Hosting: Where and Why?

[eluser]Mirage[/eluser]
Not really that surprising. It's pretty clear that there are a multitude of choices. They depend not only on experience but also on the various needs of the user. There no one size fits all solution. Thanks for sharing yours though.

[eluser]madmaxx[/eluser]
I've hosted with Dreamhost for almost 10 years now (including some CodeIgniter apps), and they've been both cheap and reliable (99.9% uptime, which is a good deal for $7/month). I've worked with dozens of other hosts (Rackspace, MediaTemple, Amazon, Peer1, ServerBeach, etc.), and Dreamhost has been a good balance between dedicated and vhosted (they're mostly vhosted). If you don't need dedicated, or VPS'd, then they'll do the job. Not perfect, mind you, but they run well-stocked Debian-based vhosts, with high limits on bandwidth, databases, and such. I've been dug/slashdotted dozens of times without problems or extra charges.

[Mod note: edited affiliate link out of your first forum post. If you build up a posting history this won't happen]

[eluser]smalljohnson[/eluser]
[quote author="Michael Wales" date="1210899660"]@popcorn
Glad to hear it - before I saw this message I signed up w/ them for a year. I've always wanted to give them a try but the opportunity never came around. For the price and the features (one of the few hosts that supports my love of PHP, Ruby, and Python) plus no arbitrary limitations (I hate arbitrary limitations).

I'm going to go ahead and say I vouch for asmallorange - the price is great, the features are great, I've never heard anything but good about them, plus - they got my MX and CNAME records taken care of in about 10 minutes.[/quote]

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)?

[eluser]TheActionCombo[/eluser]
Another vote for Medialayer: http://www.medialayer.com/

I used Dreamhost for about 1 month and it was a nightmare. Extremely slow performance and frequent outages...and their support either took weeks to respond or not at all.

I switched to Medialayer after seeing a lot of positive reviews of them on webhostingtalk.

Their service is top-notch. I've always gotten a response within MINUTES. Also, I believe someone else in this thread mentioned they're using an Apache alternative called LiteSpeed -- their performance is easily 5x better than Dreamhost.

Having used Dreamhost, I don't understand how anyone could recommend it. It's pure crap.

[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.

[eluser]Matthew Lanham[/eluser]
i'll give a vote for Amazon EC2, i've yet to use it for a production site (should be soon) but so far it seems excellent!

[eluser]smalljohnson[/eluser]
Michael, thanks for the update on A Small Orange. I think I will give them a try.

For anyone interested, ASO has a server status page located at

http://status.asmallorange.com/

This lists all their servers. In addition, you can check the uptime on each server using servername.asmallorange.com/uptime.php (replace servername with name of server). For example:

http://cindy.asmallorange.com/uptime.php
or
http://sarah.asmallorange.com/uptime.php

A couple coupons for A Small Orange disclaimer: referal credit

SAVE5: $5 off any order
15PCT 15% off any order

[eluser]a.somervell[/eluser]
Would love to have a chat with other CI users about setting up EC2 instances, we need to build a CI EC2 management console!

[eluser]chandlerou[/eluser]
Updated Main Topic

Also, That Amazon EC2 thing is really intriguing. Sounds waaaaay complex...

[eluser]Brandon Dickson[/eluser]
CoLo FTW!

Yeah I'm spoiled. I use GoDaddy for some freelance clients, and offsite DNS.

-Brandon