Intel on Web Hosting?

[SWCAdmin]

Call for recommendations, from the tech savvy of you. Who has had a good experience with their web host?

At the moment we are on a shared hosting plan through MidPhase that looks and smells great, but the performance is not meeting our members' needs. Specifically, it is intermittently slow, and their sophomoric approach to defending DoS attacks is resulting in a lot of false positive blocked IPs for our legit users. While an upgrade to their dedicated server would fix the former, the latter would persist and is not acceptable.

A lot of the misc hosting plans I've seen are too stingy on storage and/or MySQL databases. We need many databases with beau coup volume to accommodate future plans where the whole site will be database driven.

Any suggestions?

Prefer recommendations of good places to go to, but identifying NO GO terrain is productive, too.

P.S. *nix w/ php 5 and MySQL 4.

[SteveMetz]

Call for recommendations, from the tech savvy of you. Who has had a good experience with their web host?

At the moment we are on a shared hosting plan through MidPhase that looks and smells great, but the performance is not meeting our members' needs. Specifically, it is intermittently slow, and their sophomoric approach to defending DoS attacks is resulting in a lot of false positive blocked IPs for our legit users. While an upgrade to their dedicated server would fix the former, the latter would persist and is not acceptable.

A lot of the misc hosting plans I've seen are too stingy on storage and/or MySQL databases. We need many databases with beau coup volume to accommodate future plans where the whole site will be database driven.

Any suggestions?

Prefer recommendations of good places to go to, but identifying NO GO terrain is productive, too.

I've been happy with GoDaddy but all I have is a little, very simple photo gallery.

[selil]

It's all a function of cost. As you've found out shared hosting isn't that great. I use Hands On Web Hosting (handsonwebhosting.com) which is cheap and on an intermediate package around $45 a month. The Planet is used by some big name site that are high bandwidth but money becomes an issue quickly and they aren't so easy to work with. Soft Layer Technologies worked with a site I help out quite a bit and got them up and running on dedicated servers (but they have other plans). When negotiating with an ISP/hosting service have your monthly and daily bandwidth requirements in hand. A lot of them have zero idea how much bandwidth a largish forum can burn up quickly. When you talk to them you do want to know their security plan and how deep it is. It sounds like your current provider is following the crunch on the outside gooey on the inside model of security. Not so great for depth. With a few providers I've gotten all the way down to asking if they run Bastille or similar security scripts on their servers. Even then my provider gets hacked about six times a year which is the nature of shared hosting. With one of the sites I helped (#13 for activity on big boards for a long time) we just went ahead and purchased an entire server it was cheaper than shared hosting with the same data requirements.

I guess know a few things too. You're not the first to have this issue. Bandwidth and shared hosting will always be expensive and suck. Ask about disaster recovery and back up methods first. Know what you currently use and project your growth out at least a year. Web forums grow on exponential curves then plateau then grow again. Those growth periods create "frustration gaps" for users that are soon forgotten after servers are upgraded. Ask a provider about six sigma or better up time. That is really expensive too. The vBulletin web forums used to have an area where people rated hosting providers. I haven't been on there in a long time though.

If this is helpful let me know we can discuss in detail.

[MountainRunner]

I'm very happy with Pair Networks. They are one of the few who support MovableType, as in they install and actually provide tech support on it. Here's a handy referral link if you're interested.

[Chris Albon]

I cannot say enough praise for FluidHosting, especially their support. There is usually zero wait time to chat (available 24/7) with the support team which is so much preferable than waiting 2-3 days to get a response over email like other hosting companies I tried.

They also offer a bunch of hosting options:

# Shared Hosting
Easy to Manage General Purpose Hosting
# Virtual Private Server (VPS)
Low Priced Highend Server Environment for Advanced Users
# Shared Hosting Reseller
(Entry Level) Complete Hosting Solution for Web Designers/Hosting Companies
# Server Colocation

[SWCAdmin]

Thanks all. I'll run with these leads, bug you for more info, etc. Probably next week as the weekend is already committed to moving more dirt on the overdue SWJ Magazine.