Be Excellent To Each Other

Ideally I'm looking for an account I can host at least two domains on (a reseller account would be good, I suppose).

I haven't worked in the industry for a couple of years now, so I don't know who's best. Any recommendations? The websites are not large and won't have a massive amount of traffic. PHP and MySQL support would be nice, but not essential at this stage.

My domains will be staying at 123-reg, for ease of use.

I have a couple of very basic sites at http://www.flump.net/ for only 3 quid a month.

What's the uptime like? Have you had any problems?

I only have a couple of landing pages on the 2 flump domains I own so I can't really say what the uptime is as I rarely check them. However the facilities in their control panel are rather good. Even for the meagre money I pay, the control panel offers a variety of features.

They appear to be a small friendly company who are willing to help.

Flump was reccomended to me on the other place by a number of people, so there are almost certainly other users on here who will know more than I.

The packages definitely look good from their website. I'll check it out.

I host a half-dozen sites on a miniserver from Memset. They're very good, in fact, they were PC Pro's Best Web Host in 2007. It's a proper Linux VM that I have root access to, so it's a lot more flexible than most other hosting options. It's not cheap though, £20/month for my base model.

If all you want is basic MySQL and some PHP and a little bandwidth, I could let you have some space on my server for a modest fee.

Seconding the recommendation from Flump. I host about 90 websites on their servers (well, 123Reseller, which is a sister company run by the same people) and the uptime is brilliant - in fact, I don't think they've actually gone down in over two years. I'm guessing they've gone down occasionally but it's certainly not for long enough that my auto-notification thingie notices and texts me to let me know.

Good support too. They don't do support over the phone, which is regrettable, but their helpdesk tickets are usually responded to within 30 minutes.

Thanks for the offer, but I've been piggybacking off a mate's hosting for the last couple of years and I want to move away from that and do it myself.

Flump looks good and it's had two references now, so I'm going to take the plunge with them, I think.

For ease of use, why not look at 123-reg's hosting plans?

They were shit when I used to work there. The domain management side of things is good, though.

By humans as well who appear to be friendly and know what they are talking about. I think it's just a couple of people doing support but rather that than a call centre.

Ok, I've decided to take the plunge with Flump.net, I just wanted some further advice: I'm going to have about four sites I want to host now - which package would be best? On the Hosting Promotions page, they have one called "Multi-domain 15", but I'm concerned it's a bit overkill for what I need.

I host sites on my own nice server (cpanel - same as flump), and technically I resell, but I doubt this is of interest

I'd go advanced special, but it somehow £90/year seems like a lot for what you get.

I think so too. I pay £20 a month for an entire Linux VM with 10Gb of disk space and command line access; I think those packages are a bit pricey too. Mind you, the hidden costs of cheap hosting (i.e. crap support) are difficult to assess, and flump.net has been highly recommended further up the thread, so it's possible they are worth it. I'm sure I could bring my hosting costs down a bit by shopping around, especially if I moved it to the US, but I've been very happy with the levels of service I've had from the provider.

Also, is the 200Mb disk space on the £15/month package a typo? It doesn't sound right.

As Fasthosts prove time and time again, cheap hosting results in corners being cut and all your credit card details being stolen by Chinese hackers.

I pay about £117/month for my server, and Cpanel handily updates itself. Aside from that it's unmanaged, but I've never had a problem thus far.

Who do you use then Richard? I can use SSH, but would like a cpanel for ease of use, also...

How much?!?

That's a fucklot of money.

It is, but then I'm currently hosting.... (checks) 53 sites, including PTS, with plenty of capacity to spare.

The server's hosting this forum (one web, one DB) come in at less than that every month.

Dedicated servers with 100mbit burst & cpanel licence?

I like my current setup, I looked around for a good long time, and I've been with 3 or 4 different providers in the last 5 years, and this one hasn't pissed me off yet.

Well, yes. They've got Plesk (which I never use - what's the point when you have terminal or Cygwin access?) rather than cPanel, though. And they've got a 100MBit direct line (although I must confess to not knowing what 'burst' means).

I have the lowest package from Memset. I pay about £220 a year for a slice of a Dell; I get 128Mb of RAM, 10Gb of disk, and 20Gb/month at 10Mbps. It's a virtual server so I have root access to it and unrestricted ability to install apps. On that I run half a dozen websites, using Lighttpd (there isn't enough RAM to run Apache), MySQL, eAccelerator, Drupal, Postnuke, pnWikka, Gallery.

I used to run a mailserver stack too (Cryus, Postfix, Spamassassin, clamav) on the next server up the tier (256Mb RAM, 20Gb disk, etc) but I downgraded the server spec when we moved all the email to Google Domain Apps. That was big win, being easier to admin and cheaper on the server spec, and my users are happy with the service. It sounds like 128Mb of RAM isn't enough but the server is actually pretty healthy.

They've been very good to me, we've been with them for years now. Oh, and they offer cPanel for another £5/month.

What are the drawbacks to running lighttpd as opposed to Apache?

Where are your servers from, then?

Can't say I'm keen on plesk as an interface, and Cpanel is extremely good when you need to migrate accounts from one cpanel setup to another.

Anyway, I host enough sites commercially to pretty much pay for itself, and it's very handy for the demands of PTS with I don't think anything non-dedicated would be able to cope with.

1and1 - like I say, I don't use a control panel, but I guess I could install cPanel if I wanted. Nothing non-dedicated would keep up with Little Savages, stupid bloody program

The only one that bothers me is that rewrite rules in .htaccess don't work, you have to massage the format slightly and put them into the lighttpd config file directly. The main other disadvantage is you can't run any of the rich suite of apache plugins, but then I wasn't doing that anyway as mine is just vanilla PHP etc hosting. The advantages, on the other hand, are that it goes like stink and consumes much much less memory than Apache possibly can. Edumacation.

Edit -- should point out that Mebo, Youtube, and Wikipedia all run on lighttpd. Which is a good testimonial, I suggest.

Minus 10 apostrophe points.

Cheers!

It's "server is" ? Am I to deduct 10 pedant points?

It should be "the server hosting this forum (one web, one DB) comes in". You're both wrong.

No, I'm wrong, because there are two servers, and I got confused after the brackets.

So there should be no apostrophe at all. It's a catostrophe!

Which is what I said originally.

I shall put on my Pedant Hat of Correctness.

Apostroclypse, please.

Capostrophe

Catastropostrophe.

Myp. How much joy have you had with Flump? Were they any good.

I need some space with somewhere I can put ASP or PHP code, and that appears to be a decent host? Especially as I'll only need about 3 megs of web space.

The only problem I had was getting my account setup as they ballsed up the activation. Since then it's been really good - no problems at all.