Hosting support

Hello, the Drupal association has been experimenting with limited advertising on Drupal.org. We carefully evaluated options, solicited feedback, and done small experiments with advertising to learn what is acceptable. We've received good feedback, and corrected many mistakes we've made as we have experimented.

We are currently soliciting proposals for advertisements for the header of the Drupal.org hosting forums. We are also seeking feedback on the Google advertising blocks.

For years I personally used OpenSourceHost (opensourcehost.com) for hosting my personal web site (www.altamontstudios.com). I was always happy with their service and used them as a shared hosting provider for the initial launch of my new business venture, www.notchup.com. NotchUp had explosive growth even before our public launch with traffic that melted down our shared host on OSH, so I was forced to quickly look for a dedicated hosting provider.

After much research, including recent postings on drupal.org I gave Liquid Web a try. I liked the fact that they offered server configurations with set prices and month to month charges. This is in comparison to hosting companies like Rackspace that require you to negotiate prices with a sales rep and then you get locked into a 12 - 18 month contract.

Liquid Web provisioned my first server in 2 hours (they guarantee 24 hour turn around), I moved www.notchup.com to the new server and the quickly melted down my own new, dedicated server. I then had Liquid Web provision three servers for me, all with more CPU power and RAM then the original single server. They were able to move the disc drives from the original server to one of the new servers and therefore my site was only down for 30 minutes during this entire transition. I also spec'd out a private network for the 3 servers using a Gigabit switch.

I've made a Social Networking site based on Drupal 5.7 and I'm now looking for a place to host it. My budget is of 100$ and I'm thinking of buying a premium hosting plan or vps or maybe even a dedicated (if the budget allows) for 1 month or more, in order to see if the site will have any success. The hosting company must have an option of upgrading the hosting plan so the site's growth will not be limited.

An other alternative would be bluehost but from what I've read they are a total rip-off.

Two years back, I started looking for a company who know something about ruby on rails since I was headed down that path and looked at a few and selected (Dimension Servers) http://www.dimensionservers.com/. They have always been a very friendly group to deal with and also very responsive.

The only credible commentary on hosting companies comes from those who can and do provide evidence of their hosted Drupal site, by links included their post, where their drupal.org login identity and drupal.org posting history matches with their linked site and comments. Posts like the recent one for WHB usually appear to be created by shills for the referenced hosting company. As others have noted, shared web hosting business competition has become so intense that there are shills who defame, or at least bad mouth, their competition with hopes they might entice new clients to theirs.

What is apparent from surveying hosting company sites is that most are notorious for incredibly bad service due to a variety of causes. For example, the shared hosting business appears to be a very low margin enterprise, where the primary differentiators are bandwidth and storage promises. Among the big red flags about many hosting companies are their deceptive marketing tactics. There deceptive tactics include bait and switch schemes, a sales pitches that claims a low monthly rate on the surface, which in reality requires yearly pre-payment with a very high cancellation penalty. The world of web hosting bears all the features of a cut throat business environment where the largely anonymous customers come and go with the wind.

We've had a pretty unpleasant experience over the past few months with a VPS in the UK. We were previously on bluehost, which was fine, if not a little slow at times. However, the VPS has been nothing but problems, despite costing 4 times the amount and not even serving email and having less web traffic. I've just finished a chat with their billing department as we're about to move off the server, but I was wondering if anyone had any comments on this: