I was going to wait until this site started generating its own income to cover the costs of hosting the blog on its own server but there’s just too many limitations with keeping it at .WordPress that keep me from doing just that.
Getting a shared server is pretty cheap anyway so I might as well just go ahead and do it. There are a lot of plugins that will generate income that I can’t use now and I don’t want to mess with moving it when I have a lot of pages (all the internal links will have to change for one thing).
So where am I going to put it? [...]
First, we start with Google, as always. The first hit is http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8667502
According to them, Bluehost is one that I might not want to use:
Jul 24th 2008, 8:27 pm
Peon
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 15Some people have been having problems running WordPress on Bluehost. Here is one example of the problems they have had.
Another example from the Bluehost forum thread can be seen here and here were ReddRobb can’t even run a WordPress blog on a Bluehost server.__________________
Bluehost my review
Let’s check out his review.
He goes into some specifics of what issues he had when he moved from several servers to Bluehost. Here is an interesting part:
Bluehost implies in their marketing material you can run dynamic websites using programs like WordPress, b2evolution, phpBB forum, Coppermine, Gallery, Drupal, Joomla, and other programs listed in Fantastico. And you can, but what they don’t tell you, if you do run such programs even with minimal traffic you will get the dreaded “exceeds cpu quota“ error. And your site will be suspended for 5 minutes each time this happens.
That’s not good. Searching Google for “exceeds cpu quota” returns 26 hits and a lot of pissed off people. Suffice it to say that I’ll move on.
One quote at inetintegrity.com says:
Crazy Penguin says:
Richard,
After reading your blog, Tikun Olum, what amazes me the most it, was over two years ago when you posted your article. And Bluehost has not made any conscious effort to improve their lousy service since. I am bewildered, as well, how Bluehost can stay in business with the pathetically poor service they provide. Perhaps it is a matter of complacency, with both with the customer and Bluehost.
Actually I had three accounts with Bluehost at one time. I cancelled only one of the accounts initially. The other two accounts I had for two very long years of miserable service with Bluehost.
Downtownhost, A2hosting, Steadfast Networks, and NearlyFreeSheech.net are the hosting companies, I am using now. I haven’t had any problems with any of them. No downtime or any other technical problems. I would also recommend Dreamhost. Hostgator is another decent hosting company.
I wish you the best in regards to your blog and promotng the voice of peace for Israel and Palestine.
CP
Ah. Here’s an idea from the list of comments, WebHostingTalk. I used to post on there a long time ago. I wonder if I can figure out what my old login is (if it’s still good).
All right. used the trusty old ‘forgotten your password?’ thing and I’m in. If you’re looking for information about hosting websites at all, this is the place to be. Man, the last time I posted here was 2003.
I don’t want to get into the hosting thing. I’d rather have someone else take care of that stuff. I need to find someone who has good uptime, good service and that I can grow with. Web Hosting Forum looks like the one at WHT that I should use. It’s described as,“Discussions on all aspects of web hosting including past experiences (both negative and positive), choosing a host, questions and answers, and other related subjects. If your service is unavailable, please click here.”
I think the smartest thing for me to do is just post the question up on their forum and see what I get back.
I’ll post the conversation when I get more comments on it but I got a great tip from http://zinkhosting.net/.
He said I should have an ‘email this to a friend’ link on my posts. Great idea. I need a plugin so it automatically. I could put a link with html manually for now though.
I just put a link to my Deploying Soon? post by using this code. Try it out with the link at the left and scroll to the bottom.
All I did was view the html of the page and put:
<p><a href=”mailto:?subject=Check out this article I read…&body=Hi, check out this article I read at http://realizingme.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/deploying-soon-here-are-some-ideas-of-what-to-bring/”>Send this page to a friend</a></p>
One place I’m looking at the references is at the Shared Hosting Offers forum at WHT. There’s tons of information there. I specifically need WordPress and scalability though so I’ll have to move on to reviews starting with those sites. I’m choosing shared because I don’t need my own server yet. A shared server will have several domains on it. I used to have my own shared servers back in the day that I leased out space in.
Shared hosting has its drawbacks though. Most hosts oversell their servers meaning that if it were a 100GB server with 100GB of bandwidth, you would normally think you could put 100 domains on it with 1GB of space and 1GB of bandwidth. Hardly anyone ever uses the maximum of their allotted space or bandwidth so hosts will put 200 or 300 domains on it, banking that they won’t peg the system. It’s usually ok but can cause problems.
