Web hosting?

[diogo]

I'm looking for a hosting company for a ProcessWire website, and would like some suggestions based on the experience of other PW users. Maybe we can even arrive to a list of good compatible hosts to put on the website, like this one http://wordpress.org/hosting/ or this one http://symphony-cms.com/explore/compatible-hosts/

As for me, I would prefer an European company.

[apeisa]

If you don't mind managing your own vps, then I would recommend linode: http://www.linode.com/ (one of their data centers is in London). Prices start from 19.95$ / month.

I have also dreamhost: http://www.dreamhost.com/ where I manage my domains and few small sites. I like their control panel, but nothing else. (s)ftp is very slow. It runs pw without problems though.

[Pete]

For US hosting I can't recommend Liquidweb highly enough. For cloud hosting, which suits me better on one of my higher traffic websites, I use their other company Storm on Demand.

I use them because I've never had any real problems in the past several years with them, and it's managed VPS so I don't have to spend time installing modules or upgrading things. They're always happy to install modules for you on your VPS and do pretty much whatever you ask them to do.

The bit that I really like though is that they proactively monitor their servers. Once when there was actually a problem and the server hit a fatal issue in the middle of the night, their monitoring software sent me an email saying there was an issue, had automatically rebooted the VPS less than a minute later and I was emailed once again once it was back up. Then a technician sent an email a little while later saying it was a hardware fault (this is on Liquidweb, so not the cloud hosting) and the faulty hardware was replaced very quickly. All the tech support emails to me occurred overnight and my site was down for no more than a few minutes at most - on other hosts I've experienced hours of downtime and it's often only when you get a client calling you that you even realise there was a problem to start with - that obviously doesn't look professional!

They have their own datacentres too, with a new one finished recently and are showing no signs of slowing down, so I'm not worried they're going to disappear off the face of the planet one day either.

For hosting my UK sites I use EUKHost. My experience with them is mixed on the support-front (seems to depend who you speak to at this company which I've experienced many other places too), but generally positive on their VPS offerings and the prices are very hard to beat. Their VPS packages are also managed and their staff are also happy to install anything you need - I even have several caching modules and FFMPEG on one VPS, the latter being something that not a lot of hosts will install as it can eat up quite a lot of system resources, but from what I can tell EUKHost don't oversell so it's not a problem.

Another great company I've used before in the US is Site5. They're still going strong and the only reason I moved away from them and ended up at Liquidweb is because I needed a VPS at that stage and they didn't offer them at the time.

[diogo]

Pete and Apeisa, thanks a lot for your answers!

Apeisa, I still don't know if I could manage my own VPS.  I installed a LAMP system on my Fedora 15, but on a local environment where I don't have that many safety concerns ... but maybe it would be interesting. Just by curiosity, what distribution do you have installed on yours?

Also, would it make any sense to use a PaaS like PHP Fog? CloudControl seemed like an interesting solution, but uses a read-only filesystem since may. It's not for PW for sure...

One service that caught my attention for small sites was LaughingSquid (the 4th on Wordpress suggestions), mainly  because of the pricing system. but it doesn't provide shell access. Would you say it's important?

Sorry, I'm a bit throwing things on the air, but thought maybe this could be a useful topic also for other people.

EDIT: i was having a look at the Linode documentation, and it seems very clear and complete. Since I know how to use yum and use the terminal in fedora to make basic operations, i guess it would be a good choice. I only have some doubts concerning having several websites and different clients on the same server. And being a freelancer, how to make sure they can access them if something happens to me (let's hope not)... but those are different questions

[ryan]

ProcessWire doesn't have any special requirements as far as hosting goes, so the truth is that it'll run anywhere that WordPress or Drupal runs, and that includes pretty much all hosting providers.

I've been really happy with http://servint.com and that's where I keep all of my own servers and those of my clients. They are VPS and dedicated server provider. They are far from the cheapest (their least expensive is $50/month, which is what I'm using), but they are extremely reliable, helpful and there is no grey area. So if looking at a VPS or dedicated server and don't want to deal with undisclosed limitations, this is definitely a good place to check. I've used their service for nearly a decade and it's been rock solid.

I've also been looking at cheap hosting lately, and am testing an account with hostgator (http://processwire.org is running there). Seems to run nicely, and I like that they are using cPanel and have shell access for an account that is under $10/month. I've not yet tested it under any kind of load. But like all low-budget hosting providers, I recognize that as soon as traffic gets heavy or load rises, throttling would be introduced. If you have to contend with any kind of traffic or load, then you do get what you pay for with hosting. If you don't have to contend with those things, then budget hosting like hostgator, bluehost, hostmonster, and the others are perfectly fine.

