Recommend me a Web Hosting Provider
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I work for a cloud computing company. We foolishly host our website on one of our own servers. This means if our data center goes down and service is disrupted (which does happen from time to time) our website goes down as well.
This is clearly a problem as we have no way to provide messaging to our clients during such disasters.
So I have finally convinced the powers to move to a third-party provider to avoid this. We obviously need redundancy and speed is always a factor. What do you suggest? Where should I go for this service?
There are so many stinkin' options that I'm finding the research to be a bit daunting.
Thanks!
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I have been using Hostmonster for my websites for years now and I haven't experienced any problems that would cause me to switch. Hostmonster also makes it easier to host several domains at the same time.
Hope this helped!
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Without knowing your requirements, this may or may not be a decent recommendation. But assuming you're simply concerned with keeping your own site up, I recently started using JustHost. They're very inexpensive, and their 4 yr package is under $3/mo, with unlimited bandwidth, storage, emails and DBs. I've also found their techs to be responsive. Can't speak to their CS technical abilities, though, as I haven't had reason to check that out.
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Thanks guys - Here's a bit more info:
- Don't need email
- Don't need a ton of space
- Not a wordpress site so none of that.
- Need easy access to tools/redirects
- Want Redundancy and I'd like the service to recognize a user's location by IP and assign the closest server to them
- Cost is not a factor
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Jesse,
I would have a question for you on this: Since it is your business site you want to host, are you wanting a dedicated server? When you say money is no object, I would immediately be looking to dedicated with redundancy.
For ours, we use Firehost. Over the years I have used several and can only recommend two: Rackspace and Firehost. With Rackspace, I had a major US network for over 100K members and was amazed at how well it always ran. With Firehost, we made a switch from a Local hosting provider after having a 'dedicated' in name only server with the guy whose father goes somewhere. It sucked and that is as kind as I can be.
If you are worried re being able to communicate with clients, etc. in the event of an outage or other problem, I would be surprised to see you going with a simple hosting provider or reseller. The reason we use dedicated is solely because of our clients. Firehost was next to nothing for the migration, had a few small hiccups that got addressed in a reasonable time frame for the issue. The cost of migration was zero, and the cost of ongoing dedicated with them is very reasonable. We also use Dynect to allow queries over TCP as opposed to an open firewall or an inability to answer same due to firewall config. The cost on Dynect is an additional $10 per domain per month. (Dynect handles Twitter's servers to my understanding.)
Hope that helps,
Robert
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Hi Jesse,
You might consider www.dreamhost.com. It has worked perfectly for us. It has an intuitive control panel, easy to manage redirects plus they have a content deliver network (they are partnered with Cloudflare) for your redundancy needs.
Best of luck!
Finn
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Highly Rated unmanaged dedicated hosting linode.com
Highly Rated managed/unmanaged dedicated hosting mediatemple.com (Have a private fiber line between east coast and west coast, great if you have clients on both coasts)
You should also check out https://www.statuspage.io/ it is not hosting service per se, but a place to update your status of your site for customers to know connected with twitter its works great. Check out Vimeos: http://status.vimeo.com/
"Want Redundancy and I'd like the service to recognize a user's location by IP and assign the closest server to them"
First, if you aren't already, get a hosting company that offers IP-failover/shared IPs. Linode, Slicehost (among many) offer this. See:http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/10/28/ip-failover-high-av...
Basically, you have two VPSs (or servers) and if the first goes down, the second jumps in to take its place on the same IP address so that you don't have to change the DNS or anything.
Second, you can turn your TTLs down for your DNS so that when you make changes they happen faster.
Third, you can have an offsite VPS mirror with a different hosting company ready to roll.
That's usually how I deal with the issue of high availability. Have two boxes with one company with a shared-IP setup so that if one goes down, the second just takes over. Then have an off-site mirror with a different company and have my DNS TTLs set low enough that hopefully most people can get access in a couple hours.
The problem is that it all costs money. Rather than one server, you now have three. Costs have tripled to move you from, say, 99.5% reliability to 99.9%. So, you're paying a lot more for a very marginal improvement and the question that you have to ask is whether that tiny marginal improvement warrants paying triple.... more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074747
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Hi Jesse,
Will recommend :-
Hostgator - Shared Hosting. They actually allow you to burst upto 25% of Memory Limit (which is massive at 12 GB) for upto 90 sec, no capping on Bandwidth, HDD. Servers are recently upgraded too. Very cheap at just 50-60$ a year
Knownhost SSD VPS - The best and foremost leader in VPS now comes with Cloud SSD Plans. 1.5 GB Plan stars at around 50$ / mo with VPS
Rackspace Cloud - Undoubtedly - the best in cloud hosting. Cloud Server for 2 GB starts at around 87 $ / mo
Liquid Host for Dedicated - Most Powerful Server in Dedicated Hosting. Dual Core Server starts at around 299 $ / mo
May check on your requirement, if you need any assistance in setting up server. do let know !!
