Suitable UK Linux Hosting Packages For Lots Of Small Sites
Sep 5, 2007
Does anyone know of a hosting Linux package (must be UK based) that has the usuals (PHP, MySQL, subdomains, email, Apache ModRewrite) that is geared towards hosting lots of low bandwidth sites?
I use several great hosters but they limit the amount of addon domains or charge you through the roof for extra ones. I'm thinking a package that will let me do 15 - 25 domains. More would be a bonus. The bandwidth allowance is not a problem. A lot of my customers' sites use less than 100 MB a month.
For hosting smaller sites 10-20 pages with low niche traffic would it be better to host them individually on small hosting plans or would it be to your advantage to host themt together on a dedicated server?
I've a few arcades sites and they're using more bandwidth than my servers can handle (> 2TB month). I currently have two dedicated boxes.
The sites are static, so they don't require much processing power, just bandwidth (lots of .swf files).
My current host(liquidweb) offered me a 10mb unmetered for 100usd/month, which sounded too much, as I think that I'd be better renting more servers(Or VPSs) and spreading the sites (avoiding single point of failure).
I searched and thought about trying mediatemple grid service, which offers 1TB bw/month.
What do you guys think? Will I be able to use all the BW they promise, ow they will try to kick me off saying that I'm using too much resources(even I hosting only static files)?
I host about 30 sites for clients who don't want to manage their own hosting. All of the sites are low-traffic. Almost all use FrogCMS or Wordpress /w minify and cacheing options. All of my clients use Google Apps for email.
I guess I'm looking for a reasonable host (nothing unlimited) more storage than ASO would be nice - I'm looking from something from $10-20 monthly and I can purchase for a year at a time.
Sharkspace, downtown host and host gator seem a little "dreamhost-like"... but have good reviews.
Also, I'm in Montreal so a datacenter on the east-coast would be nice
I run a large service on 2 machines (we're talking 8x2.66Ghz processing power, 4-6GB ram, etc), however we are thinking about creating a node/clustered setup to help spread the load, bandwidth, mysql (having one server for hundreds of thousands of databases is not wise it seems :p), diskspace etc. Lots of machines just seems to be a cheaper and more powerful option.
Would you advise going with lots of lower end machines, or just a few mid-range machines.
Here is what I propose:
3 of these Dual Xeon 3GHZ Dual-Core (4x3GHz) 3GB RAM 500GB Sata Drive 4000 GB Bandwidth 100mbit
or
4 of these XEON X3220 QUAD CORE 2.4GHZ 1066FSB 2GB DDR2 RAM (Upgradeable) 250GB HDD 2000GB Bandwidth 100mbit
or
7 of these Dual Xeon 3.06 Ghz 2GB DDR2 RAM 250GB SATA 2000GB BW/MONTH 100mbit
All of the above are roughly similar prices in total.
I have built a server so I can co-locate it to be used for shared hosting. The specification is high, compared to most dedicated server offerings, so I was considering splitting it up into different virtual machines for different purposes. The specification is: Intel Xeon 3230 (4x 2.66ghz), 8GB DDR ECC RAM, Seagate Cheetah SAS 15,000rpm (4x 147GB), Adaptec RAID 5405 (RAID 6 Array with Battery Backup), Dual on-board NIC, etc.
The original plan was to use this machine as just one linux server, but I am concerned most of its potential will not be exploited. So I am exploring the possibility of setting it up as 2 Virtual Machines, installing Linux on one and Windows on the other. This way I can offer hosting for ASP and ASP.NET, and possibly MS SQL and/or Exchange depending on costs for their licences.
What Microsoft licences are suitable for servers used for shared hosting? From what I can gather there are several ways of being licenced, but I can't figure out which is the most cost effective. It seems you buy the server OS edition that supports your requirements, then pay another licence per user (CAL?) - I haven't got a clue how many users I will need to have though. Then if you want to use MS SQL, DNS or Exchange you need the correct edition - and buy licences for these too.
Does anyone know roughly what I should be looking to pay for what? I would ideally like to have MS SQL, DNS and Exchange - but am aware that the licence could be so expensive that it wouldn't be worth doing.
