Need Reference: Looking for a *reliable* small business web host

[xerocool]

Hi all,

Not sure if this is in the right forum, Mods - if this is incorrect please PM me or move it...

I'm starting up a new business and require a reliable relatively low-cost web host who can handle lots of simultaneous database accesses and gives a healthy chunk of monthly bandwidth.

I've heard a couple of things, please correct me my understanding on any of these are wrong - 1) that I should buy my domain name and host service from the same provider company due to routing issues, i.e. don't use GoDaddy to buy a name and Yahoo to host it. 2) companies that advertise UNLIMITED bandwidth/storage do not guarantee any form of Qos, i.e. if they're loaded by other people then you're just SoL. 3) some hosts, when you register with them, do not actually SELL you the name, they actually register for you but maintain the rights to it, but some actually sell the name to you as if it were your property, is there a way I can distinguish them?

I'm not making a web page to advertise my service, rather my web page is my service - as if I were creating a forum service like Anandtech. However, I'm nowhere near that stage yet and am planning only to register my domain name while I'm building up the site, and also eventually if all goes well I'm planning on expanding so I don't need these first servers to be the end all, just something that say can handle 10,000-50,000 unique users.

If anyone, even the mods, have any suggestions I'd really appreciate it as I'm seeing all these cheapo web hosting guys, but I'm not sure if they're any good (probably not).

Cheers,
Xero

 

[kevnich2]

Not sure about QOS or guarantees (No one in the IT business gives guarantees much) but I would take a look at hostgator.com I've been using them for 2 1/2 years now after going through about 5 very unrealible hosting companies and have had ZERO trouble with them. Very good company, good communication, excellent support. I'm fairly certain their support is 24/7 as well. Price is very reasonable too. And no, I have no affiliation with hostgator - just a satisfied customer that took several years to find a good, reliable hosting company.

 

[JackMDS]

Hosting services measure the Amount of Bandwidth that the clients use.

Unlimited means that you are not paying for any of the Amount used, it has Nothing to do with Qos.

If you buy a regular Domain that is own by you, it does not matter who you bought it from and where you use it. There is No gains in using the Registrar that you bought it from unless they offer some special Cost related deals. I.e., it has nothing to do with Bandwidth, Speed, or technology.

 

[ScottMac]

Yahoo looks to have some decent deals, they are very secure, are well maintained, and probably more bandwidth than your average cheap shop. Their support group has always been good to me if I had an issue.

What you need to watch is, IMO, any free utilities, frameworks, databases, etc that they offer. I think Yahoo offers PHP Nuke, for example, but it's gawd-awful old, appears to be completely un-patched, and easily hacked. If you want to use a framework, be prepared to load the entire thing and do all the maintenance. I think they use mySQL, but again, I think it's an older version (but at least they lock it down some and appear to keep it up to patch). They have a couple CGI languages available.

Check 'em out if you haven't already

 

[Emulex]

i never put my domains near my hosting. you create a single point of failure.

moniker is SOLID for high end domains (5-6 figure value); 1and1 is good for low end (0-4 figure). 1and1 will not sell/hold/etc your domain for non payment/decline card they will send you to collections after 90 days. which is better than having your domain sold off and having to buy it back (or not).

godaddy is lame. if i fake a piece of spam from you i can have your domain shutdown and you fined $200 like that. avoid like the plague. the also ban /24's for a single ip offender. super lame.

you won't get SLA's without high price tag.

i've had about 24 hours of outage this year with dreamhost and about 2 hours in the past 3 years with 1and1. My own T-1 has had maybe .5 hour in the last 3 years. Comcast has had maybe 48 hours in the past 3 years.

you kinda get the point on your quality is about correlated to your pay$$.

amazon cloud is not a terrible choice. they can't afford to go down. their hosting is what amazon uses itself and a day of downtime would equal milllions in lost sales easily. they have a vested interest. you could start small and balloon quickly. it is not cheap but that kind of flexibility if your site gets hammered for popularity is something you won't find in small potatoes hosting.

 

[kevnich2]

A bit off topic but if your T-1 with 1/2 hour of downtime, consider yourself lucky. I've worked with lots of small businesses with T-1's and ended up convincing almost all of them to go with a cable or DSL for primary connection because their T-1's went down so often. Old wiring is old wiring.

