Recommend me a Web Hosting Provider
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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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Hi Ron,
I suppose I did not answer that question very well.
I understand you were saying you prefer rack space, and I have nothing against them as host however I think there are that there are better choices out there. Primarily I agree with you is the way to set up a server redundantly with two data centers however my personal choice and a company that has never let me down is FireHost
all the best,
Thomas
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Thomas,
These guys look good! Is their service as good (or preferably better) than Rackspace? Are there areas where they fall short?
Always looking for good hosts!
Ron
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Hi Ron,
I apologize for not getting back to you earlier.
Great question.
I feel they are superior to rack space in every way shape and form.
Let's take the content delivery networks both companies offer with rack space you get Akamai's watered-down CDN.
With fire host you get edge cast's full power CDN a content delivery network that consistently ranks at the top when it comes to speed and the ability to do some pretty unique things.
Security fire host is hands-down the winner.
Smart options for people who care about uptime DynECT DNS at a very very low price.
Using Dyn assures you will have uptime all the time and the fact that they are the fastest DNS host as well makes it an easy decision.
The negatives cost you're going to be spending more money with fire host simply because you are getting more.
The page.ly scandal things were said about fire host the were are true I have added more about this below.
If this is a negative it would depend on the person however they do not offer a non-managed solution.
The way I feel is
Fire host in my opinion has no shortcomings in comparison to rack space for my use I want speed, security, support as good or better than rack space, knowledge that my company by host with will not come back and tell me sorry in the fine print we cannot do XY and Z because of that we are sorry. Which we both know does not help us,
having used rack space quite a bit I am confident you will be very happy with firehost
one of the things I could think of that people might want that fire host would not provide our
inexpensive non managed hosting
rack space as a high quality cloud and has the ability to offer rack space servers and rack space cloud and many more options but for right now the two differences would be fire host will only allow a fully managed solution so when you compare a firehost set up and a rack space set up I personally believe in managed hosting although I love hosting nobody wants to be told sorry we can't help you by any hosting provider if they ever have an issue. I have made it a rule of mine never to use unmanaged hosting except in extremely rare situations.
Currently fire host more of a we have built-in XY and Z this is speed and truly Ford Knox security
as I am sure you are aware of many managed WordPress hosting companies
fire host has been unfairly blamed for downtime that Pagely customers received when issues occurred firehouse was blamed by pagely for downtime when the truth is fire host was up & Pagely a company dedicated to manage WordPress hosting ran different hardware and software utilized specifically for WordPress this led to separate issues that meant pagely could be down BUT FireHost was never down. (FireHost is one of the best WordPress hosts ever especially because they allow you to run a system without a control panel)
if you go to Page.ly and now powered by look at their website you will see it says "press armor"
This also is reflected on the fire host website where they no longer list pagely as a partner because of the fact Pagely was not accurately showing people that there was a difference.
My suggestion to anybody with any questions is to speak to fire host who will show their perfect uptime record along with the fact that a company I've known for a long time called Dyn.com has partnered with fire host what makes this unique is because Dyn has a 12 year uptime record and when you're in the DNS business that is a huge deal. Meaning they have a higher uptime then anyone else in managed DNS at any price.
To put that type of trust and loyalty into a company takes a lot and the fact that my friends at Dyn have done this and fire host's openness of their uptime makes me assured that they have no issues.
The difference I can see from personal use is fire host is faster I know that it is hard to gauge because front-end code matters so much however running identical websites I've seen significant speed increases.
I know every company that touts a faster than the other guy independent test may be looked on with some question however I personally leave that these numbers are very accurate from my own use.
http://www.firehost.com/downloads/FireHost-cloud-performace-benchmarks
the downside that I could see is price to be honest not everyone cares that much about performance and security I know you know how important it is because of the small amount you've told me tells me you know quite a bit about what you know about hosting.
The other differences would be you would have to use a different company for your e-mail as fire host does not provide the service. I believe that this is not an issue for many people. If they are currently happy with their e-mail host use them if not find another and to be honest rack space is one of the best e-mail hosting companies out there in my opinion for hosted exchange as well as their own rack space e-mail.
I use a combination of many different e-mail hosting companies to see which is going to be the best.
So far I've had very good luck with rack space, Peer1 exchange, Google apps has become maybe the best of both worlds however I am interested in what they're going to morph into.
Then of course using a high quality third-party support/migration team with Microsoft's exchange 365 is a very cost-effective method for a high quality answer to those who do not want to move off of hosted exchange.
Intermedia and many others are always there to meet the need as well. Although I cannot speak for anyone other than intermedia feel intermedia is an outstanding one-stop shop for e-mail.
I should say this currently my plastics companies main e-mail is being hosted on liquid webs dedicated exchange 2007 this is becoming dated and because it's base price is just shy of $1000 a month. It is also something we are changing by hiring a company that will do all the support for Microsoft exchange however we are hosting this on its own cloud set up with fire host just to let you know how highly I personally feel towards them.
The reason for this is e-mail is extremely important and also extremely easy to break into. However having had service with fire host for over 3 years and never experiencing a minute of downtime I feel very comfortable in the move.
Sorry to go on so long about all this but as somebody with multiple is in over 40 hosting accounts with different hosting companies I can tell you there are some differences between them which I'm sure you know.
My best advice is called the support line at 2 AM then tell them wrong number just to see how quickly they pick up.
