

Ask YC: What web hosting service do you use? - sangguine

I am wondering what web hosting service you all use.
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vaksel
I have a dedicated server from Liquid Web. I can't say enough good things
about them. The service is really top notch.

a) Communication: they actually speak English, you aren't forwarded to some
call center in India

b) Response: If you call someone, will pick up within 3 rings. If you email
you'll get the first response after 5 minutes. They really are around 24/7. I
once needed something done at 3:30 am, I got a reply to my email in less than
10 minutes.

c) Its all managed, you really don't need to know anything about servers. Need
a library installed? Just drop them a line, Can't figure out how to setup your
server? Drop them a line. And there are no support ticket fees or any other
crap like that, that other managed hosts charge.

I mean honestly, if Rackspace is any better, there better be some sex involved
while I wait for them to fix the server. And with the higher prices Rackspace
has, that better be the case.

Note: You should really only be using them with dedicated servers, their
shared/virtual is a little bit pricey

And to those that complain about prices, think to yourself, would you rather
get a problem resolved in 20 minutes, or 20 hours.

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gigawatt
I have a VPS from WiredTree (wiredtree.com) and I can't recommend them highly
enough. Good guys, great support. The only negative is that the intro VPS
(with only 256MB of RAM) is a little weak, and can choke on cPanel. If you're
looking for a fully-managed VPS, go with WiredTree.

For smaller-scale sites, Media Layer (medialayer.com) gets nothing but rave
reviews on the webostingtalk.com forums, though I don't have any first-hand
experience with them. I've used EngineHosting (enginehosting.com) for a couple
ExpressionEngine based sites for clients, and they're great, too.

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cjoh1111
Slicehost. Love them.

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Stabback
Same, but I wish they had a 'green' option. I'd gladly pay a bit more if I
could get renewable power powering my site.

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daragh
In all seriousness, that's retarded.

If you honestly want to be "green" you can make changes to your personal
behaviour (such as using CFLs, recycled packaging etc.) and not rely on some
company to hold your hand and make you feel like you're making a difference
for a little extra cash.

I personally tend to lose respect for companies that try to upsell their
"green" options, much in the same way I am dubious of extended warranties.

I also hope you realise that even if they were to offer a "green" option it
probably wouldn't mean they're going to stick a windmill on top of their colo,
they'd just use your extra cash to offset the environmental cost of the
electricity you used, much in the same way you can.

Don't get me wrong, I a happy Slichost customer and have made efforts to
recycle and use public transport for the environment's sake since I was a
child, but this recent rash of "green" buzzwording really ires me as it seems
to be used in a most insincere and vapid manner, instead of people actually
taking a rational, pragmatic approach to environmental efficiency.

~~~
pg
_If you honestly want to be "green" you can make changes to your personal
behaviour (such as using CFLs, recycled packaging etc.) and not rely on some
company to hold your hand_

But surely hosting is by definition an area where you need a company to do it
for you? Things like what you eat, how you travel, etc, you can control
yourself, but the whole point of shared hosting is that you don't own or even
see the server.

~~~
daragh
The other point I made was that even if they were offering "green" VPSs it
doesn't mean they're going to have a "green" and "non-green" power cables
running in to the building and they put your VPS in the rack hooked up to the
"green" one. They`d probably just do exactly what you can do yourself, pay
someone to offset the environmental cost.

One of the main things about purposefully choosing "green" companies, often at
increased cost, is that you are influencing the market based on your
preference. Choosing environmentally friendly products encourages companies to
offer them (I also appreciate that this is why many abuse the term).

Furthermore, if you wish to brand your site or company as "green" you should
probably do a little more than choose a "green" VPS provider lest you further
obviate the term.

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ivey
For Rails/Merb projects that can afford it, I love Engine Yard. They're way
more expensive than VPS hosts, but you get a support team who specialize in
Rails/Merb deployment. It's like outsourcing your sysadmin team, too.

For lower budget, I love Slicehost.

