Hosts

[John Smith]

Hi guys,

Just out of curiosity and to spark some discussion, who do you guys use
for Web Hosts? How much do you tackle on your own, vs how much do you
expect/want the web hosts to do?

Do you prefer dedicated servers? VPSes? Shared Hosts?

Who is local for hosting? Do you prefer local or does it matter to you?

I'm always up for local hosting if I can find it at a decent rate.

[Sean Carnell]

I'm local for hosting :o)  I have 7 servers in a rack at Midcoast Internet's data center in Rockland, have had them there for 6 years now, before that I colocated two boxes on a shared rack in the same place. During that time the service has been at least as stable as any of the major providers, speed is always good, they have generator backup etc.

I don't easily trust web hosts; I had a (very) bad experience many years ago, and have heard more horror stories since then. It's nice to not be the "man in the middle" when things go wrong. However I'm sure many web hosts are reliable.. just a case of once bitten, twice shy.

Sean

[Kevin Callahan]

I've used Dreamhost for many years now. Back in 2006 when I switched to them there were hardly any shared Rails hosts and they were small and getting a lot of buzz online for their service and pricing. Overall I've been pretty happy with them. I get shell access, and the control panel is powerful and pretty easy to use. Performance is good most of the time though every once in a while I see a hiccup. Also, their support is great, especially for a low-level account like I now have. I used to have an account that qualified for phone support and their techs were always knowledgeable. For critical issues I can still pay for a callback if needed. Their backups are pretty sweet, though there's no way to restore prior to what's on the disk.

I've also used Verio VPS for many years for situations where I needed a full OS to be able to customize the full stack. Pretty good pricing, great support as long as the server config isn't too far off their spec, though performance sucks. Not sure how many VPS they cram onto a single physical box or what the latency is within the abstraction layers, though the performance shows. However, they do backup to tape, so if the data isn't in the disk backup, they can restore though it takes several days and a hefty fee.

I've heard good things about Textdrive, and of course the Engine Yard is an awesome rails solution especially for apps that have the potential need to quickly and substantially scale out.

I've also worked for a few years on a server at MIS data center (funny to call it that if you've ever been in there :) in Rockland. Never had a problem with the network or the power that I'm aware of.

-k

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[Justin Russell]

Yup, for basic stuff, I've been happy overall with DreamHost pretty
much for the same reasons as Kevin (not to mention the price). Their
account management is really slick, and if something does go wrong
they've been pretty up front about it on their status blog.

For those times when you need a little more (VPS) control, I've had
really good luck with Slicehost. Server management is easy,
streamlined, and *quick*. I love that I can reboot a box from my iPod
touch with the Slicehost app, too, but that's probably just the geek
in me talking. :)

> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Sean Carnell <sean.carn...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > I'm local for hosting :o)  I have 7 servers in a rack at Midcoast
> > Internet's data center in Rockland, have had them there for 6 years now,
> > before that I colocated two boxes on a shared rack in the same place. During
> > that time the service has been at least as stable as any of the major
> > providers, speed is always good, they have generator backup etc.
>
> > I don't easily trust web hosts; I had a (very) bad experience many years
> > ago, and have heard more horror stories since then. It's nice to not be the
> > "man in the middle" when things go wrong. However I'm sure many web hosts
> > are reliable.. just a case of once bitten, twice shy.
>
> > Sean
>
> >  --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> > "From the Hip" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to from-t...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

> > from-the-hip...@googlegroups.com<from-the-hip%2Bunsubscribe@google groups.com>