OP: If you want reliablity with webhosting though, the higher the cost, generally the better they are, better support you'll get for any issues you run into.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

My brother works in the realm of webhosting, I'll have him chime in.

 

[xerocool]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Hosting services measure the Amount of Bandwidth that the clients use.

Unlimited means that you are not paying for any of the Amount used, it has Nothing to do with Qos.

Sorry, I knew I should've been more specific here - what I mean by QoS is not like VoIP service or packet conditioning/traffic prioritization; what I mean by QoS is guaranteed uptime, bandwidth, storage. All sites that promote unlimited anything always have a clause in their TOS which state something to the effect of "if you go over whatever our undefined limits are you can get fined/disabled/banned/etc."

My concern here is that I'd rather pay for some guaranteed quality of the host's service, so that I *know* that I'm getting 500GB of bandwidth rather than possibly getting 500GB one month and 50GB the next month, due to other customers using the site more and me getting a smaller share.

If you buy a regular Domain that is own by you, it does not matter who you bought it from and where you use it. There is No gains in using the Registrar that you bought it from unless they offer some special Cost related deals. I.e., it has nothing to do with Bandwidth, Speed, or technology.

What I meant/heard from about the registrar v. the host is that the registrar is the person who resolves the domain name and obviously the host is the one who provides the actual backbone (CPU, Bandwidth, Storage, etc.) for the actual site. Purely logically speaking, for example, if I have my name registered with GoDaddy and my site hosted by 1and1; isn't GoDaddy the one who is resolving the name and then has to forward the client to 1and1 servers? Does this introduce any sort of latency/performance lag? From a systems standpoint it seems like it would by having two physical boxes somewhere else in the world, but it may be marginal - I'm not sure, that's why I'm asking.

Actually, the whole regsitrar and host on the same server is something that I've been looking into alot - it seems pretty much everyone says not to, but my colleague's cousin says that its necessary to provide faster service. If anyone can give me their 2cents on the pro's/con's (if any) in detail I'd really appreciate it!

Btw, thanks everyone for posting all their stuff! I'm taking a look at www.thesitewizard.com and it's really helpful - and alot of it is what you all are saying too, so I feel more reassured now.

Also, we were leaning towards using 1and1.com, but it got HORRIBLE reviews about how they wouldn't stop charging people and one person even said something about how they're holdinger her domain hostage??

 

[Crusty]

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4

Look there for shared hosting offers and make sure to search for reviews of the company before you commit to anything. Make sure you buy your domain from an official registrar like godaddy or namecheap(there are tons of others as well).

 

[heymrdj]

For only 10-50,000 uniques shared should be more than enough service, but it is bad business to do business from shared resources. Most hosters are fickle, and TOS's can screw you over, which is bad for your business front. I would recommend a VPS server, or a small Dedicated. I pay for a 40$ a month server from Interserver.com right now. Atom processor, 1GB RAM and 250GB hard drive. Easily runs 18 threads of the python/php/mysql application of torrentflux while serving FTP and HTTP hits. I would recommend this route. If you can't manage a linux server, hire someone to manage it for you. If you're no good with command line you can hire someone to set it up to go so all you have to do is use GUI's, I do this service as well. If you really really are new to managing webservers though, get you a server with the Direct Admin or Cpanel control panel already installed. It's literally point and click really at that point, though DA normally adds 10-15$ a month to the price, and Cpanel adds about 25$ a month. This is the licensing costs and hosts make very little money off these licenses. Go to those panels sites and you'll see if you bought those licenses yourself you're paying a minimum of 300$ one time. Cpanel is 1,075$ for 3 years license. I use the free Virtualmin panel right now, but it leaves alot to be desired and still requires a decent amount of CLI knowledge to run it.

A dedicated will start you off (at most companies) with a 100mbs line and 2TB of bandwidth, with more available. Of course you can go as high as 100mbs dedicated lines (33TB per month), but these cost about 1,200$ a month. And then there's GB pipes, but those are a lot of $$$.

Are your databases going to be hosted on server? Or are you wanting multiple database servers for database failover? If you're new, a single server with Apache/SSL, and MySQL should be all you need.

