Hosting: Where and Why?

[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]

I’m looking for a new host. I checked out the forums at asmallorange and it appears they are having some major problems with PHP5. Also, lots of complaints about servers being down.

http://forums.asmallorange.com/index.php...opic=11522

http://forums.asmallorange.com/index.php...opic=10980

Any of those hosting on ASO seeing any of these problems (and using PHP5)?

I had a small bit of downtime about a week ago - about 30 minutes worth. I've seen some complaints about downtime on ASO but, just like any shared host, it comes down to who your neighbors are and what server you are on.

I don't like any amount of downtime but when I emailed ASO about that instance I had a response within 2-3 minutes saying they knew it was down, they weren't sure why, and they were working on fixing it. Like I said, 30 minutes later I was back up. Any company that can give me a response that honest and that quickly is okay by me - it's more than Dreamhost or Eleven2 ever did.

As far as PHP5 goes - I've had no problem with it at all. One of those links you linked to was from January, which is an eternity on the interwebs as we all know. The other is much more current (only about a week old) and one of the responses makes it seem as if ASO's servers are configured differently depending on which one you get. They probably use a few as test-beds for new features.

In this case, the few having problems, it seems as if they are trying to implement a way to change between PHP4 and PHP5 via the cPanel interface. As it is now, and the way I run PHP5 on my server, is to use the .htaccess file.

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php

Definitely some things to consider - but ASO's customer service is absolutely amazing, if I could only tell you one thing about them.