After hearing on Twitter how an acquaintance’s new hosting provider went ‘mammaries skyward’ this week, much to their understandable annoyance, it occurred to me that I have some recommendations I can make on this subject. While I don’t host that many sites, I’ve been doing it for long enough and had experience of both personal and medium-traffic sites that I’ve experienced the highs and lows quite a few times already.
The Golden Rule: Support > Everything
When it comes to hosting, the most important thing to look for, beyond what all the statistics of how much space and bandwidth you get, beyond even quoted up-times, is the quality of the support service. The big question is: when things go wrong – and if you host long enough, eventually they will even in the best possible hosting environment – how quickly are problems resolved, and how responsive are the support engineers during the process. Literally nothing is more important than this, and unfortunately it’s the one thing that you’ll only really learn with experience, unless you’re hosting a site big enough that you can get a formal SLA. Assuming you’re not going big enough for that, the only way to judge this is by being with a provider for a while, or knowing someone who has been with them, or possibly looking at online review sites – although frankly these are often highly unreliable, polluted as they are with inaccuracies and omissions either because of ignorance (people who post glowing reviews after being with the site 2 weeks) and unfortunately by frequent shill reviews.
I’ll post a couple of hosts I’ve had good experience with over many years later in the post, through good times and bad.
Know Your Bandwidth
Personally, I instantly rule out any host that claims ‘unlimited bandwith’. This is a crock – there is no such thing, and to claim there is just means the host is already lying to you before you even start – they have to pay for their bandwidth, so they can’t possibly allow everyone truly unlimited bandwidth and stay in business. If you really need unlimited bandwidth, i.e. you have a high-traffic site with lots of media files, then you will quickly bump into the way that these sites offer this ‘unlimited’ deal – via throttling. You may not have an absolute physical cap on your bandwidth, but if the tap is locked off to a slow dribble beyond a certain usage, it’s really worthless. In practice, ‘unlimited bandwidth’ is just a marketing point that they hope will draw in people who will only actually use a tiny amount of bandwidth, but will somehow favour them because the offer looks good. Don’t be one of those dumb guys.
Really you need to establish your bandwidth requirements and head for a host that can fulfil them for a reasonable price. For example, ogre3d.org uses between 125GB and 250GB per month, which is a reasonable amount, compared to my personal site here which only needs 5-10GB per month.
If you have ‘spiky’ bandwidth, i.e. occasionally you need to be able to distribute large amounts of data, but it’s not a constant stream, it would be best to go for a lower monthly limit and host high-bandwidth items elsewhere. I often use Amazon S3 for this purpose which can be made to look like a sub-domain of your own site, and which charges for bandwidth at a very fine granularity so matches your demand closely – it’s more expensive than buying a monthly allowance if you use it a lot, but for on-demand spikes it works very well.
Shared, Dedicated or Virtual/Cloud?
I currently use two shared hosts and one dedicated host, to match the demands of each site. Personally, I’m still very skeptical about virtual private servers and cloud hosting, due to a bad experience I had a few years back when we tried running ogre3d.org on a VPS. We lasted not much more than a month before we moved the server to a dedicated machine because the VPS simply didn’t deliver on its promises – performance was unpredictable and to be honest you had the worst of both worlds – you had to admin your own server but you still didn’t have a 100% guarantee that no-one else would be screwing with something on the machine, or that the disk arrays wouldn’t be hammered by someone else (regardless of CPU assignment), or some other balancing issue. Virtualisation has evolved in the last few years so this may not be an accurate representation anymore, but personally I wouldn’t go for a VPS again any time soon, unless it was a machine I controlled entirely and partitioned myself into virtuals – at least with shared and dedicated servers you know exactly what you’re getting – either a low-maintenance but shared resource environment, or total control & power. VPS claims to offer a middle ground but in my experience it didn’t deliver.
So, who do I use?