Another problem is that if you have one of the other guys on your server upload a bad script in their site, it could bog down the whole server (like when you get the hourglass on your computer if a program stops responding). That would cause my blog to stop until it’s fixed.
Here’s some of the hosting companies I’m looking into right now but I have no idea yet if they have anything I’m looking for:
- http://www.liquidweb.com/
- http://powervps.com/
- http://www.rackforce.com/
- HostGator
- InMotion Hosting
- http://www.mochahost.com/
- Globat
- Lunar Pages
- Ipower
Some of those links will take you to a review site but I’m not sure about those reviews. They look a little soft.
Man, there’s a lot of info out there but I need WordPress in particular. This is where marketing comes in handy. If they don’t specifically mention WordPress, I’m passing them up due to lack of time or interest to look at each one. You’ll have to excuse me for a bit while I do some kind of stream of consciousness posting here until I figure it out:
How about a search in WHT at the shared hosting section for WordPress? – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/search.php?searchid=6441576
http://www.softsyshosting.com/ has one-click wordpress installation. Interesting. I could always import my other site with the admin panel. Not sure about they’re quality yet though.
Hmmm. WPSensei mentions WordPress:
Managed WordPress Hosting – WPSensei
About Our Managed WordPress Hosting
Our Managed WordPress Hosting Services provide bloggers and users of the WordPress software with the following free services available by request and 100% Free of Charge.
- Free WordPress Installation & Upgrades
- Free WordPress Theme Installation
- Free WordPress Plugin Installation & Configuration
Additionally, we provide 100% Free Transfer Services! We’ll transfer your existing setup over to our services and assist you with optimizing your blogs’ setup to ensure you’re getting the most out of your installation!
First 2 Months of Managed WordPress Hosting Absolutely Free!
To prove that our Managed WordPress Hosting services are the absolute best of the best, we’re going to provide every new customer with the First 2 Months of Service Absolutely Free
Simply use the coupon code below when signing up for service and your billing will automatically be adjusted!
Coupon Code: FIRST2
Looks like they’re a little new, not that that necessarily means bad.
Softsys seems to have what I need. Let’s see if they’re any good according to other people.
Review for SoftSys Hosting
This is a 3 month review for my host. There website is located at http://www.softsyshosting.com/.
As a .net developer it was crucial to me that I recieved all the features I required for powerful websites. SoftSys provided me with exactly that. There plans have plenty of space/band for a small site like mine and they offer mssql 2005 databases. They also have all the versions of .net (upto 3.5 which is the latest).
There support is phenominal. My suppor tickets are answered within 1 – 2 hours. Half the time, it’s within the hour. I’ve submitted about 2 critical tickets. One was the mail settings on the server and allowing a different port for my application. And yesterday night (saturday around 11:30 pm) i submitted another ticket that had to deal with permissions. I was definately not looking for a reply at that time of the day, but i did recieve a “we are looking into this” 30 minutes later, and “your problem has been fixed” about 1 hour later.
I am a university student so my budget is low. I was on the lowest plan and therefore only had one domain allowed. However I needed to setup an additional domain. Instead of buying another plan, I emailed them and explained that I am unable to buy another account (or another domain to attach to the account). I was very suprised to see the reply email. Rick had knocked off 50% of the additional domain price, and added it to my invoice. however he also stated that I can pay that whenever it is convinient for me. This was about a month ago. I will be paying my invoice at the end of the week.
If i remember, I will definatly try to do a 6 month review. but for now, good job softsys.
my domain: www.daiytip.net for verfication.__________________
Your spring cleaning tips, ideas, and checklist found here
Windows Vista SP1 Download link here!
I’ve narrowed it down (for now) to:
dreamhost
Medialayer
Here’s a negative review of dreamhost, saying they have mySQL issues and some other things but they’re not too bad – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=716229&highlight=dreamhost+wordpress
Another – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=715644&highlight=dreamhost+wordpress
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=710341&highlight=dreamhost+wordpress says dreamhost and bluehost have unlimited plans. Sounds like a good thing but it’s really not. Unlimited plans cause issues if they don’t keep up with the hardware and bandwidth requirements during a growth spurt.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=710341&highlight=dreamhost+wordpress – negative for dreamhost, positive for liquidweb
Liquidweb apparently has vps (which is shared but you’re sandboxed-in with your own cpu usage etc. I forget the exact details of what it is).
