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Website hosting companies

Heh, I run a hosting biz. But we charge more then $49/yr. Not sure if spamming my biz is kosher, but I have posted my url before.
 
I've used Idologic since 2006 and love them.

http://www.idologic.com/

They have a pre-sales area in the forums for questions, and you can email 'em too.
They aren't the cheapest, but they are one of the best reseller hosts period.

Check out their rating on WHT.
I have had excellent uptime and support in 3yrs of service after many crappy hosts...remember Eryxma anyone? Aieee!!!

Uptime: https://secure.idologic.com/payment/serverstatus/alertra.php?server=uranium

Since: 2007-07-01
Outages: 37
Uptime: 99.856%

Most of that is for scheduled maintenance. (Alertra stats only started being used in 2007, I've been there since march 2006)

And, I only pay $15/mo. (yes, I'm grandfathered in from an old plan)

They also always are upgrading the servers and software.

Here's what I have now:

server_stats.png


I host all of my own images I've taken...ever seen a dead pic? ;)


lostmind, tell him what ya think of Global Compass...;)
That's where I'm physically hosted, Marietta 55 and 56 in Atlanta.

You get what you pay for, eh?
 
I'll be touring marietta in 6 weeks or so.

Honestly though, facilities are just 1 piece of the puzzle - and even the BEST facilities have problems such as exploding power mains, ATS that go on the fritz, thefts, FBI confiscations and everything. I've seen it all in close to 12 years of hosting. You need solid transit providers, redundant & top class network gear, good server hardware, good server software (http://ezp.net/technology.php), good technical support team (check out my pic here: http://ezp.net/team.php) and someone who is going to be around for a few years (we've been incorporated since oct 2000 and have been hosting websites even before then!). Oh and don't forget a solid backup solution (http://ezp.net/backup.php).

I have honestly no clue who idologic.com is. Sorry Quad, although since you like them, they get bonus marks in my books. But do they like chili? :)

We do run robust servers. We are still filling up our dual quad core xeon servers, with 12gb ram and 4 SSD's & 2 WD velociraptor (fastest spinning media SATA based drives available!) raid array. It puts out close to 30k IOPS and tops out at 600mb/s streaming reads & writes. Making it a VERY impressive drive array, as most enterprise class SATA drives top out at about 125 IOPS and most SAS drives top out at 200IOPS. We also run Litespeed, a commercial replacement webserver for Apache, which is in some cases 6x faster then Apache (although generally it's actually about 1.8x faster and I've never ran a benchmark where Apache can BEAT Litespeed), plus Litespeed has a ton more features in it and fully supports htaccess & mod rewrite (plus some nice security, anti-dos, etc.).

You'll also find a lot of hosting co's will throttle the # of connections you can have at once, put in silly cpu limits and file handles, etc. We don't do that, we take each client on a case by case basis IF they are affecting service to other clients. We've even been known to offer advice on how to fix scripts that are performing like a beaten dog...

Oh yeah. We specialise in making php&mysql based apps run faster then your average joe runs to the fridge for milk when having their first taste of naga! :)

I've taken wordpress sites that were DYING on good hardware at other hosts with only 30 concurrent connections and brought them on our hardware and had them pushing 1800 concurrent connections in testing (and pushing over 100 concurrent when being dugg, etc.). We've taken vbulletin sites and had them scale to over 2000 users online at once, without disabling search, etc.

***Was that spammy enough?***

Anyways, we've not been accepting signups for a while as we are redoing our website YET AGAIN. :(

See our signup page?: http://ezp.net/order.html

We have lot's of space though, so if anyone wants to give us a shot, just pm me or email me: shane /at/ ezp.net

Our signup form will work on and off during the next few days as my programmer is actually working on it right now... please don't use it!

All said, there are PLENTY of serious and quality hosts out there. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of really good scams too. Always always always always! keep a local backup of your data. ALWAYS. No matter how much you're paying for backup services. I've witnessed far too many online businesses die because a backup didn't perform or some other drama.
 
Cool stuff lost. :)

I agree with all he said about hosting, it's a wild market.

Like the fun one..there is *NO* such thing as unlimited everything.
Hosts who advertise that way, I run away.

Heh, Idologic is originally based out of Canada (as well as an Oregon office recently), funny eh?

I like the fact they don't oversell, keep up with hardware, and are genuinely nice people who are reachable 24/7...even by phone and IM.

I guess it really comes down to what you need vs what ya wanna pay.
 
QuadShotz said:

php 5.2.10? Ever had any issues with that?

We found a lot of clients software didn't play nice with 5.2.10 when we upgraded, so we rolled back to 5.2.9. Plan to move forward in a few more weeks, giving stuff like wordpress and drupal a chance to catch up :)
 
lostmind said:
php 5.2.10? Ever had any issues with that?

We found a lot of clients software didn't play nice with 5.2.10 when we upgraded, so we rolled back to 5.2.9. Plan to move forward in a few more weeks, giving stuff like wordpress and drupal a chance to catch up :)

Heh, I know the feeling.

Idologic held off having Cpanel 11 for a long time on account of issues. And only just got SQL5 in June. They've had a dedicated SQL5 cluster built since last year, but integrating it into Cpanel was problematic. Directadmin was another whole ball of wax altogether... ;)

I haven't had or heard of any issues, but I don't really have a site except a copy of 4Images for pix.

Plus, I'm kinda 'olde skool' and install and manage scripts myself, rather than use Fantastico. SSH and FTP is much more fun. :cool:
 
Integrating anything into any control panel is, err... troublesome.

