

Ask HN: Best Consumer Hosting - ggwicz

Hey all, I'm looking to upgrade hosting that can handle a decent amount of traffic. I can't really spend a whole lot of monthly money, and am curious what you all think is the best at handling traffic for the price.<p>Media Temple, Midphase, DreamHost, Name.com standard hosting, HostGator, etc. Any input appreciated!
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dangrossman
If you're comparing shared hosting companies you're not really comparing
anything at all. They all have the same business model -- stuff several
hundred to several thousand sites on each server, advertise unlimited
resources but terminate any site that uses more than the average. If you want
to handle more than a trickle of traffic, you need dedicated resources -- that
means $20 a month or so for a VPS.

Once you switch you'll never go back. Having your site operating at the whim
of some resource checking script will seem ridiculous. The idea of paying for
"10 domains" or "20 mailboxes" or "100 subdomains" will make you laugh since
you now realize these things are nothing more than few lines of text in a
configuration file -- not actual scarce resources to be portioned out at
different fees. The idea of not being able to upgrade your language versions
or install your own packages will seem appalling. It's worth the couple extra
dollars a month.

~~~
dholowiski
I totally agree- once you go vps you'll never go back.

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ggwicz
In response to both dangrossman and ohashi, sorry to not add this info to the
question.

The problem with me is my app will have subdomains for each user. For example,
`john.myapp.com`. These subdomains are each going to be password-protected
areas with healthy amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared
hosting I currently have.

You've both recommended VPS. Any input on that?

What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple:
<http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/> ?

The videos are embedded from Vimeo, so the concern for me is just having good
uptime and reliability and not having to worry too much about running out of
"disk space" and bandwidth.

~~~
dangrossman
> The problem with me is my app will have subdomains for each user. For
> example, `john.myapp.com`.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Wildcard DNS entry, wildcard vhost -- two lines
of text that say "point all DNS queries to the IP of my VPS, point all HTTP
requests to this document root (your app)", then your app has some code that
looks at the hostname in the request to decide which site to show. Subdomains
are not 'things' that take up any resources.

> These subdomains are each going to be password-protected areas with healthy
> amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared hosting I
> currently have.

If all the videos are embedded offsite, then they really have no impact on
your choice of hosting solution. You don't have to handle the bandwidth or
storage or even the HTTP requests for the videos. A shared host wouldn't know
or care if you put a million videos on each webpage -- it would have no impact
on their server. It'll have no impact on yours either.

> What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple:
> <http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/> ?

Considering it's an unmanaged service, I don't see why you'd pay them
$30/month when Linode is only $20/month and has a perfect review record among
HN hackers.

~~~
ggwicz
Great answers man, thank you! I feel pretty good about Linode. I'm going to
look more into it and shop around a bit more. Thanks for all the help.

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tar
I have heard good things about <http://linode.com/>

~~~
mgoforth
I've used Linode to host my personal website and various side projects over
the last 2 years and I've been very pleased. For low traffic sites and small
apps the $20 per month plan has been sufficient.

~~~
glimcat
Depending on the definition of "low traffic" and what exactly you plan to do,
Heroku may be a free solution.

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ohashi
First of all, you haven't really defined a decent amount of traffic. Where are
you bottlenecking? database? bandwidth? cpu?

I agree with dangrossman that going from one shared host to another isn't
going to go well most likely. Of course, that depends on the bottleneck. I've
got a shared host running SSDs, if my bottleneck was disk i/o it might work on
that while failing on shared hosts using something slower.

If you really are pushing a lot of traffic and having trouble with shared
hosting though, it's time to upgrade. VPS/Dedicated/Cloud are the options I
would be looking at. Also possibly a CDN depending on what the bottleneck is
of course.

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riskish
Has anyone here used media temple's $20/mo service? I'm looking into that as
well

~~~
dangrossman
It's shared hosting with all the drawbacks that implies, yet without the price
benefit of shared hosting anywhere else. If you have $20 per month to spend on
hosting you have two choices -- if you want managed, shared hosting, save some
money and buy it somewhere cheaper. If you want the full control of a VPS and
can manage it, then spend that $20 on a VPS somewhere else and get much more.

