Good Business Managed Hosting

January 4, 2012 8:33 PM

I'm looking for a managed web host for a startup I'm involved with. I'm currently looking in the $100-$300 per month range plans, with webmasters.com's virtual server in the lead. Does anyone have some advice with this kind of hosting?

We need a Linux based host for a PHP/MySql site that will be available to the general public. We may also need to install OpenOffice on the server for certain specialized doc conversions. We definitely want managed hosting. We need good management and reliable service. Could I get some advice from any mefites out there with good or bad experiences with webmasters or its competitors?

posted by unreason to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Does the 300 dollar plan include sys admin time? Are you doing the sys admin yourself? It sounds like you're looking for a dedicated server (they're normally cheaper than virtual at the high end).
posted by devnull at 12:10 AM on January 5, 2012

The $100 includes server management, i.e., keeping things up and running, applying patches, responding to problems, etc. That's the critical thing because we don't really have the resources to get our own guy to deal with the "it's 2 in the morning and the server is down" problem.
posted by unreason at 6:11 AM on January 5, 2012

I have had good luck with Storm on Demand for my cloud based servers. They also have dedicated options and offer a fully managed servers with CPanel for an additional $20/month.

Rackspace's cloud offering was also in my top 3 and I know they offered fully managed Red Hat servers.
posted by dyno04 at 6:42 AM on January 5, 2012

Since you lack an ops person, maybe you should look into PaaS (Platform as a service) solutions for PHP, a good list of which can be found here. Of those, it looks like cloud control has a MySQL add on.
posted by symbollocks at 11:34 AM on January 5, 2012