them because sometimes it's just for a couple of minutes, and other times the slowness will drag on for an hour or two. I've found, during these slow times, that the database server will not respond as well in phpMyAdmin. Could it have been my connection issue? Maybe except every other website (including Drupal) was pulling up just fine.

I noticed the intermittent difficulties more when I was actively working on the liberalthinkers.org website b/c I was glued to my computer all the time. I think, at that time, I would have difficulties with load times 4-5 times a day. Now, I haven't been as glued to my computer, but I still notice problems 2-3 times a week. When things do work, they are often very fast, but sometimes they don't. That's my issue. That's why I'm looking for a new webhost.

I hear ya!

webwright commented 7 November 2005 at 20:23

Yaw, I hear ya! Having owned a hosting company for several years, I know how tricky it is to find the point of failure/slowless when a site is acting up...

When I did a tracerout to your hosting company (from Alaska), it didn't seem abnormally slow-- but if it's intermittant..... My guess is that you are spot on-- it's probably either the hosting company not having enough bandwidth to accomodate traffic spikes or having a site on your server that slams the box in some way...

I be Dreamhost's 7.95 account would do great for ya. Note that they also allow you to host UNLIMITED domains with a single account (though you'll run out of disk and bandwidth if you hosted a bunch).... Very nice feature if you're looking for a place to host "hobby" sites. That's what I do with it!

Hehe-- Liberalthinkers.org! I've been flamed on that site!

G'luck!
___________________________________--
Tony Wright
Travel Guides (Drupal Site)
Google Adsense Keywords

Thanks for the info. :)

ryooki commented 7 November 2005 at 21:52

Thanks for the info. :) I'm sorry about the flaming... I've asked people to be nice, but you can't control others. Especially the very passionate or upset ones.