Hosting Discussion (for those searching for good hosts)

[Honor]

I'm doing some research on my end, and like a few other people I've come across, am looking for opinions/experiences/tips and tricks etc to finding a good, affordable hosting service. Anyone with knowledge or experience please pipe in and lead some of us strugglers to the light!

Honor's Experience

Siteground
I did not like Siteground at all for forum hosting. It was insanely expensive, and for $140 a year (that I was later told would almost double when the subscription was renewed as I had bought in on a promotional), 5 forum members and the Ajax shout box pushed us over bandwidth/script hit limitations. I do not recommend to those starting out unless you can afford the major business hosting plan.

GoDaddy
I'm not on the "account owning" end of this hosting service - a friend of mine is hosting our board for now and I only have FTP and Database access, nothing else. As far as that goes, it's not the best - my FTP times out for several minutes at a time. Chrome doesn't like how something is set up but without further access I don't know exactly why or if it's fixable.

Small No-Name Hosting
Excellent customer service, the smaller the business. Frequent issues, however, and the possible threat of a sudden shut down. Overall a good experience, especially for the price (where else am I gonna find $1 a month with NO limitations whatsoever except for disk space?). Not sure I will try this again. I only lost $5 out of the deal though, after the host shut down unexpectedly.


Honor's Research

FatCow
Fairly decently priced. No cPanel. 75,000 hits per user per day limit (no clue if this is good or not), otherwise, "unlimited" except for disk space. Pay on a yearly basis.

Aspinetworks
Nicely priced. No cPanel. Small company, seems to only have one tech support person, fast response times. Not sure on the limitations.

Blue Host
This one left me with the most intrigue. Best price so far. Didn't give me the hourly limitations, but when I described our setting, they were positive script hits etc wouldn't be an issue. Pay on a yearly basis.


Anyone know anything about any of these host that would shine a good (or bad) light on them?

[Obsidian]

Godaddy is a baaaaad choice. Bad. Bad bad. Run don't walk.


Anyways...
If you've a decent amount of server admin experience, try your hand at a VPS. It's farrrrrr more control and less BS about queries, number of databases, etc. It's just "here's the amount of bandwidth you get, here's the amount of RAM, here's the amount of HDD space you get. Have fun."
Of course, there's ToS to behave by to keep the naughty boys out, but other than that you're on your own.

Currently, I'm helping run a box with Sam; we're hosted with Linode. No issues so far.



Oh, and on any system an AJAX "shoutbox" is a bad idea. You should use something that's actually made for real-time chat.

[Sir Glen]

Aspinetworks
Nicely priced. No cPanel. Small company, seems to only have one tech support person, fast response times. Not sure on the limitations.

I've been working with ApisNetworks for a couple years now, and know people who have been hosting their site with them for a very, very long time, so I thought I should put in a plug here.

First, the owner is Matt Saladna. He does the majority of the tech support, but there are actually other hired individuals who do tech support as well. It's not a one-man team, he's just VERY hands-on with his clients. Tech support has, for me, always been handled in less than an hour and USUALLY in less than 15 minutes. VERY good. They offer a huge range of functions and features and Matt has even helped out debugging my code, for free. I was an idiot and thought a problem I was having was a server issue, he figured out the problem from my description, searched my code, and told me where to fix it. Awesome.

They offer shared and private hosting, but their shared hosting is great. Their servers are housed at the AtlantaNAP data center, and their equipment is state of the art. It's really a slick opperation. The owner and staff live just a few miles away and can be (and are) on site to fix problems in minutes. They do shared hosting out of multiple servers (I have shared hosting accounts on two of them) and as I mentioned to private hosting on dedicated servers. As for the control panel; they wrote it, from the ground up. I used cPanel for years before swithing and I was skeptical, but I talked to a guy who had been using it for years and he swore up-and-down that it was awesome. Turns out he was right. It's a MILLION times more stable than any cPanel installation I've used. Way more flexible in general as well. And if you have any problems with it they'll do what it takes to (quickly) fix the situation. The only bug report I filed, ever, resulted in a fix being implimented system wide in under an hour.

Compared to any of the big-time hosting companies it's a tiny operation, yes. But it's a really top-notch operation. I can't recommend them highly enough.

If you want more specific info about the control panel, the colocation center, the servers, etc. just check out their site.

No I don't get paid for this recommendation.

[Honor]

I did like dealing with Matt - he was extremely quick and when I expressed a few concerns, he first pointed me towards a demo administration panel so I could see how their version of cPanel works, and then recommended the lowest package so I can upgrade as needed. Very honorable in my book (I've dealt with much less honorable *coughsitegroundcough*).

@Obsidian - I've been dying to find an IRC implementation for the board. I've used it before, and at one time had even set up my own channel (not sure I remember how to now though...) - but I do have a problem with my members being lazy. I can't get them to go two levels deep into forum structure to see what they're missing, much less will I be able to convince them to click an extra link AND download a client to run the channel offsite. I can't even get half of them on our facebook page, where we keep them updated on site problems

Do you know of a way to embed an IRC chat into the board itself, to appear like the Ajax chat (and not have advertisements)?

[Obsidian]

No advertisements? Never happens unless you host the script yourself, which again kills a server.

Mibbit is your best bet if the IRC network (like freenode) doesn't block the client.

[Sir Glen]

I haven't found any good way to do it. My boards are all IRC heavy, because the user base is largely from a clan in a browsergame we used to play together. All our coordination for the clan (actually, all clans in the game) was done through IRC, so we're all extremely familiar with it. The nice thing about Mibbit is there is no download client, it works really well, and for a small fee you can set up some pretty nice embedded "widgets". I haven't found a good way to integrate that directly with a board, but it does mean it's one click to join the channel of your choice. Simplifies it for people who aren't used to IRC.

All my channels are an irc.coldfront.net, again because of the gaming community that we were a part of. It's a great server though.

[Obsidian]

I haven't found any good way to do it. My boards are all IRC heavy, because the user base is largely from a clan in a browsergame we used to play together. All our coordination for the clan (actually, all clans in the game) was done through IRC, so we're all extremely familiar with it. The nice thing about Mibbit is there is no download client, it works really well, and for a small fee you can set up some pretty nice embedded "widgets". I haven't found a good way to integrate that directly with a board, but it does mean it's one click to join the channel of your choice. Simplifies it for people who aren't used to IRC.

All my channels are an irc.coldfront.net, again because of the gaming community that we were a part of. It's a great server though.

Do an iframe and a custom page, and you've got it easily accessible.

[spaceace]

i've used icdsoft.com for several years and have never had any issues or down time. 24/7 tech support and hosting in the US as well as offshore. i've switched several people from hostgator and godaddy to my host and they have all said they are glad they made the switch. i'm happy with mine

[Leos]

Hi! I'm going to upgrade from a free blog platform to some good paid blog hosting, but not very expensive. I don't need much space and options, just enough for a blog. I though of the most famous providers Hostgator or Godaddy, but I see these two are not too popular here...Which one of your preferred hosting services would you advise for my needs?
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iphone app development

[Obsidian]

Hi! I'm going to upgrade from a free blog platform to some good paid blog hosting, but not very expensive. I don't need much space and options, just enough for a blog. I though of the most famous providers Hostgator or Godaddy, but I see these two are not too popular here...Which one of your preferred hosting services would you advise for my needs?

If you can swing it, I still recommend a VPS. I just moved my own server to a Linode 768 (Sam's server and mine are both 768's, and are setup very similarly), and it runs beautifully. Running your own server is not for the faint of heart though, it takes dedication, but if you can do that you'll gain experience in a lot of things.