Someone also mentioned HostForWeb in that post. Checking…
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=703249&highlight=dreamhost+wordpress mentions Medialayer. I’ve already had a couple of suggestions for that one. It goes on the list.
[Note to self: look into cache:
Phill, I really would think that installing WP-Cache is going to cut your resource usage in a big way ... I installed it on one of my sites which previously was taking 5.8 seconds to load (!!!) (however, that was for 40 posts on the homepage -- it's a news site) ... I installed WP-Cache and the page-load time was immediately cut to 1.4 seconds. Now I've adjusted it so that there are only 20 posts/page, and the load time is 0.8 seconds. WP-Cache is a really, really awesome plug-in.
Does anyone know for sure whether wordpress.com already has WP-Cache running? I wonder ...
I'll poke around and see if I can find the answer on that..
I second the recommendation to use a cache. However, I'd recommend WP Super Cache, it's more advanced than WP-Cache 2 and much more efficient in many cases.]
Another negative for Dreamhost – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=700959&highlight=dreamhost+wordpress. That takes them off the list.
Plus for liquidweb and medialayer.
Here’s a couple of interesting comments on medialayer:
Quote:
Originally Posted by grahamrb
Just having a look at Media Layer, they seem very expensive for what they offer, $40 per month for 2.5Gb of disk space. Can anyone shed some light on what makes them better than say Liquid Web who offer a similar service for $25 per month. At $40 per month I think I can get a VPS.
- MediaLayer’s plans are not oversold in any respect. You’re paying for a higher level of service there and the price is very well justified.
.
Quote:
Originally Posted by grahamrb
Just having a look at Media Layer, they seem very expensive for what they offer, $40 per month for 2.5Gb of disk space. Can anyone shed some light on what makes them better than say Liquid Web who offer a similar service for $25 per month. At $40 per month I think I can get a VPS.
- You’re paying to be hosted on a high-spec server with expert management and relatively few other clients. Sure you can get a VPS for the same or less money but in terms of both performance and management it will be a downgrade.
.
- There’s really no words to describe it. Just imagine super super fast page loads with an IT level 3 tech at your service within minutes.
So Fantastico now has WordPress. Excellent. You can install things with Fantastico super easy.
Medialayer and Liquidweb both have VPN and dedicated servers so I could upgrade with them pretty easily. Liquidweb has a very good reputation. Medialayer’s is stellar.
Cartikahosting is mentioned again.
Let’s do a little unscientific test:
Results 1 – 100 of about 226,000 for hostgator problems.
Results 1 – 100 of about 5,070 for cartikahosting problems.
Results 1 – 100 of about 47,500 for softsys problems host. – (which actually is less because there’s a math program with a similar name)
Results 1 – 100 of about 27,500 for liquidweb problems.
Results 1 – 100 of about 10,700 for medialayer problems -”media player“. – (had to add the media player thing because I originally got 9,330,000!)
I think based on that, and the fact that I don’t like the pricing scheme they have (too much, too cheap), I can cross hostgator off the list.
So now we’re down to liquidweb, medialyer, cartikahosting and softsys.
Let’s look at pricing:
softsys
Medialayer
Softsys is a LOT cheaper than the other two, which are priced similarly but liquidweb is a bit cheaper.
cartikahosting (the linux plans are cheaper, $15 gives 15GB xfer and 750MB storage but it doesn’t have a dedicated IP, which you’ll need if you want to SSL certify your site)
BTW – Once I figure this out, I’ll see if I can get a coupon at http://couponsnexus.com/. Always a good place to check for discounts if you’re going to move to a new host. Also check out http://www.hyperspin.com/en/ranking.php?type=1 to see the uptime (how often it isn’t down).
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=717665&highlight=cartikahosting – a couple people mentioned that a lot of the top blogs use Media Temple as their server.
But man, these people hate it – http://hostjury.com/reviews/Media+Temple
After many, many, many sites, forums, and reviews, I’m now down to liquidweb, Cartikahosting and medialayer.