Can anyone recommend a reliable VPS or Dedicated server company that has 64/128+ IPs. My preference is a company that has the IPs on hand - without the paperwork. I'm after something with low cpu, ram, bandwidth / resource usage.
My server will be having an OS reload. I'd like to know where to find all Hosting packages made by the root and by the reseller users. How do I restore that to the newly installed OS?
how about other needed files to consider aside from the account backup?
Can anyone give me some recomendations of some traffic accounting packages?
I'm looking for something that drives the backend stats you get as a customer when you login to your Dedicated Server providers control panel. Traffic graphs / total throughput stats etc
The obvious way to do this is to ping the switch ports and generate graphs and stats using RRD tool. The other way to do it would be to mirror the external switch port and generate stats from there (this would discount 'internal' traffic between boxes, although there will be a seperate private LAN for this).
We can obviously roll our own, but to save on man hours are there any out the box packages (open source or otherwise) to generate the graphs, traffic levels and dump it all out in a nice customer friendly report (i.e not something like Cacti).
In other words, what does everyone else use...or is it a case that everyone has based the backend on mrtg / rrdtool and built their own reporting lauyer ad-hoc on top?
As far as I see each hosting company uses various methods to make customers buy their domains. They can provide free domains, free Fantastico scripts, website building software, templates etc. I am planning to launch my hosting company really soon. Also I think to include free internet marketing services in some hosting packages. I am just wondering if such internet marketing program can be considered as a significant competitive advantage stimulating customers to make a purchase?
I just joined this forum because I want to let as many people as possible know about a horrible experience that I had with my last small business web hosting company: LogicWeb.
Then I would love to hear other people's horror stories about companies they hate and praises about companies they like.
Let me just say that I had originally signed up with another company that was bought by LogicWeb. I had their VPS package and the biggest problem was the customer service which used to be good under the other company. Run into a little problem, send them an email and have to wait three days for a response. A response that generally said something like "we don't cover that."
So, anyhow, I found another small business web hosting company and then tried to cancel with LogicWeb. Sent them email after email and I was still getting billed. Finally, I found their cancellation form buried on their site and submitted a cancellation with a note stating that I had sent several emails trying to cancel.
A couple of weeks later, I get another bill in my email box so I decide to call them up. I'm on the phone with a guy and tell him that I have been trying to cancel for three months and the first thing he says is, "I don't think you're being honest."
"What?" I say not believing that that could be the first thing he says to me. "I think you're lying."
"Well, I'm not lying and I resent this conversation so far."
"Well, you are lying. It's only been two months since you stopped using our system."
"So, because I'm off by one month, you call me a liar?"
"Yes, because liars lie!"
I couldn't believe it! I couldn't believe that any small business web hosting service would call their client a liar even if they were lying. So, I made a mistake and got pissed and cursed!
"I can't believe you're calling me a ****ing liar! I've never ever been called a liar before. Let me speak to your supervisor!"
"Well, I'm the owner and I'm recording this conversation and if you're going to use foul language with me then I'll just report you to my collections department!"
I say, "Let me get this straight. You say that I'm lying and call me a liar, something no business person should ever do to a client, and just because I say '****ing' because I'm insulted, you're pissed at me? Well, if you are going to hang up on me then let me just finish with this... you are a ****ing *******!"
I don't know how much worse a business owner can act with a customer and I highly recommend avoiding LogicWeb since they are the worst small business web hosting around.
It is looking like I am going to have to leave IX hosting. They have a bandwidth problem on my shared server that they cannot seem to solve. I am experiencing slow loading & slow interactive features. Ping times can exceed 500ms during peak hours EST. I have run tracerts that show them specifically that the bottleneck is between thier server and quest-comm and they still cant seem to get a handle on it. This has been going on for a month and I have given them till tuesday.
So, this leaves me to prepare to move my clients' sites UGH! My parameters are somewhat unique which makes it a little tougher to pick a new host. My clients sites are all small local business sites ranging from 5 to 60 pages. I need very little storage space and I use very little bandwidth. However, I do need unlimited domains, ASP support and I really like IX's web shell feature. I will also be doing some e-commerce in the near futures.
I am spending a paltry 7.95 per month with IX. I may spend as much as $20 per month for the right service. Beyond my afformentioned specific requirments, I want a host that is established, proven reliable, in the states, has their own real bricks and mortar facility and a stellar reputation with the experienced web guys.