For my shared hosting, I’ve been using Hosting Matters for about 10 years now. I went through a couple of other hosts before them and had terrible experiences, but since I switched to them I’ve been very happy. I can count the number of hours downtime (that I’ve been aware of) over those years on one hand, and whenever there’s an issue they’re incredibly fast to respond – they have both community forums and support tickets depending on the urgency. It’s also very reassuring to see the same names cropping up in the support responses over the years.
Their offerings are pretty standard, nothing that would make them jump off the page for anyone looking for a stellar feature list or super-cheap pricing. But they’re very reasonable, they’re honest about what they’re offering (like bandwidth), and as I said before, support > everything.
For dedicated hosting, since 2007 I’ve used Dedipower. They’re based in Reading, their support staff are all local and are on the end of a phone if you need them (no call centres). Having been through a UK dedicated server comparison twice in the last 3 years (once again just recently), Dedipower came out as the most competitive for the service they were willing to offer, and I’ve been happy with the support service. In once instance in fact, when I moved a sub-site off the server, they were quickly on the phone to me within 10 minutes to tell me it was ‘down’ – at which point I had to explain it was expected & apologise for not notifying them in advance. You really can’t complain about that.
I hope that’s useful to someone. In case I need to point this out, I’m not getting paid or receiving discounts to promote either of these hosts, they’re just the two I’ve been most happy with over the ~10 years I’ve been hosting sites. YMMV but they’ve worked well for me 
July 8th, 2010 at 10:42 am
Funny thing here, I first got a bit annoyed when I saw your post seeing as just this month I had to decide on a host to start building my site and I could have used the opinion first. Pleasantly surprised though, that you recommended Hosting Matters which was my choice anyways.
July 8th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
After having some lousy experiences with other VPS providers, I’ve been nothing but delighted with Linode. Fantastic support, great performance, reasonable prices. And they have a datacenter in London now too.
July 8th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
@Drexer: haha
@Till: funnily enough, linode was where we hosted ogre3d.org on VPS originally that we weren’t happy with (performance wise, and scaling it out wasn’t cost-effective). But this was 2005, as I say things may be different now. We’ve been dedicated since then.
July 8th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
I run a couple VPS’s on linode and I’ve been pretty happy. One thing you have to do is tweak your software for a low memory environment (especially apache if you’re running it). Once you’ve done that, VPS performance should be pretty good unless your server load is very disk intensive (disks are shared so read and writes are always going to be slower).
July 9th, 2010 at 1:21 am
Another linode user. Although I don’t stress mine overly at all, I really need the power a vps provides over shared hosting without the price a dedicated server implies over everything else. Plus they just gave me ~42% more ram for the same price so I’m happy.
I also agree with the memory sentiments, the typical install and go LAMP stack eats ram terribly and needlessly. If possible I’d recommend Nginx to prospective VPS users due to its supreme light footprint and speed.
July 9th, 2010 at 2:08 am
A fourth Linode user here – wow. A few things my VPS experiences have told me:
Firstly, you really need a VPS which is near to you. SSH becomes unusable when latencies are high or highly variable. Preferably keep it in country, at the least on the same continent.
Secondly, no Apache. Apache is a real resource hog. Good options are Cherokee (the performance king) and Nginx (the very close runner up). Cherokee also gets an extra thumbs up for spawning your back-end servers for you, and a so so usable graphical GUI (Believe me, I’ve never once wished I had a textual config file, but depending on your demands you might). lighthttpd is a third option, but is slightly slower and plagued by memory leaks.
(I’ll also note that I wouldn’t run Apache for anything – even on a dedicated server. In my eyes it has no advantages whatsoever).
Thirdly, Xen, Xen, Xen. Back in 2005 Linode ran User Mode Linux, which was somewhat more sluggish than Xen is. Xen’s fair resource allocation is very good – but of course you have the issue of it being difficult to benchmark things when the host node is fully loaded and you aren’t bursting into other people’s resources.
