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Socoder -> Web Development -> good hosting

Fri, 22 Jul 2011, 02:34
JL235
PMC needs to move, the servers we are currently on just aren't good enough. So does anyone know any good companies for PHP hosting?
Fri, 22 Jul 2011, 03:19
Jayenkai
Obviously not me!
I've looked around a fair few times, but without hitting that "Not cheap anymore" barrier, I've not found anything capable.

I'm too cheap

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''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 22 Jul 2011, 05:33
Spare
I'm very happy with strato so far... But I'm using a VPS, not a webhosting package ( www.strato-hosting.co.uk/ )
Fri, 22 Jul 2011, 12:19
Stealth
If around €7.62 per month sounds acceptable, try the Rackspace Cloud. That will buy you a VPS with 256mb of dedicated memory. Their servers benchmark twice as fast as Amazon AWS.

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Quit posting and try Google.
Fri, 22 Jul 2011, 13:59
HoboBen
Managed or unmanaged? In the latter case, I would recommend Linode, especially as there is a London data centre and support gets back to you within 6 minutes on average. They don't oversell, either. There's good options for expanding, including on-demand instances through an API.

ben@sigma:~$ uptime
20:55:28 up 356 days, 18:47, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Over a year without rebooting! |edit| Apparently I'm now dyslexic! |edit|

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blog | work | code | more code
Fri, 22 Jul 2011, 23:54
Sticky
A year is 365 days

I'd suggest dreamhost - I haven't used them in a bit over a year, but before that I'd used them for about four and they were pretty good. I'm not sure if their service is kinda hit-and-miss though, as there are regularly people complaining about how their websites have been down quite frequently, in nearly every downtime or the like. I never had any such issues - the only time I recall my site being 'down' was when the DNS was still propagating and so the url pointed to the wrong server.

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last.fm
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 11:58
JL235
Rackspace have a hidden $100 signup fee, which puts me off. So I'll probably go with Linode (unless I find a better one).

Thanks for the suggestions!
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 12:32
Stealth
Rackspace have a hidden $100 signup fee


Cloud Servers has no signup fee. Not sure where you saw that at.

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Quit posting and try Google.
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 12:38
JL235
If you have a look on the pricing page, they have a clause at the bottom:

rackspace **In addition to the hourly service fee of 12¢/hour per server, a $100 flat, monthly account fee will be assessed when at least one server on the account is active. The account fee is not reflected in the above pricing as it is not a per server charge but an overall account fee no matter how many servers are active on the account.

I didn't realize it said monthly, so that's even worse.
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 13:36
Stealth
That has a ** next to it because it correlates to the managed service option. You really wouldn't need that unless you wanted a sysadmin on call. The cheapest option will cost you around €7.62. Bandwidth isn't included, but it's quite cheap. That pricing page has a calculator on the right side to help you figure out the costs.

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Quit posting and try Google.
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 13:51
HoboBen
Benchmarks, but a little old: vps performance comparison

(note that Linode now offers more memory and disk space as standard than it did when the benchmark was made)

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blog | work | code | more code
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 13:56
JL235
ah, I see! I just presumed the ** applied to all hosting. I didn't realise it was just for that option. Thanks for clearing that up Stealth.
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 13:59
Stealth
I would go with Linode over Rackspace after looking at those numbers. The only advantage to Rackspace is that they offer Cloud Files (+CDN) and Cloud Balancers with free internal bandwidth. If you have large storage needs or would like to use a CDN, they would be better.

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Quit posting and try Google.
Tue, 02 Aug 2011, 14:00
JL235
Yup, those numbers also convince me too. Thanks Ben!
Thu, 04 Aug 2011, 17:45
JL235
I have bought a Linode account today, and started to setup a dev copy of PMC. So far it handles requests about 50 times faster, at a consistent speed, and with no issues.

I've setup a proper CDN using nginx, which is _much_ faster at serving css/js/images then Apache, and should allow us to send out more data per seconds (and so be faster). It's way faster, even with lots of old optimizations (like caching) currently being broken.

I'm really amazed at how much faster this new server is.
Thu, 04 Aug 2011, 20:33
Stealth
Be sure to install APC for PHP.
Fri, 05 Aug 2011, 02:58
JL235
Done, although there doesn't seem to be any difference in speed. I'll probably only notice it if the site is under load.

But some users on Linode have reported they have much lower CPU usage with APC.