

Ask YC: Recommend a hosting company. - samwise

Simple request. I will be launching my site in a couple days, but i need a reliable host.<p>Looking to spend between $50-$150 a month. Needs to scale up easily. Has to be able to survive Digg and Techcrunch (wishful thinking). Will be severing images mostly.<p>Trying to avoid amazon.
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patrickg-zill
Buy your own 1U system, install max ram and max disk you can or can afford.

Colocate system for under $100 per month.

See <http://webhostingtalk.com>, look under "Colo Hosting Offers" forum for
various offers from $39 per month on up. If you can get an offer that is local
to where you are, that is better.

Reason: if you are serving images you will want lots of local disk space, and
RAM to serve as disk cache or to serve as RAM for your webserver with its
1000+ connections.

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tx
This advice is not for everybody. We needed our own mailserver with a TON of
storage, so getting our own U1 worked best. But for most people it's too much
hassle.

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nreece
From experience I would suggest you to get a VPS (with 512mb-1gb RAM) to start
with, and then move to a dedicated server if the need arises. You'll find a
lot of VPS offers and discussions at the WebHostingTalk forums (
<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103> and
<http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104> )

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tzury
slicehost.com, not expensive, scale-up, scale-down, no extra fees, various
selection of distros. simply great!

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NoBSWebDesign
I really enjoy using Slicehost. You get a whole lot of server for very little
money. The trade-off is that unlike many other VPS's you must set up the
entire server yourself from scratch through the command line. This can be a
little frustrating the first week, but VERY rewarding in that you learn the
intricacies of server setup in the process (assuming you don't already have
that capability).

Even more importantly though, they have excellent support. Forums, wikis, and
live chat through their site. I remember getting help one time when I was
first starting out, chatting with one of the owners at 3am on a Tuesday night
as he helped me work out a bug with my server.

~~~
projectileboy
I second all of the above - I'm a complete Linux know-nothing turd, and the
articles in the forums got me completely up and running. I'm a big fan of the
Slicehosters.

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altano
If you're serving up mostly static or cached content, you can survive any
onslaught of traffic with a VPS, and I'll throw in my vote for Rimuhosting

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ericb
Agreed. Rimuhosting rocks. They have awesome support, too.

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carpo
I've got a vps at slicehost and they've been great - would definately
recommend them. For my next project im thinking of going Joyent, as their
storage seems more scalable. I was thinking of using Amazon S3 with Slicehost,
but am worried about the speed. The bandwidth costs seem pretty expensive too.

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icky
> For my next project im thinking of going Joyent, as their storage seems more
> scalable.

One of my past clients used them (around when they merged with TextDrive).
Their Solaris setup is a PITA if you're used to Linux or *BSD. If you set up a
25-cent swear jar, you'll probably be able to pay your hosting fees in
quarters!

The other thing to realize is that Joyent slices scale vertically: a larger
slice is just a larger piece of a very large Solaris box, and there's a limit
to how big they can get. (Don't know if it's still true, but at the time, they
also had no way of directly upgrading a slice "in-place").

You'd be better off figuring out how to scale your storage (preferably with
redundancy) across multiple computers. Look into MogileFS or Hadoop's DFS.

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thorax
<http://www.xlhost.com> is who I use and they have solid dedicated server
prices and no contracts. Many times when they upgrade their hardware I "hop"
servers to one of the new servers at the same price.

I've heard people say good things about <http://www.servage.com> for light
processing sites that need high bandwidth and lots of space.

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davidw
1) site:news.ycombinator.com hosting - its been discussed before, fairly
recently too, if I recall.

2) Layered Tech has been a good place for me.

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chasingsparks
Like bigbee, I also use ServerBeach. They are (very) affordable and offer
support above the level that would be suggested by the cost.

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modoc
I love SoftLayer. They've been amazing. Dedicated boxes only, but you can get
something decent for under $150, and they can get you new hardware in about
two hours, which is great. Granted our needs are a bit larger than yours at
this time, but even when I just had a single server, I thought they were a
great host. Amazing support, simple plans, etc...

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1gor
You may be better off serving images off Amazon S3.

As to hosting providers, I have 4 years good experience with openhosting.com
-- they provide virtual servers with root access etc, pay-as-you scale
(starting $20 a month, then growing as your RAM /CPU/Disk/bandwidth grows).
Another plus is that they sit on a very thick pipe.

~~~
samwise
We plan to jack some bandwidth from flickr and other photo sharing sites
(legally). Amazon EC2 seems like a great option, but have issues with
reliability and SQL.

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silencio
softlayer, layeredtech as mentioned above are both fantastic albeit on the
pricey side.

currently with vectoral.info, have been with them for something like a year
now and love them in general, but their selection of linux distros is meh.

what was wrong with amazon s3?

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bigbee
I've been using ServerBeach for about 8 months now, growing from 1 dedicated
server to 4, and am quite happy with them. No downtimes or problems of any
kind so far. If you decide to use them, you can use my referral code -
ND86GGNNTQ - to get $100 off.

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iratsu
You might want to take a look at tummy.com <http://www.tummy.com/Hosting/> You
can e-mail them to ask about your needs

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zinxq
Serverbeach is excellent. Google on "serverbeach referral" - there's plenty of
codes out there to get you money off.

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bayareaguy
I like amazon. I also like slicehost. www.intuix.com is small but good too.

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plusbryan
mosso.com is $100 for clustered windows/linux hosting. good tech support,
rails support. it's a rackspace venture.

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inklesspen
www.linode.com has been great for me.

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blader
Softlayer.