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If performance is your thing: http://serverbear.com/ (performance comparison)
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Awesome question and awesome thread. Thanks for asking the question Jesse. We are in the same position. However, for us money IS an object. Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread. We may take some of these suggestions for ourselves. Cheers!
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Jesse
I was going to basically say exactly what Robert has said about fire host they are the best hands down.
Robert thumbs up man
Here are some highlights you might want to look at as well
Jesse,
I have spent some time configuring a list of some of the best web hosts out there you can check them out I think and they all will meet your needs.
I will admit I have a favorite and that is FIREHOST I have been using them for years and they've never let me down same thing with Dyn DNS so you know if you want to or have to save money on DNS DNS made easy is a excellent bargain
you said
Thanks guys - Here's a bit more info:
- Don't need email
- Don't need a ton of space
- Not a wordpress site so none of that.
- Need easy access to tools/redirects
- Want Redundancy and I'd like the service to recognize a user's location by IP and assign the closest server to them
- Cost is not a factor
you are definitely thinking the right way about hosting. I can tell you I have accounts with a lot of hosting companies I will never use cheap hosting as it is junk.
I have found my favorite post for uptime along with incredible speed and security is sometimes a tough call I have accounts with 26 hosting providers so I really do know what I'm talking about when it comes to these providers.
FireHost It is far and away the fastest, best service, and by far the most secure host available. It's not cheap, but you have exactly what you asked for the ability to be probably the best host available right now.
You can choose between Nginx, Apache, IS, tomcat & Light speed
everything is managed this includes free on boarding of any website.
DNS is offered by the best in business 2 million queries per month for only $10 by DynECT that is a fantastic deal.
Then for a content delivery network edge cast is outstanding at $50 a month it is a great deal and everything is under control of one company managing DNS that is the highest uptime in the world along with the fastest content delivery network in North America. also now carries with it Google page speed built-in to edge cast CDN
this gives you the best of everything in my opinion for instance if you're in Vienna Austria or your client is they will have a point of presence
**DFW01 **(Dallas, TX)
**PHX01 **(Phoenix, AZ)
LHR01**(London, EN)**
AMS01**(Amsterdam, NL)**
Vienna, Austria
CDN Point of Presence
not only in the United States are you fully covered but with the content delivery network and the steel for DynECT DNS you will have a point of presence for each of them in the same area many times
Frankfurt, Germany
CDN & DNS Point of Presence
these are all over the world here are a couple examples but literally everywhere you want the Internet to exist this hasn't covered with all tier 1 data providers like Level 3 and NTT
Chicago, Illinois
CDN & DNS Point of Presence
however if they're in Frankfurt hub city they will have the fastest speeds when adding the DNS and anycast pop along with the points of presence from the CDN
to show you their database's here's a map and you can set up plans to have a server running in London and one in Arizona or one in Texas and the other an Arizona fluid
http://www.firehost.com/secure-cloud/data-centers
http://www.firehost.com/compare
http://www.firehost.com/secure-cloud/performance-benchmarks
I will recommend some other hosts I have used and had a great experience with and also back that up with some data of their uptime.
I wish this company would run Nginx off the bat however they are flexible and everything they do is 100% managed one of the best hosting companies in the world.
Well
Datapipe - 100% uptime over 7 years
http://info.datapipe.com/stratosphere
https://bluebox.net/ (under Moz)
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pair Networks - World Class Web Hosting
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https://www.hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/managed-services/
Hope this help's,
Thomas
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FireHost is #1
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Thank you Robert, this definitely helps. Honestly I've been leaning towards Rackspace from the get-go and I'm considering looking at CloudFlare to work along side it as I like the way they serve data and provide cached backups in the event of an outage.
Honestly, I don't think I need a dedicated server. We are a cloud hosting company so we have tons of our own servers in our own data centers. That said, I don't want our website hosted on those servers as it is right now because when we go down, our website goes down too and we are left with no way to notify our clients as to what is happening.
The login portals, backend, and everything else is going to stay on our own subdomains where it resides now. The only thing I'm going to be moving is the HTML files. Nothing that affects functionality will move.
So because of that it doesn't really seem like I'd need a dedicated... The chances of Rackspace going down at the same time as our own servers are pretty stinkin' slim, so I feel like that combined with cloudflare should get me what I need... What do you think?
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Thank you Thomas! This helps immensely. I'm going to look into Firehost. Sounds like I could use them and skip CloudFlare all together.
I definitely need localization for our Canadian clients as we actually have a fairly large number of them and we have our own Canadian data center as well in Vancouver, so this helps. It really is an amazing difference for Canadian users accessing Canadian servers as opposed to American. The speed difference is instantly noticeable.