I have contacted a few that I have seen mentioned here but many dont support ASP and many require a dedicated server deal to host unlimited domains, which of course, is outside my cost requirements.
I've paid for a site to do some harding of my new server and I'm not up to speed with it all yet.[url]
They say they've completed it but I can not find any config files for mod_dosevasive in my httpd.conf file. Is there a way I can check to see what packages or software or tools are installed on the server?
I've been poking around here for a few evenings trying to find someone else who's asked just the same question I need to ask, but I'm not really seeing it.
My situation is this. I am writing a website in ASP.Net 2.0 for a small business. I do web development for a living, so the database admin, asp/vb.net coding is not an issue. However, I've never dealt with the hosting side of things.
I need the following:
1) ability to host two different domains using some shared DLLs that provide funtionality used by both sites. I've read that some hosting companies won't let you put DLLs on their servers, so I'm not sure if I can do this.
2) Ability to send and recieve e-mails at "mydomain.com". I think this is a no-brainer.
3) Ability to use SQL Server express.
4) We will be taking orders with credit card numbers, so I need to be able to do HTTPS and I need to know my data will be secure.
5) obviously, I need a server that has the .Net 2.0 framework on it.
i am at my witts end here. mail() is running VERY slowly on all of the linux packages of my reseller account. Runs fine on windows, but not linux. The odd thing is that it also takes forever for some forms to load too. For mail(), if i switch from my hosting provider's email account in the to section of mail() to my isp or gmail or anything else, it will run fine. What could be the problem here? My host says he checked all the server records and levels and everything is fine, but my scripts can't be the problem either - they have been untouched for years!
We're a small company developing with PHP (Code Igniter and WordPress) and need somewhere to host our pages.
Today we have a dedicated server managed by me, but i realize it's a little too much for me and we're looking into moving to a shared host, preferrably, but we're open to others solutions (VPS?) as well.
As per now our customer's pages are rather low traffic, the highest is approx 1000 per day, and the other ones are maybe a 1000 more, so 2000 in total. Maybe a little redundancy should be added as well.
So our requirements are (in no particular order):
- SSH access - Unlimited domains (or at least 50) - 10-20 GB/day bandwidth (as the large site hosts some videos ~10-40 MB/video) - ~5-10 GB disk space - Unlimited MySQL-dbs - European - we're in Scandinavia, but that's not required for host - Preferrably green - Price is not the most important - we can pay up to 35€-45€/month - CP could be cPanel or custom. I tried Plesk but i seemed quite horrible to me - And of course: Linux
Can I use this edition for hosting on dedicated server, and how does it compare to the enterprise edition ? Can it be used with hosting? The web edition sucks as I can not install ms sql on it, so it is useless. Anyone use sbs server to host his website, because most of the link i read never mention it for hosting, and only for print sharing/ filesharing/ business applications, but where is it's use for hosting?
So what do you think ? IO looked at its infor and it did not provide much?
I have about 5 sites all hosted on my same hosting account. One of those domains is attached to the hosting account. I place my other domains in a folder of a sub-directory of my main domain. This has been working fine, up until today when i noticed a weird error. I give you a little example of how my sites are setup
my main domain: www.maindomain.com
My other sites hosted in a sub-directory of my main domain: www.maindomain.com/sites/site2/ www.maindomain.com/sites/site3/
How my other sites appear on the web: www.site2.com www.site3.com
This works fine for every page until i go to www.site2.com/index.php It redirects to www.maindomain.com/sites/site2/index.php for some reason
I'm planning on moving from a shared hosting environment to a VPS. I've got 2 VPS hosts in mind (FutureHosting and Zone.net), all of them offer cpanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin.
My question to everyone is which cpanel would be more useful to me? I've used cpanel in the past, but I would like to try something new. With the VPS, I do plan to host people's websites and I would like to create more websites for myself and manage them. I am leaning more towards DirectAdmin since it has an option for creating small user panels for people. What does everyone else think?
Also, how do you determine how much RAM you need? I obviously can't monitor my own RAM usage since I come from a shared hosting environment? How will I know if I need 256, 384 or even 512MB of RAM? Should I just start off with 256 and go from there?
