Help finding a webhost...

January 13, 2012 11:01 AM

Webhosting for ~$20 and not shared/has decent uptime? Cloud/VPS? What are my options and what services are competitive and have a good cost?

I'm on dreamhost but the past few months have really sucked with them in terms of downtime. I'm trying to have something more "professional" for all my activities and downtime like this isn't acceptable.

Currently I'm hosting a wordpress blog and a Comic CMS there (and a pmwiki on my own personal domain, separate from the 'commercial/pro' site)...

What sort of price is probably a decent price for a solid uptime? Is VPS what I'm ultimately looking for (I can't be spending hundreds a month on this stuff)?

I like dreamhost's "easy installs" (even if it means I sacrifice some flexibility) -- are there any other hosts that have such features (especially for, say, e-commerce)?

I saw asmallorange recommended on an AskMe but they look like they're just going to be comparable to dreamhost.

Could I just switch to the VPS hosting on dreamhost and have more confidence/uptime? Or will I still have issues and just need to jump the ship?

posted by symbioid to computers & internet (11 answers total)

I've been on eleven2 for years and years. They have great customer service and with the exception of some issues last year on my shared server because someone wash going crazy with bandwidth usage I've not had any downtime in nearly ten years.
posted by winna at 11:19 AM on January 13

Linode is a VPS provider that has plans starting at $20/month. I've used them for about 3 years and they've very reliable. However, with most VPSes it's pretty much up to you to install everything yourself once your VPS is up. Linode provides StackScripts to automatically set up some things like Wordpress, but I've never used them so I can't comment on how they work or how up to date they are.

VPS isn't inherently more stable than shared hosting, though. I'd look at other shared providers to see what they offer. I used Pair networks over a decade ago. They had a good reputation then, and they still do today.
posted by zsazsa at 11:22 AM on January 13 [1 favorite]

I've never had issues out of 1and1.
posted by deezil at 11:26 AM on January 13

I came in here to recommend a Linode VPS. I've been using them for close to a year now without incident.
posted by namewithoutwords at 11:41 AM on January 13

I vaguely know the Positive Internet guys and they're great people, very professional and knowledgable.
posted by Magnakai at 12:20 PM on January 13

Veeble has been good for me for my purposes. My VPS there gives me something like 120gb, plenty of horsepower and I think ~3TB of throughput per month for $25. You'd need to install everything but the OS yourself, though. I see downtime for a few minutes every 3-4 weeks, but really never for very long at all. It was the best deal on offshore VPS I could find at the time.
posted by pjaust at 12:27 PM on January 13

Linode is lovely. Amazon was running a deal on a free micro VM for a while. I used linode's handy DNS panel to direct some domains to the Amazon account. Works great!
posted by klanawa at 12:36 PM on January 13

I asked a question on webhosting a few months ago. I choose webfaction in the end and found them wonderful. On their shared hosting they have easy installers, but they give you almost free reign to do whatever you want with your hosting (unlike godaddy who apparently allow ssh-ing to shared hosting but all you can do is look at your files). They have extremely good support also - they are quick to respond, competent and friendly.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 1:02 PM on January 13

Positive multi-year experience with Rimuhosting VPS
posted by zippy at 1:38 PM on January 13

Another vote for Linode, they are super quick respond to help and often give free upgrades.
posted by DJWeezy at 6:31 PM on January 13

Webfaction is good, but there panel is not as user friendly as Dreamhost. Also, their email system leaves a bit to be desired. Use Google apps for your Domain if you don't need more than 10 accounts
posted by backwards guitar at 8:16 PM on January 13