Anyway thanks!
A big thanks to everybody for participating in this thread!
I've got a lot to research here! I'll let you all know what we end up going with just to provide closure
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Hi Jesse,
** there are some really great choices there. And a lot in Canada. Peer 1 is going to have the most databases and Canada by quite a bit to the best of my knowledge. However you can reach speeds that are equal from a database in Arizona buying off of a Geo load balanced CDN with any cast DNS that also happens to run Google page speed natively and SPDY**
** so in the quote below when it talks about Canada I pasted the explanation from the links below and just give you an idea of how safe this company is and I sure do some fantastic companies but I would still pick this you can do whatever you want and never worry about hosting this is the built-in enterprise security that comes with every fire host account**
http://www.firehost.com/secure-cloud/enterprise-security
** to see what I mean about fire host in Canada**
FireHost is in CA
http://www.firehost.com/secure-cloud/business-continuity/dns-advanced-traffic-management
Geo Traffic Management allows state level (in US), province level (in Canada), and country level (everywhere else) correlations to be tailored for your business needs.
http://www.firehost.com/secure-cloud/cdn
Real-Time Traffic Management
To generate the fastest response times possible, traditional Traffic Management methodologies require DNS hosting customers to pre-determine and set traffic routing parameters pairing historical user information with the geographically closest data center, rather than live or expected trends. Much improved, real time traffic management available from FireHost analyzes traffic flow and data center response times on the fly, taking the guesswork out of traffic routing decisions, enabling your web applications to automatically receive visitors from the nearest hosting infrastructure, in the fastest and most efficient way.
Geo Traffic Management
Overshadowing the regional rule sets (GSLB feature) currently available within the Traffic Management service, Geo Traffic Management as part of Advanced Traffic Management DNS hosting configuration enables customers to control domain name server responses based on the most granular, customized, and geographically driven rule sets in the hosting industry.
Geo Traffic Management allows state level (in US), province level (in Canada), and country level (everywhere else) correlations to be tailored for your business needs. You can even select default or fallback regions for queries that do not match any configured rules, and customize responses based on country of originating DNS resolver for a large set of supported record types (A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, SPF, SRV, SSHFP and DHCID). All in the name of helping ensure extremely fast response times.
DNS Hosting with Advanced Traffic Management Includes:
- Traffic shaping decisions happen outside the data center infrastructure, local hardware failures do not pose a downtime risk; traffic routes to the next available and established failover location
- Plus two additional features that give you control and confidence that your web applications and databases will serve up a great end user experience at all times
- DNS Hosting across seventeen points of presence, on five continents
- Short hops (< 15ms in US, < 30ms in Europe, < 50ms in APAC)
- DNS Traffic Management features for additional granularity
- Data replication assistance from FireHost's expert engineers
- DNS Hosting with Active Failover
- High availability for each secure cloud server
- The ability to use multiple data centers. A true benefit since quality for these services can vary by region around the world
FireHost and Your DNS with Advanced Traffic Management
** all the best,**
** Thomas**
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Jesse mentioned Cloudflare and its feature to keep your site up when the servers go down. I am looking for some experience with that feature because I also had high hopes for this feature, but it turns out when one of my sites went down it displayed the homepage and the rest was down. For a dynamic site it wasn't very useful, Is it a different experience for pro or enterprise accounts?
Thanks guys
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Because conflict is capable of holding a cash at multiple points around the globe. It is able to simply cash your site and serve that content to any visitor that shows up just like when you set your DNS TTL value if you've ever changed your domain or had to move a domain you will know what I'm talking about.
Because clouldflare is a verse proxy server and not a true CDN does not mean that it cannot hold cash on certain points of presentsHowever you can do this for any real content delivery network as well Edge cast, and Max CDN, Net DNA, CDN 77All you do is set a true cash like a sea name into your www.then simply set the TTL extremely high everything with cash and you want to make sure that you do cash everything in the mirror like scenario then run the CDN and you will have lights out protection however I would not choose a hosting company for that reason alone as the downtime has gotten so minuscule on some of these hosts that they really should not have anything more than 10 hours in five years of downtime.
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I would recommend Rackspace with redundant virtual servers at two or more locations. I have had good luck with them on non word press sites. If you were on word press I wold recommend Zippykid which is basically Rackspace with a front end and word press support.
As a side note if you are ever looking for guest bloggers I spent 20 years in the space, have 11 issued patents(22 pending) and love writing about the subject.
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Hi Ron,
I would agree with you that if he was doing WordPress Zippy kid is one of the best choices out there. However I believe he is doing hosting for all types of websites.
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Thomas,
As I stated above I usually use Rackspace if it is a non Wordpress web site. If it is a financial institution with a disaster recovery plan Sunguard is a good choice for a redundant data center.
Ron
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