I’m in the middle of switching right now. For those of us who are just artists, somewhat technically-savvy (compared to, say, my mom) but not super-nerds with any real clue as to what php means, a cheap, shared hosting service is really all we need, want, and rightfully deserve. I was on godaddy because it was cheap and I didn’t know better. Now that my contract is up, I found 1&1 to offer me a $2/month deal. I couldn’t find any reason why it was any worse than godaddy, and godaddy served my needs just fine, so now I’m switching. It’s a bit of a bitch to migrate my wordpress blogs over, but I’m able to do it with a little help.
For my needs, and the needs of millions of people worldwide, I’m not sure what a better alternative would be than one of these megaserver places. As long as people can view my site without any issues, I can speak to a human being if there’s a problem, and I’m not paying hundreds of bucks a year, I’m good.
Let me heartily recommend Namecheap.com for registering and hosting. GoDaddy is the Devil.
That said, it’s true that Namecheap is also leaving most of the work to the customer. I’m from the web world originally, and it still takes me some time to figure out how to get what I want out of even customer-friendlier packages like WordPress. I am often in conversation with a friend of mine who’s a pro PHP developer, and even he will occasionally be baffled and actually incorrect about Wordpress’ capabilities.
So there you have it. It’s a tinkerer’s world out there for a while. I certainly don’t want to be arsed to learn another language/platform that might fail, such as Ruby on Rails. Remember when we thought PERL would be the new best thing forever?
I’m no longer in this business, but if you’re not doing complex things and don’t require high end services, why not just try your local web hosting company instead of chains like GoDaddy.
If you live in a major city, the mom and pop companies should be plenty. From experience, their uptimes and reliability are much higher then chains. Plus you’re supporting the local economy instead of some big corporation.
As others have said, if your company ARE losing cash by the minute due to downtime, you might as well go PRO, bring your services to speed and hire a proper System Admin.
For those that use GoDaddy, well, you get what you PAID for. I rather pay a few bucks more per month to a local company.
NearlyFreeSpeech has been my choice for (8?) years without regrets of any sort.
I wish they could host my .de domain also. Not their fault, DENIC is being difficult.
Sounds great in theory. The only problem is that relatively simple-seeming things, like a blog, can require some strong infrastructure, skills and personnel to keep a database always up, updated, backed up and always secure. Since I’ve been using a larger host - which I’m not affiliated with btw - it’s been a very hassle-free existence.
I use zernebok, and I can heartily recommend it. Of course, I’m biased. It’s a relatively small company run by a friend of mine from college, but I wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t fantastic.
I think actually that if I were forced to find another provider, I’d probably try to find something similar- some relatively small thing owned and operated by the same person, because I think you’re more likely to get someone who cares about service and quality when it’s something they’ve built and poured effort into.
The only problem with small 'n indie outfits is that, while service is mostly excellent, humans can and do experience downtime, sometimes permanent. You should always have backups and an exit strategy(ie. do you, personally, have the credentials needed to change your domain’s DNS records, right now, to point to a new host?); but especially so if more or less the entire technical and operations staff of your hosting company could be hit by a single bus, in a single collision.
I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand the problem. What is it between a large outfit and a smaller one? All you really need is just one guy to handle all that infrastructure. Even the backup generators. Of course if you really need the backup generators, you might as well consider going pro.
For instance, from a hobby perspective, I’m a member of SDF Public Access UNIX System for more than a decade. This bbs system had been around since the 80s and is done by a single guy. You can basically plunk in WordPress and not worry about a thing. We even had +200 users on concurrently and are one of the main drivers for NetBSD on concurrent multi-processes. System Admin’s from the era of TECO and DDT. I have much faith in this system/community for not failing and hassle free.
From a professional perspective, of the time I’ve worked on in an ISP, the majority of my time is spent on technical support than actual system maintenance. Granted, the work was more on the ISP side then simply webhosting. But from that experience, I can say work can be all done by just one guy. Backups? I just automated to scripts. Security? The few breeches I had to face due to user’s lack of common sense is migrated thanks to our virtual setup or is contained to a single machine. I came from an era long after TECO and DDT. When Perl was consider great, I can get the job done with ksh, awk, and sed at a much lighter footprint.
I’ve always had good results with CrystalTech (now Newtek aka The Small Business Authority) for reliable shared hosting, and presently run several WordPress sites on it. You might have to dig through their site to FIND where they offer web hosting, though.
Agreed, there’s no comparison. Anyone who thinks GoDaddy’s interface is anything but dogshit has never used anything else. And Dreamhost’s pricing winds up being way better once you tally up all the nickel & diming GoDaddy does (charging for additional email addresses & aliases?)
My experience with DH shared hosting hasn’t been without the occasional bump or gripe, but I will never touch GoDaddy again (the only reason I ever did in the first place was because a clueless new employer had already set up with them.)
The problem is simple: in my experience, smaller providers of the mom-and-pop-shop scale have provided me with hassles. Larger providers have not.
Theory is one thing, practice is another. What happens if the one person running the place gets sick? Wants to go on vacation? Etc. Whatever the causes of small-shop hassles have been, I haven’t experienced the same effects since I moved to a larger provider.
A provider who was not GoDaddy, of course. They really do suck.
At one time I hosted my site at Media Temple mainly because all the ‘cool’ sites were using them. Guess what? They are a fucking horrible hosting company. Overpriced, no spam filtering on email unless I paid a much larger fee and my site would go down around once a month. I actually switched to Go Daddy and was much happier with what I got for my money. I don’t like their advertising, and almost left them a few times because of it, but they are much better than Media Temple. You can get tech support on the phone in 5 minutes any time and they know what they are doing. I work on high traffic sites and host them on AWS, but for an amateur you could do worse than Go Daddy. I wouldn’t recommend Media Temple to anybody.
Rightscale handles a simplified EC2 instance setup. It’s a bit expensive compared to other solutions, but you just hit play to fire up an instance and can then choose to install from a list of common apps like phpmyadmin, WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc. Rightscale is also what we use for running scalable, high traffic server clusters on AWS.
I use Digital Ocean for VPS hosting and Hover for DNS. Both have been good so far, although DO is just a bare VPS - I do all the sysadmin work. They do have a lot of good images to choose from and a good library of tutorials. But it’s definitely cheap, and I’m happy to do all my own sysadmin stuff.
I despise them. Horrible support (no phone number at all and are slack online). Horrible webmail. There’s much better alternatives. I’m not going to shill for the alternatives, but I think everyone in this thread cheerleading Dreamhost perhaps are limiting their choices.