NEVER buy your domain name from your company. I use namecheap and they work well with me, as they will run nameservers for me, or I can run my own. I run my own as I have to point to multiple servers such as a Zimbra server for MX records ect ect, but for a simple setup like yours, namecheap should work.

I'll keep checking into the thread.

 

[xerocool]

Originally posted by: heymrdj
For only 10-50,000 uniques shared should be more than enough service, but it is bad business to do business from shared resources. Most hosters are fickle, and TOS's can screw you over, which is bad for your business front. I would recommend a VPS server, or a small Dedicated. I pay for a 40$ a month server from Interserver.com right now. Atom processor, 1GB RAM and 250GB hard drive. Easily runs 18 threads of the python/php/mysql application of torrentflux while serving FTP and HTTP hits. I would recommend this route. If you can't manage a linux server, hire someone to manage it for you. If you're no good with command line you can hire someone to set it up to go so all you have to do is use GUI's, I do this service as well. If you really really are new to managing webservers though, get you a server with the Direct Admin or Cpanel control panel already installed. It's literally point and click really at that point, though DA normally adds 10-15$ a month to the price, and Cpanel adds about 25$ a month. This is the licensing costs and hosts make very little money off these licenses. Go to those panels sites and you'll see if you bought those licenses yourself you're paying a minimum of 300$ one time. Cpanel is 1,075$ for 3 years license. I use the free Virtualmin panel right now, but it leaves alot to be desired and still requires a decent amount of CLI knowledge to run it.

A dedicated will start you off (at most companies) with a 100mbs line and 2TB of bandwidth, with more available. Of course you can go as high as 100mbs dedicated lines (33TB per month), but these cost about 1,200$ a month. And then there's GB pipes, but those are a lot of $$$.

Are your databases going to be hosted on server? Or are you wanting multiple database servers for database failover? If you're new, a single server with Apache/SSL, and MySQL should be all you need.

NEVER buy your domain name from your company. I use namecheap and they work well with me, as they will run nameservers for me, or I can run my own. I run my own as I have to point to multiple servers such as a Zimbra server for MX records ect ect, but for a simple setup like yours, namecheap should work.

I'll keep checking into the thread.

wow! tremendous amounts of information here, thanks!

i think for phase 1 we are looking at a single host server for our databases, we do realize the necessity for redundancy incase of server failures or DoS attacks; but we're not big enough to really warrant multiple DB servers... (yet ) and for our initial starting purposes, i think shared hosting will do until we (hopefully) pick up some steam and have a reason to sink more cash into the site.

i just wanted to clarify one sentence of yours "NEVER buy your domain name from your company", i take it you mean never buy the domain name from the hosting company? is this because of the single point of failure that was mentioned before previously? are there any other reasons (or can you expand on this)?

again, to everyone, thanks so much for the awesome support/replies; it's helping me alot out here! :heart:

 

[heymrdj]

Originally posted by: xerocool

Originally posted by: heymrdj
For only 10-50,000 uniques shared should be more than enough service, but it is bad business to do business from shared resources. Most hosters are fickle, and TOS's can screw you over, which is bad for your business front. I would recommend a VPS server, or a small Dedicated. I pay for a 40$ a month server from Interserver.com right now. Atom processor, 1GB RAM and 250GB hard drive. Easily runs 18 threads of the python/php/mysql application of torrentflux while serving FTP and HTTP hits. I would recommend this route. If you can't manage a linux server, hire someone to manage it for you. If you're no good with command line you can hire someone to set it up to go so all you have to do is use GUI's, I do this service as well. If you really really are new to managing webservers though, get you a server with the Direct Admin or Cpanel control panel already installed. It's literally point and click really at that point, though DA normally adds 10-15$ a month to the price, and Cpanel adds about 25$ a month. This is the licensing costs and hosts make very little money off these licenses. Go to those panels sites and you'll see if you bought those licenses yourself you're paying a minimum of 300$ one time. Cpanel is 1,075$ for 3 years license. I use the free Virtualmin panel right now, but it leaves alot to be desired and still requires a decent amount of CLI knowledge to run it.