Personally, I would never pay for an account without shell access, but that's me. I consider this an absolute requirement, but ProcessWire doesn't.

Most of our traffic on this site is from Europe, so I've sometimes wondered if I should move the hosting to Europe.  Currently the site is hosted at ServInt in their Washington, DC data center. Works great for me, but I'm one of the few US users. I would be interested in hearing how the site performs for those of you in Europe and outside the US.

[diogo]

Thanks Ryan! Servint looks really nice, but the lowest price is too much for me right now (there is a crisis going on here, not easy). Hostgator is really quite cheap, but it's funny that i would never feel compelled to look further then the homepage if it wasn't for your suggestion. I was also looking for Portuguese VPS servers, and there are some that look interesting. I might even try one of those, or go by Apeisa's suggestion of Linode.

The answers so far are very different from what i've found when i was googling around. I'm glad I asked

EDIT: as for processwire website, i didn't notice much difference from processwire.com to processwire.org, but on both the images take maybe 1 sec to load for the first time on this connection (i admit this connection is not great). Slower than happycog.com but faster than whitehouse.org

[alchime.net]

>> I would be interested in hearing how the site performs for those of you in Europe and outside the US.

works fine. I'm the Indian ocean.  ;D (Reunion Island)

e-clicking is quite cheap with cpanel for shared hosting. Haven't try other option.

[Pete]

PW.com loads slightly faster than PW.org - I did a few ping tests and that seems to support my experience in a browser.

It's only a 20ms difference, but obviously the lower the better.

both are obviously a bit slower to load than more local sites, but I wouldn't say it's particularly noticeable or off-putting.

[ryan]

Glad to hear processwire.com is loading reasonably well for you guys. Let me know if that ever changes.

I'm not actually recommending HostGator.com, just saying I'm testing it out to see how it works. I have low expectations considering the price, but seems pretty decent so far. If you hunt around, you can get a coupon to get the account there for like $5 USD/month. BlueHost seems to be another okay low-cost option, and I've used it with another client (though like HostGator a slight bit more). I wouldn't go for any low cost option if you have to serve 1k+ pageviews a day though.

One of the best places I've found to do research on hosting providers is at http://webhostingtalk.com ... it's also the first place I check if there's ever any kind of outage anywhere, there's usually someone talking about it.

I've heard good things before about the providers that Antti and Pete recommended as well. Having a VPS is definitely great if you know your way around server administration, or have a VPS provider that considers them managed VPSs (where they will take care of fixing or upgrading anything as needed).

Two other hosting providers I've used quite a bit, but have mixed feelings about are hostway.com and mediatemple.com. Regardless of hosting provider, I personally look for those that use cPanel just because it's familiar and easy to get around.

[apeisa]

Most of our traffic on this site is from Europe, so I've sometimes wondered if I should move the hosting to Europe.  Currently the site is hosted at ServInt in their Washington, DC data center. Works great for me, but I'm one of the few US users. I would be interested in hearing how the site performs for those of you in Europe and outside the US.

Loading times are ok. Site pings 140ms and .org pings 170ms. My dreamhost domain pings 300ms, my linode sites pings 65ms and local sites pings 21ms.

Loading time changes quite a bit when I do hard refreshes on one regular page (http://processwire.com/api/variables/page/). I would say avg load time is something like 2.30ms. Sometimes almost 3 seconds and sometimes 1.50ms. I haven't have really slow page loads ever, so I think it works pretty well. I compared it to few our sites (pw and others), regular content pages and I could get avg load times between 0.9-1.3s. I got 20Mbit ADSL.

There could be some easy and good improvements to the front end coding too, which could help loading times (I don't say these are something that need any attention now, but maybe when we get to processwire.com redesign). YSlow gives grade C. Quick apache conf changes that could be made: contents are not gzipped and static resources doesn't have far-future expire headers.

[Soma]

pretty good from here.

~110 processwire.com

~180 processwire.org

~25 my private host provider somewhere germany

~15 our host we use for projects zurich

I think there's many good hosting providers in switzerland.

http://nine.ch

http://everyware.ch

http://hostpoint.ch

http://hoststar.ch

[drilonb]

www.1and1.com / For US-> with Processwire work good Tested

hostmist.com / XEN VPS - Hurricane for Europe  / Work Perfect - with Processwire work good Tested

alvotech.de -> for Europe  with Processwire work good Tested

http://www.server.lu/vserver-overview -> for Europe  with Processwire work good Tested very fast

[alchime.net]

What about having PW in softaculous/cPannel ?