As I posted, Liquidweb is the least expensive of the three but medialayer has a $10 plan that would suit me for a while. I can move the database and stuff if I really need to because I used to do it when I hosted but it’s a pain to do it from where I’m at. Service and uptime are my biggest priorities. I am planning on having at least 3 domains in the near future but I may end up with subdomains if I don’t need certs.
Cartika has a $15 plan but it doesn’t come with a dedicated IP, which I’ll need later on. With the ventures I have planned, I’d quickly be up to the $50/mo plan, putting me in sight of VPN’s.
Medialayer will hold me for quite a while at $25 but I’m not sure about the dedicated IP’s for them at that pricepoint.
liquidweb is $19 for 3 domains but I can start off with a smaller account for now.
I need to find out if having the blog on a windows server has any benefit. If so, Cartika is the only option in this group.
Hmmm. From what I’ve seen, Linux is still a better choice; more security, runs more efficiently, more stable. The medialayer guy said a dedicated IP is only $2 more per month. That’s cool. All they gotta do is click a button on their control panel to give it to me but I guess they gotta make a buck (or two) somehow.
So maybe control panel? Guess not. I can figure it out. I used cPanel in the past so I’m most comfortable with it but they’re pretty easy to pick up. There’s a LOT of help on the web.
MediaLayer uses DirectAdmin
I tried Hsphere on a windows server a few years ago and didn’t much care for it but it might have been because I was so used to cPanel.
http://szarka.net/technotes/wordpress.php says that wordpress uses mysql and freebsd uses the new mysqli. You can fix either but they don’t come that way usually.
If you want a breakdown (of someone’s opinion) of Linux, freeBSD and windows, check out http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/bsd_flier.html
Here’s another glowing review of medialayer – http://69.20.126.9/showthread.php?t=597163
From http://www.goaliestore.com/board/hot-stove/72781-web-hosting-question.html:
ThePM
In Training
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Vancouver, CanadaI was into the hosting industry for the longest time and did a lot of work for various companies.
The 3 I had the best experience with were:
CartikaHosting.com (Premium provider, pricey but one of the best in this biz)
MediaLayer.net (Also a premium provider)
ReliableSite.net (Used for file storage and downloading content.)
I have yet to have an issue with any of the 3 and hosted with Cartika for 2+ years, MediaLayer 1.5 years, and RS for 1 year. None have let me down as of yet and these are truly premium providers.
In your case, I’d go Cartika/ML for your professional site, and ReliableSite for content.
Damn. It’s a tough call between medialayer and Cartika.
http://hostjury.com/ has a couple of reviews of each, what do they say?
Hmm. I wonder why they think medialayer is so much better? Let’s find out the negative comments for each since they both have LOTS of good comments all over the web:
First, Cartika:
Trang
23 Jun 08Reviews I have read have been very simple and do not go past Cartika’s own marketing – expensive yet reliable plus great customer service. So far I have found that Cartika has provided a level of service expected by any hosting company. As a reseller, the user interface is not intuitive or simple, and very Web 1.0, nowhere near the ease of use of GoDaddy or other common hosts. While Cartika may be a decent solution of end users with 1 domain, I highly do not recommend using them for reselling or administering multiple domains.
Cartika Hosting’s Response
Hello Trang and thank you for taking the time to review our services. I would like to add some comments however
^^Reviews I have read have been very simple and do not go past Cartika’s own marketing – expensive yet reliable plus great customer service.^^
nice to see that our customers general experience match that of our marketing efforts and promises – Thanks !
^^As a reseller, the user interface is not intuitive or simple, and very Web 1.0, nowhere near the ease of use of GoDaddy or other common hosts.^^
to be fair, we do not have our own control panel, we use of the the major commercially available control panels (H-Sphere). I understand and appreciate if it isnt a panel you are fond of, however, it is a very widely used system.
^^While Cartika may be a decent solution of end users with 1 domain, I highly do not recommend using them for reselling or administering multiple domains.^^
I was awful surprised to read these comments. Our solution is specifically geared and engineered towards resellers and professionals who manage multiple domains. I am simply not aware of ANY other solution that allows a reseller to centrally manage an entire cluster of servers across Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Coldfusion, Sharepoint and Exchange platforms. I do understand that there can be a steep learning curve with such a solution and that it is not the ideal solution for everyone, however, in the future, please do not hesitate to ask for assistance if you do not understand something or if you require help. We are more then willing to help customers who request help.