I either want full control, or someone I trust in control.

~~~
krschultz
Same here, we use Engine Yard and have gone through several slashdot/digg/TC
posts with no problem. Never have a headache with them.

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ninjastar99
Rackspace - bar none - for anything mission critical in a dedicated setup.
I've used Softlayer, HostMySite, and LiquidWeb before in an attempt to save a
few bucks a month, but regretted it almost immediately.

In multiple cases of downtime, the only response from Softlayer was "not
really sure what happened." With Rackspace, I can sleep at night - and the
extra $150 a month per server is well worth it to us. Peace of mind is
invaluable, and expertise is irreplaceable.

I also recommend Slicehost highly.

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Jax
Been using JaguarPC (jaguarpc.com) shared hosting account since the past 5
months. The support is good. And they have these tech support guys who could
actually can understand my noob language(and showed me around the settings)
when i tried to play around with my account.

One of my friends from US told me that slicehost is good and i see a lot of
fan comments above.

I have also been using Google AppEngine since a week. Its blazing fast. But
they currently have only free accounts and have mentioned on their blog that
they will start a paid cloud hosting service soon for those who reach their
free hosting limits. Yahoo! too have announced that they will soon offer cloud
hosting. So if u you wait for a couple months you might get to choose between
EC2 and Google and Yahoo and slicehost and others. Because if you are using
php, i have a wild guess that Yahoo's hosting will be php inclined(most of
their services are php-inclined). If u are comfortable with python, go for
Google AppEngine.

Also a word of CAUTION: if you are going to choose shared hosting packages,
then always read terms of service agreement and whatever agreements they have.
I once used a one month trial coupon with Hostgator and stumbled upon their
T.O.S. It was clearly mentioned that they allow only '50000 inodes' on shared
hosting accounts, which in simpler words translates that you can have a max of
50000 files. So if you are going to host something like a social networking
site, beware! Your users might get to the max files limit if u are going to
have a feature like photo uploading.

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natch
Hurricane Electric shared hosting.

Pros: super low latency connections, ssh access, decent setup, no frills,
$10/month.

Cons: they don't keep their installations in the bleeding edge version-wise. I
use Perl a lot. They are at 5.8.0, which is not bad, but not the very latest.
Of course you can install your own anything (perl, python, ruby, etc.) in user
space, which makes library management more simple too.

Unknowns: I've never had it tested under a serious load. Just playing around.

I WISH there was a host that gave me the speed, simplicity and low price of HE
but also supported more than one domain name on the same account (for the same
price). There are sites that do that, but typically they have something else
wrong with them, such as having the "feature" of being control-panel based.

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bmatheny
We use The Planet (<http://www.theplanet.com>) along with EC2 from AWS. I've
used The Planet for about 7 years now, for both business and personal use.
Good prices, decent support and a top notch network.

~~~
rw
Did the explosion change your opinion of theplanet?

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tortilla
linode.com, slicehost.com, servintvps.com

I recommend all 3, just depends on what you need.

~~~
edw519
_just depends on what you need_

For example...

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silencio
If you're looking for cheap dedicated hosting, I liked leaseweb, ovh and
vectoral, and if a .us based host is okay, layeredtech and softlayer are
excellent. Support ranges from amazing to nonexistant, but they're all
_really_ cheap (except for softlayer, but you get what you pay for..) for lots
and lots of transfer - I blow through a few terabytes a month on three
servers, think $100/month for 3TB transfer, 250gb hdd, 1.5gb ram which
slicehost can't compare to price-wise.

Otherwise for me it's a tie between slicehost, dreamhost (because i had a free
promo code..) and asmallorange (i have a lifetime account). All of them meet
different needs of mine, sooo.

~~~
kngspook
How did you get a lifetime account?

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adoyle
I used interland.com (bought out a while ago) and serverpronto.com, but now I
use business grade Verizon FIOS in my basement with a Mac Mini on a 2 hour
UPS. Uptime has been 100% over the last year (except for the reboots I did for
software updates).

I used to run a lot of mailman lists and have discovered the hardest thing to
do is to get a set of "clean" IP addresses. Serverpronto was tough, they were
blocked a lot. Interland was ok. My Verizon address block (I get 5 static IPs)
is not on any RBLs but they sit in the middle of what are generally dynamic
IPs so some big sites (esa.int, notably) reject email from my system.

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brk
Me :)

1U Dedicated server (BYOS) for $50/mo.

~~~
brk
I'm curious why so many people have down-voted my comment above, as it's
factual. I host stuff in my own datacenter, I don't overly promote it here,
although I had considered a YC special rate. Or is it that I shouldn't promote
my startup because it's not free? Several people here post links to or
comments about their startup businesses without getting down-voted.

~~~
krschultz
I don't think people realized that you were a professional host but that you
were telling the guy to do it himself. What is your site?

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mannylee1
Media Temple. They are great for the price.

~~~
sachinag
We use MT's Dedicated Virtual offering - it's "in the cloud", but it gives us
full on root access. If you go that way, however, get a box without Plesk pre-
installed. Ugh.

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bkrausz
I've used VPSLink on and off depending on my needs since they started,
incredibly cheap service and I've yet to have any major problems. Minor issues
were resolved very quickly, great support.