A dedicated will start you off (at most companies) with a 100mbs line and 2TB of bandwidth, with more available. Of course you can go as high as 100mbs dedicated lines (33TB per month), but these cost about 1,200$ a month. And then there's GB pipes, but those are a lot of $$$.

Are your databases going to be hosted on server? Or are you wanting multiple database servers for database failover? If you're new, a single server with Apache/SSL, and MySQL should be all you need.

NEVER buy your domain name from your company. I use namecheap and they work well with me, as they will run nameservers for me, or I can run my own. I run my own as I have to point to multiple servers such as a Zimbra server for MX records ect ect, but for a simple setup like yours, namecheap should work.

I'll keep checking into the thread.

wow! tremendous amounts of information here, thanks!

i think for phase 1 we are looking at a single host server for our databases, we do realize the necessity for redundancy incase of server failures or DoS attacks; but we're not big enough to really warrant multiple DB servers... (yet ) and for our initial starting purposes, i think shared hosting will do until we (hopefully) pick up some steam and have a reason to sink more cash into the site.

i just wanted to clarify one sentence of yours "NEVER buy your domain name from your company", i take it you mean never buy the domain name from the hosting company? is this because of the single point of failure that was mentioned before previously? are there any other reasons (or can you expand on this)?

again, to everyone, thanks so much for the awesome support/replies; it's helping me alot out here! :heart:

Many webhosters are like lawyers. Their TOS and other agreements get you into ownership pickles. Alot of times when you buy a domain from a host, you're giving them the rights to said domain. It's always best to go with a domain company such as enom, godaddy, and namecheap. This allows you to carry your domain anywhere, even if it's a little server you're running in your closet at home. Remember also that domains are alot like federal property, and theres laws to their registration to the world's DNS servers. Therefore there aren't exactly many companies that actually sell domains, many are just resellers of the big ones. Many the big ones (like namecheap and enom) give reseller packages that allows one to sell domains for them and take a cut off the top, and also make it look like the hoster can offer a complete package.

Do yourself the favor and get the domain from a big domain seller, and the host for elsewhere.

I'm on www.freewebspace.net as heymrdj, you can post there for shared hosting and the guys will compete over you. If you're curious about a companie's rep then you can PM me here or there and I'll help you dig the dirt on them. I would offer to host you myself but I dropped out of that game a few years ago because it takes way too much time to manage web servers for the public.

Oh and I'm thecoolnessrune's brother .

 

[Emulex]

yeah its nice when you can actually talk to the owner (monte) of moniker about issues; and they know how to handle 6-7 figure domain transactions;escrow; protecting the account from fraud, etc.

you pay a little more but if its your trademark business name having your domain auto-renew to fill 10 years is a good thing.

if your hosting server goes kaput you can quickly reroute dns to minimize downtime.

1and1 is cool with their nemesis servers which provide backup MX for free. i had over 25K emails backed up on their servers due to a massive reverse-bounce attack on a domain. my mail servers couldn't process the flow. they held up their end and no business mail was lost. that is a BIG PLUS to me. huge. free with any domain purchase.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I am not sure if it's been mentioned, but what sort of databases are you looking to get hosted?

It sounds like you just need some shared hosting, with the ability to move into a VPS, or Dedicated server when the time comes.

 

[xerocool]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
I am not sure if it's been mentioned, but what sort of databases are you looking to get hosted?

It sounds like you just need some shared hosting, with the ability to move into a VPS, or Dedicated server when the time comes.

looking for a host with MySQL - we already have some groundwork laid out from playing around in our sandbox host (Dreamhost) - neither of us are super experts with creating websites, so i'm not sure what else you mean by types of DB's. is there something that we should look for in particular for security/expandibility/etc reasons?

btw, thanks to everyone for their super support, we ended up reg'ing with GoDaddy and pointed it to our sandbox for now. we're still looking into getting a real host, but development should take at least another month or two, so we have some time.

i'm going to save this thread for posterity and future reference

cheers all!
-xero

 

[ViviTheMage]

MS SQL, MySQL, etc...but you said you were using MySQL.

If you have any web hosting questions, let me know! I offer some pretty decent rates to AT members.

 

[holden j caufield]

you can visit www.lightcloud.com we can offer you basically anything you need and have datacenters across the country. Feel free to PM me any questions