Thanks again for taking the time to provide this review.
Geez. That’s the only negative comment for both. I think Trang’s issue is with Hshpere, not Cartika. Since Cartika only uses Hsphere, it’s still a valid issue though.
http://www.webhostmagazine.com/ec/award.asp?id=450 gave medialayer an editor’s choice award this March:
March 2008
Web Host Magazine & Buyer’s Guide
Editors’ Choice for Web Hosting
Specialty Hosting services
MediaLayer
Application Hosting
Outstanding Application Hosting
MediaLayer offers a form of hosting made especially for PHP and MySQL applications. Raid protected SCSI hard drives, quad core processors, LiteSpeed, MySQL 5, and more are included with every Application Hosting plan. What’s more, MediaLayer promises zero overselling. They don’t stop there though. Qualified technicians monitor the support channels 24/7 and reply within minutes. Along with the normal technical support, the folks at MediaLayer are more than happy to help users with software problems as well and all of this for an incredible price. When it came to deciding if MediaLayer was Editors’ Choice Award material, well the choice was an obvious one.
For their outstanding Application Hosting service, MediaLayer receives an Editors’ Choice Award for March 2008
http://www.medialayer.com/
Other than the interface, it basically comes down to whether clustered servers or lightspeed is better.
From http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=697528&mode=linear:
Web Hosting Master
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Athens, Greece
Posts: 1,052Cartika has better value in my opinion. Clustered services (each service on seperate server), daily backups of files, 4 hour backups of databases, you can restore the backups from the control panel, I suppose easier upgrade because of their control panel, older/established company (maybe this does not mean anything) etc.
But again, you can’t go wrong with any of those providers.__________________
www.HelmHosts.com :: directory of providers using Parallels Helm Control Panel for Windows Hosting
Latest project :: Mousikopolis Records – online music store
I don’t pretend to follow everything in this post – http://www.megaburst.com/load-balancing/wordpress-benchmarks-running-on-nginx-php-apache-and-fastcgi/
But it basically shows [[Nginx + FastCGI, running spawn-fcgi from Lightspeed distribution with 30 child threads, all static content served by Nginx and PHP served by PHP 5.2.6 php-cgi version (custom compiled from the source of course).]] getting beat by [[Nginx front end, Apache + PHP, Super Cache, some custom rewrite rules:
Requests done: 1000, concurrency 30 threads]]
After a LOT of looking around, I’ve decided to go with Cartika. I like the cluster balancing idea a little better than the supposed lightspeed advantages (I’ve seen reviews that either are good or say it doesn’t make much difference).
I did a little test of their support. I emailed them at 5:13am their time to test their support. I probably should have sent it 2-3 hours ago to see how well they do in the middle of the night.
I received the ticket acknowledgement in 20 minutes:
Your support request has been received. For any updates to this ticket, please reply to this email, leaving the subject line intact.
CartikaHosting Support
The answer came back in 25 minutes
- Hello Scott,
Answers are inline.
On 9/22/08 12:31 PM, “CartikaHosting Support” <support@cartikahosting.com>
wrote:
> IP: 217.194.139.3
> Hello,
> I am considering cartika as a host for my wordpress blog but I wanted
> to contact support for the answer for two reasons; I wanted to do a
> small test of the responsiveness and thoroughness of your support and
> I wanted to get an answer from the guys who may know better than the
> sales guys (no offense to the sales guys).
- Not a problem at all (I’m sure they won’t mind).
> Which of the platforms (freeBSD, Coldfusion, Linux, etc) would be the
> best to use for a wordpress blog? I have no idea about the amount of
> resources (by way of plugins etc) or hit’s I’ll have since I just put
> this venture up 3 days ago (I’m only getting 50-100 hits/day at the
> moment but that will increase pretty soon).
- I would recommend Linux (FreeBSD is also an option — however, not all plugins play nicely with it for whatever reason). ColdFusion runs on Windows (which also support PHP). However, the problem with this is that PHP is not native on Windows as yet (though PHP5 is making strides towards that) so you may see issues in that respect.
> Thank you for your help.
> Scott Kelley
> Realizing {Me}
>
Hopefully this answers the question
.
Regards,
Jonathan
Yup! Thanks Jonathan. I’ll be signing up with the linux site now.
I invite any of the hosts mentioned, as well as any of their current or former customers, to post comments below.