Also call them go over your specific issues with them and how they would address them I am certain you will be happy with the person you are connected to giving you a complete knowledgeable answer.
Better yet try them out with a dummy site called out issues that you've had in the past with other companies see how they address it.
These are the types of things I've done to reach my conclusion of who's the best web host available right now and my answer to everyone is fire host.
Now if were talking managed WordPress solutions.
Zippykid, WPengine, web synthesis, presslabs, Pagely & get flywheel
the get flywheel host is one I must state I do not have much confidence in as far as their ability to have a truly secure network. Therefore I have used my closed beta and I can tell you I will look at them again in another 6 months however as of right now I could not give an honest recommendation to anyone that they use them simply because they do things like this for example. Make one password and username for login, SFTP, and database this is something that is intended to be shared with your developer similar To the Way, Zippy kid allows people to set up a website the difference being ZippyKid does all the security the right way. Making it a safe and effective place to host WordPress sites.
I wish that Pagely had a better set up however unlike Vid at Zippy kid they do not believe in putting as much into their infrastructure that's what led to this issue in my opinion and I think the guise of fire host can do the best job of explaining it.
I hope I was able to answer your question and I am sorry if I did not have more negatives. I will try to think of some I know it is strange but I'm sure you understand once you get the perfect hosting company for what you're doing and they prove to you that there no joke you take that to heart.
Another huge plus for fire host is they are one of the very few managed hosting companies or non managed hosting companies I will allow you in the setup to pick between Apache (great but has been eclipsed by better software) Nginx (the future in my opinion so much faster than anything else out there) Light-speed (everything you can do on Apache if you need an exact replica that is 9 times faster and more secure.) Apache tomcat (for you those who want that service) & Microsoft IIS
I understand many hosting companies will allow you to run Nginx but unfortunately they will not support it. Which in my opinion leaves people with a big problem. You never want your host to tell you I'm sorry but that part of your plan is not covered by us.
Please don't look at this as an attack on rack space it is not in any way shape or form in fact I feel rack space is one of the better hosting companies on the planet. However in my opinion and from what I've learned firsthand use there are better hosting companies the best I've come across yet is fire host. I'm willing to stake my name on it and honestly that's something I don't do very often.
Ron if you'd like to speak more about it I would be more than happy to chat with you please fill free to private message me or reach out to me via e-mail which is available on my profile.
Respectfully,
Thomas Zickell
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Ron,
private message me about some of your guest blogging as I would be interested.
I myself have patents please fill free to take a look Google me.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
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Hi Dana,
May I ask approximately what you are looking to spend?
If you give me a good idea of what you need to host and what you're looking to spend I can tell you from using many hosting companies what my opinion would be.
I know firsthand if you want to save money running an Nginx set up verse Apache will save you a great deal of money because you will not need as much RAM to do the same thing as you would if you are using Apache
While I will never advocate anyone using dream host they do have a decent page on the differences between running Apache and Nginx this is primarily true across the board and I would recommend single hop or an SSD VPS via liquid Web you can get away with using such a small amount of RAM that your cost would be extremely low
Only Nginx can run SPDY something anyone with an e-commerce website should care about hosting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Web_Server_Performance_Comparison
http://www.webpronews.com/nginx-virtual-host-configuration-migrating-from-apache-2012-03
This is interesting out Apache2 verse Nginx however keep in mind that if you run a varnish server on top of Nginx not only will you beat Apache2 everywhere you will save an immense amount of RAM.
http://systemsarchitect.net/apache2-vs-nginx-for-php-application/
I would recommend liquid Web SSD Nginx for $50 a month that is a steal when you're considering a managed solution and full VPS
If you call liquid Web and ask them to set up a solution exactly as you wish they will do it. As will most of the providers I have listed above. However at $50 a month managed I don't think there are many other deals
https://www.liquidweb.com/managed-vps-hosting/
A small Orange is a fantastic hosting company that just recently added telephone support which is a big plus for me. My brother hosts with them and he has had no downtime in the past two years. Running a VPS with Nginx completely managed for very little money under $50 a month with SSD drives take a look at their VPS offerings there cloud VPS which is extremely fast and very well priced maybe the best solution take a look at what you can get if you go to $30 you can run two Cores
http://asmallorange.com/hosting/cloud/
you may also want to look in http://moz.com/perks#all
You will find this offer however I have never used site ground but I do trust Moz their use of cloud flair is not really something I would treasure or consider a content delivery network however it will speed up your site.
3 months FREE Hosting
SiteGround's hosting make websites faster for better SEO, free CDN and unique caching technology to double or triple website performance.
Another solution that you can talk price with them directly about is
If you wish to manage your own VPS or use a shared solution here are some alternatives
I would look into Linode for a low-cost VPS
https://library.linode.com/web-servers/nginx
In fact you could run a very low cost VPS on digital ocean in fact digital ocean is so inexpensive that this is the cost of a full VPS
1 VPS 512MB RAM, 20GB SSD Disk, and 1TB Transfer for $5/mo! https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
So you know they were found to be faster than Amazon when compared head-to-head by a company called getflywheel.com
Although Amazon is never a bad option however support is lacking.
For good support and inexpensive pricing liquid Web
A2Hosting
http://www.a2hosting.com/nginx-hosting
or
As far as people being concerned about having to write 301 redirects and writing them in Nginx I have found this tool to be perfect
Please feel free to private message me or e-mail me as you have been very helpful to me in the past I would very much like to help you if I can in the situation.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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