July 9th, 2010 at 9:16 am
When we were on linode we spent 6 weeks tweaking to try to get it to run well 24/7 and didn’t manage it – we went with thttpd to cut down memory use, endlessly tweaked PHP memory use etc. Even when we managed to get it within memory budget performance was far too unpredictable – like I say, they in theory allocate you CPU/RAM, but that’s not the only things you’re sharing (disk arrays, network bandwidth etc).
But yeah, this was 2005 and relatively speaking we had a high-traffic site for the budget we had. Things are probably different now, but I’m still highly skeptical. If I’m going to have to go to the trouble of administering my own server, I’d prefer to have complete control over it, personally. If I’m not going to have 100% control, I’d rather have someone else pick up the slack of SW updates etc. I’m not convinced the middle ground of VPS has many benefits unless you have a modest site and just happen to want to manage the configuration directly (either because you have specific needs, or you just like to play). I don’t think it’s on the radar particularly as a performance option for me.
I’ve never had an issue with SSH latencies and I regularly host internationally. I also like text-only configurations – they’re fast to use remotely (compared to VNC et al), I can search for settings far easier than digging through a GUI, and I can very easily back up, diff and comment configurations. GUI server configuration is overrated
July 11th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Thank You very much I was in so dire need of exactly this info. Thanks very good info.
July 11th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
The Cherokee configuration is via a (very nice) web interface. It generates a “human readable” (in a quite loose sense – i.e. unstructured) configuration file, so it can be diffed, and in a tough spot can be hand edited.
I certainly manage to get things done using the web interface quicker than I did with either Apache or nginx’ configuration files though (Wizards for quickly deploying common applications and platforms definitely help!
July 12th, 2010 at 9:01 am
@Owen: I still prefer 100% plain text configuration. I realise some people don’t.
Plus, I also like that the only way to admin the server is via SSH – a very long obscure password or my (heavily protected) SSH keys, potentially with port knocking options. Web interfaces to admin critical central services make me nervous, they’re far more likely to be compromised.
July 12th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
cherokee-admin a) has to be started manually, b) binds only to Localhost (you SSH port forward it) and c) generates a long random password each time you launch it.
Its pretty secure!
(OK, you can override all of these things if you want)
As for the config file – it is plain text, just in the form “mime!video/mp4!extensions = mp4″
September 14th, 2010 at 2:35 am
1) Personally, I instantly rule out any host that claims ‘unlimited bandwith’.
2) http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/6026/hosting.png
3) For my shared hosting, I’ve been using Hosting Matters for about 10 years now.
Something’s awry between your “Steal underpants” and “Profit” steps.
September 14th, 2010 at 8:55 am
At the time of writing, and over the last 10 years, they didn’t offer an unlimited option. I’m disappointed they’ve caved to marketing pressure to do so since I wrote this post, and therefore gave you the opportunity to be smug about it
Hopefully it’s a one-off just for their anniversary.
My message is the same though -ignore unlimited packages, they’re just a marketing gimmick. If you really need that many resources, they won’t deliver.
January 24th, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Personally my hosting arrangement is this.
Avoid Shared Hosting at all costs – unless what you are hosting has no value – i.e. no passwords, login data etc.
Beyond that, VPS hosting is the way to go. With this you have to recognise that not all VPS hosts are the same, and some pack the machines far too tight.
However, the security is far better – no running all PHP scripts on the webserver as the same user, relying on safe_mode or open_basedir for protection. You can run what you like, you get SSH access and you can control backups etc.
At some point you will have to bite the bullet and go dedicated hosting – I can’t speak about this much because I don’t have that much experience.
Also, agree with Steve on the unlimited data scam – it is. What you want to be looking at is what is the peak bandwidth you can use (100 MB/s ? 1GB/s? etc) and what the total per month you can use.
Amazon S3 is a sketchy service – the cost is in no way transparent, but if you need to get a lot of data out to people it is cost effective.