That would be great..

[diogo]

I tend to choose Linode, but the guys at webhostingtalk are not very encouraging to all those that have asked about it and showed less experience. They always encourage them to go for a managed VPS, but that is way out of what I could pay right now.

By the other hand. I really enjoyed reading some of the documentation. It's quite clear, and straightforward.

@Apeisa, what do you think? Is it as overwhelming as they say at the forums?

[apeisa]

Basic management is pretty easy - mostly you need to get known with Apache.

I would install latest Ubuntu LTS (10.04) so you wouldn't need upgrading your os until 2015: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS (make sure you install the server edition). There are tons of help online and nothing very complicated if you use basic LAMP stack. Google and Linode docs helps, and sure you can always ask here (we need that web dev -talk forum) or any other forum for help.

I am by no means server admin myself - I just run few of my hobby projects on my own VPS, but I have had zero problems with them. At work we have guys better than I am on handling that stuff.

[diogo]

Apeisa, you are right. It's true that Fedora doesn't have long term support editions.

I think I will go for Linode. Any problem I might have, this is the first place where I will ask. I'm not a forum kind of person (if this even exists), but you all make people feel at home.

Thanks for that

EDIT: keep the suggestions coming. They may be useful for anyone else.

[teppo]

If you don't mind managing your own vps, then I would recommend linode: http://www.linode.com/ (one of their data centers is in London). Prices start from 19.95$ / month.

Resurrecting an old thread to mention that I've been using a Linode VPS for around a month now and couldn't be more happy with them so far.

From order to setting things up everything worked properly. Account was ready instantly, web server running couple of PW installations a few hours later -- which is good enough for me. Even latency between my remote Finnish location and their London datacenter seems surprisingly low.

Default Linux installation they provided (there were quite a few options to choose from..) didn't include anything extra, which in my opinion is a good thing but also means that you'll have to install everything from Apache to PHP and MySQL etc. yourself. They do provide a very good help for all those steps, though.

Anyway, big thanks to Antti for mentioning these guys!

[diogo]

I'm interrupting my vegetative state on the forum to say that I went for Linode after my last message ("I'm not a forum kind of person" ) and I'm very happy with it. I still have the 19.95$/month where I keep three production websites and all my experiments and developing stuff.

Never had a single problem and learned a lot in the way.

[OrganizedFellow]

+1 Pete for the Site5 recommendation. I've used them in the past and really liked their community.

@Ryan

I'm just getting into git for local development. When you say that Hostgator offers shell access, that includes git, correct?

I've never required shell nor git on a host, but my current one will not allow it, so I'm looking to move soon.

[fmgujju]

I have shared hosting with http://host4geeks.com cheap prices and prompt service. I just found about them in last December.

[totoff]

i have pw sites at several hosting companies in germany and never experienced serious problems. my personal favorite is all-inkl.com though it requires a little tweaking to get pw up and running there. but they provide excellent 24/7 service even with small packages. also very smooth was hetzner for a client and 1&1 though no serious developer would recommend 1&1 as the service is awful.

despite of the ones i already work with i would give uberspace a try as soon as their is an opportunity to do so. i like the minimal approach and the friendliness.

[diogo]

I can also say that the pw website I have on all-inkl.com runs smoothly and without a problem.

[iNoize]

i have pw sites at several hosting companies in germany and never experienced serious problems. my personal favorite is all-inkl.com though it requires a little tweaking to get pw up and running there. but they provide excellent 24/7 service even with small packages. also very smooth was hetzner for a client and 1&1 though no serious developer would recommend 1&1 as the service is awful.

despite of the ones i already work with i would give uberspace a try as soon as their is an opportunity to do so. i like the minimal approach and the friendliness.

Can you tell me your settings on hetzner ? 

i get some trouble with the Modulesmanager 

cannot read cache file   ***/***/***/site/assets/cache/ModuleManager.cache

[totoff]

hi creative3minds,

the account type is dl500 which my client booked some years ago and we did not make any special settings, only upgraded to php 5.3. all files in /site including /site/assets are owned by the main ftp user and belong to its group.

we are on 2.2.9 though. don't know if 2.3 requires different server settings.

sorry, i'm afraid i cant help very much.

[ryan]

i get some trouble with the Modulesmanager 

Try posting this to the ModulesManager thread so that Soma sees it. But I ran into a similar issue at one point after migrating a site. You may have to go back and check that your /site/assets/cache/ is writable, and perhaps manually remove an existing cache file if it exists.