~~~
tialys
I agree, VPSLink is great. Never had any problems and if you can get a coupon
(they offer them fairly often) you can really get a great deal. (I got mine
locked in at a lower price with the coupon I used, and I believe they've
offered more since).

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notauser
For personal stuff I use Tektonic who are pretty good. The price is very
competative, tech support exists, and they accomodate special requests with no
particular hassle (e.g. please make sure my two VPSs are in different data
centers).

Last time they had a problem was a few years ago (server hardware failure) and
they bothered to give updates frequently and rapidly opened up new temporary
hosts for customers who had backups to restore from. Pretty good service for a
'no support' plan.

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smanek
I use vpslink. I paid for two years in advance, and got a vps with 256MB of
Ram for ~$10/month (about half the cost of slicehost).

Had no problems with them so far.

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jfornear
I use <http://mosso.com> which is an experimental cloud hosting provider
backed by <http://rackspace.com>

I always get complimented on how fast my site loads and performs on it and
have never had any problems that haven't been taken care of rather quickly.

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randallsquared
I've been using vpslink.com for a few months for a few servers. One of my
virtual servers has been rebooted without warning (which they say up front can
happen, it's true) three or four times in the last two months. If I had
anything important on that machine, I'd be somewhat unhappy, but it's hard to
complain at their prices.

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ComputerGuru
Lunarpages. Excellent customer service and the latest tech on all their
managed servers (even the shared ones).

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robertgaal
We've been with Rails Machine for over a year and loving it. If you need some
extra support and sysadmin knowledge (aka more hands-on then Slicehost) Rails
Machine is absolutely the best we could wish for.

And of course additionally we also use EC2 and other AWS services.

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fnazeeri
<http://www.aiso.net/>

They are carbon free and have provided great service since 2000. They use 100%
solar power and have bio-diesel backup generators. Have used them for 4 months
and have had a great experience.

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symptic
I support my buddy's business by using one of his dedicated servers:
<http://wdservers.com>

He runs his own sites and needs a lot of server power, but also leases out to
his contacts (me) and the people they refer.

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jrockway
I use Slicehost for my applications and Bingodisk for big files and general
static content. I also use the private part of Bingodisk for backups (via
duplicity) from my laptop and application server. It's nice.

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drewcrawford
RapidVPS? I use them to host a few small sites on the cheap (starting at like
$9 a month I believe). It probably wouldn't scale, but it's irreplacable for
development.

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petercooper
Primarily SoftLayer. Best dedicated provider I've ever used. Used to use
EV1Servers / The Planet before but SoftLayer offer so much more.

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walesmd
ASmallOrange - Absolutely excellenct customer support with great prices. Go
shared, then jump up to VPS/dedicated if you need to scale.

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jbyers
Shared hosting? Depends heavily on what technologies you want to use.

VPS? Slicehost

Dedicated server(s)? Softlayer

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izak30
EC2

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rwebb
<http://www.m5hosting.com/>

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hbien
Webfaction. Simple, cheap, and good support.

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richesh
our startup uses JEE technology so our choices were limited, but we are
currently deploying on Amazon's EC2.

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thorax
xlhost, some of the lowest prices on dedicated servers, no contracts, setup
fees, etc.

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timae
hostmysite.com

never had a problem.

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thinkcomp
My own.

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mov
tektonic.net

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mroman
Well, as of right now I am using siteground shared hosting, and have found it
to be excellent for the money. Their tech support is fast and
knowledgeable,and respectful (I don't expect people to KMA, however, the
Godaddy people for example have proven themselves to be incompetent AND
disrespectful) their interface is clear and usable, and everything has worked
great so far, I feel that they provide a lot of value for the money. I am
surprised to not see them mentioned here, they HAVE won a couple of awards,
and are the best I have seen since 2003. Disclaimer: I mostly used Godaddy
before them (yuck!) yet I have had to use a couple of others for clients, and
they were all - invariably - not that great at ALL. Now, if anyone has had a
bad experience with them, I would certainly like to know, as I am considering
reselling for them as part of a "includes great hosting" feature in a
comprehensive service package for future clients of mine.

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mstefff
<a href="<http://www.liquidweb.com/?RID=mikestefff>">Liquidweb</a>

Yes it's an affiliate link but they are truly amazing. Prices are great and
come with full support and management. Highly recommended. Have never had an
easier experience.

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mstefff
I guess html isn't allowed...