I'd rather we didn't use em, but it is honestly great stuff for those users who aren't tech savvy. Pretty icons, works 99% of the stuff... gives the user more control and takes some load off our shoulders when it comes to support issues.

We're just rolling out our enterprise grade mail filtering... getting it to work with cpanel was/is a nightmare.

I've never used any third party uptime monitoring stuff, do you find alertra to be useful?
 
IGGY, I will assume you are looking for a shared hosting plan, so here are some things to check.

1. Do they own their own datacenter? Ask.

This is important. This means they own the servers and own or maintain the building they are in. If they do not, it means they are resellers. You don't want to go through a reseller. A reseller could be a kid with a computer, or it could be a larger company, but when there is an issue with the server, they are just a middle man. Go to the source!

2. Look for reviews/issues on www.webhostingtalk.com.

There are other things too, but I don't know what you are trying to do.
 
THP,

I have to politely refute your first point.

Owning your own datacenter is no requirement to provide great service. In fact, the majority of hosting companies will flat out lie to you about this anyway!

Colocation (placing hardware you own in another companies datacenter) is an excellent option for hosting providers. You do not get the $1million + upfront cost of building your own facility, you get SLA's and 24/7 remote hands staff you can deal with directly and you have full access to your own hardware. You get all the benefits of running your own facility without the headache or need to bring in all the required network and datacenter engineers. It allows the hosting company to focus on what they do best, which should be building great hosting platforms and delivering fast, friendly support.

I colocate servers in 3 different locations, Vancouver, Montreal, Marietta GA. We currently have 16 racks full of servers and have our 17th coming online in the next few weeks in Marietta. I used to be in San Jose too, but closed that location down a few years back. The key to maintaining uptime and troubleshooting dead servers is to have your own hardware in stock. At each location we carry spare cpu's, drives, power supplies, raid cards, ram, etc. in stock.

Thanks to investment in devices such as APC remote powerstrips & KVM/IP, my staff and I can work on the server as if we were directly logged into it with a monitor & keyboard. When needed, we can remotely powercycle (reboot) the servers. Thanks to our contracts with our providers we can have remote hands support in our private cage within 15 minutes and have them open our servers, replace any needed hardware and get things re-racked.

I offer a 4 hour hardware replacement SLA. In 9 years of offering this SLA, I've never had to pay out a credit on it. Why? Proper planning, proper procedures, server grade hardware, proper hardware monitoring.

Be wary of providers who don't tell you EXACTLY what hardware you are getting. It's really easy to offer a "dedicated server" based on hardware picked up at an auction for pennies. Many big providers who own their own datacenter do this. It makes sense from a financial perspective, you can get 100 lot's of pc's and put them on a bakers rack for next to nothing. When a server dies, offer the client a new server from the 100 lot. Of course, this means the client will be down for hours, losing potentially all of their data but hey! churn is a part of the biz, right?

Well, no, churn should be pretty damn low and customer satisfaction should be priority #1. We lose, on average, .6 clients per month (yes, we actually track it). Of course, we have never had a month where we gained more then 38 clients (offering that in the interest of full disclosure).

I have had outages that were out of my control, such as a power main exploding in Vancouver, causing the generator to kick in and then the generator overheated and shut down. Took the whole building offline. Guess what? The company that owned the datacenter was offline too. :)

In that instance, we had to live up to our 99.9% uptime guarantee and credited quite a bit of money to our clients that month. Luckily our second biggest cost (bandwidth & colo fee's) were credited to us as well since our colo provider was down.

Another thing to remember... in the hosting world, EVERYONE is a reseller of something. It's the nature of the internet.

Oh and WHT is full of shills. Lot's of good info there, but be _really_ careful of accepting recommendations on there. I've seen more providers blow up on WHT... just do your research.... there are plenty of great hosts but it's very easy to appear to be a big company when in reality it's a kid in highschool....

Further full disclosure, I do not run a big company. Other then the people pictured on our team page, we employ 3 part time employees.
 
Oh and I've toured well over 30 datacenters all over the world.

Some people's datacenters are no more then a glorified closet. Linksys, Dlink, Netgear crap equipment on city power with a couple $100 ups's... Yet they technically own their own datacenter.

My little company has spent close to $250k this year on network and server hardware alone...

eh, there's all sorts of different ways to do biz.
 
Yuppers.

Idologic colo's much like lostmind's company does.

I COULD resell my dinky hosting plan if I wanted to, I even have my own nameservers so few could find out...too much hassle though.

I just wanted a good host and I got one. :)

*I actually have created a account for a friend for testing, but he's doesn't need my support or help.
 
lostmind said:
THP,

I have to politely refute your first point.
That's fine, I'm just trying to help IGGY with an unbiased opinion. I don't own a hosting company, and the datacenter ownership is a factor to me. It's not the only factor.
 
My point is, owning a datacenter does not = great service or uptime or pricing or performance.

Your host, operates their own datacenter (but they don't technically OWN it) - how does this improve the level of service they provide you?

While I think your host is a pretty good host - they do what they say they will do pretty darn well. But they don't offer entry level packages, they don't offer much customisation on their server platforms and they don't offer the level of service many smaller providers do. Although they do offer a lot more service then many or perhaps even most "large" providers. Most "large" are simply in the business of racking and lighting up hardware and letting the client manage the rest.

Their SLA is no more competitive then most players in the industry (and definitely no better then my own, but not really tooting my horn here). I would think that checking out the Terms of Service and SLA of a potential provider to be more important then whether or not they own a datacenter.
 
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