

Ask HN: Update from Midphase hosting status thread - brandnewlow

Earlier this week I shared some hosting issues I'm facing.  42 comments followed, all of which were helpful, detailed, encouraging and (most importantly) useful.<p>Here's the thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326012<p>I wanted to share a quick update.<p>Based on advice here I took the following steps:<p>1.  Posted to linode.com and Slicehost.com forums as well as the Drupal paid-services forum, soliciting paid, contract work to migrate to better hosting and optimize my server situation.<p>2. I received 18 responses.  Many were impressively detailed.  A few were hilarious: "My brother's setting up a box.  It's 10x more powerful than anything out there.  Let us host you."<p>3. I heard from a developer I already knew and have worked a bit with in the past.  Turns out he's interested and knows his way around Slicehost.  I hired him based on our past track record, at a price we both thought was fair.<p>4. Last night we moved my Drupal site to a 1GB slice.  It's already noticeably faster and is no longer crashing every 2 hours.<p>5.  Next week I have some "Drupal sharks" who'll start crawling over my install looking to optimize the Drupal piece of it.<p>So thanks, HN.  It was really useful to learn that I needed more RAM for my setup in addition to Drupal optimization.  I am happily on a Slice and now have an experienced hacker to defer to now and then.
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tdavis
Let this be a lesson to everyone: the time you invest in finding a web host is
_critical_. I went through 3 VPS and 2 Dedicated hosts before finally finding
and going with Softlayer and boy oh boy was it worth the time and effort, not
to mention the anger I caused other companies by calling them incompetent and
issuing chargebacks ;)

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vaksel
Congrats, your host is one of the most important decisions you'll make. And
slicehost is one of the better options, frankly I never heard of midphase

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lsc
A tested disaster recovery plan (including tested off-site backups) is much
more important, in many situations, than your choice of host.

Choosing a good host is like running on raid disk. It's a great idea, and it
dramatically reduces downtime, but if you keep important data it's not nearly
as important as a good, tested, offsite backup.

This does depend on your business model. Ask yourself: what is worse, being
down for a few days? or losing all your data? Now, you did say that your site
was news focused, so it's quite likely that losing the archives would be a
fairly survivable event, if expensive (as you'd need to rewrite the code) but
if you are entrusted with customer data, well, a failure without backups
usually means death (or starting over with no customers and a bad reputation.)
My experience has been that if you lose a customer's data, even if you warned
them ahead of time that you were not keeping backups, the customer will leave,
and more importantly will tell other people to avoid your service.

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mechanical_fish
Excellent news! Hope you are happier in your new home.

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brandnewlow
So far, yes indeed. The performance difference is like night and day. We're
still combing out blips from the migration, but all's well thus far.

