Web hosting

From Dar

A page to collate tips and comparisons of different web hosting services

( see also email list hosting )

Contents 1 intro 2 forum 3 UK Web hosting 3.1 DC Hosting 3.2 Clook 3.3 United Hosting 3.4 bionic-hosting.co.uk 4 US web hosting 5 EU web hosting 6 tools

intro

It's very important to use a good web hosting service but what makes a good one?

Costs vary enormously. Location can be a factor. Pricing schemes vary as well. Some hosts 'oversell'. Some have affiliate schemes. Is fantastico desirable? Why so many different C-Panels?

forum

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

UK Web hosting

http://ukwebsolutionsdirect.co.uk/hosting.php

http://streamline.net

• Used these to host my blog http://www.danielsiddle.co.uk . Seem reasonably priced and decent support. Not great with Wordpress straight out of the box but it doesn't take much to get it going. All in all pretty happy with them so far, 4 months and counting.

http://www.visn.co.uk/

http://www.positive-internet.co.uk/ "excellent and reasonable priced"

http://www.xcalibre.co.uk/index.html

http://www.names.co.uk/

DC Hosting

Ends up expensive and they block access to xml-rpc, which turns a plain worpress blog into a non-standard install. Also communications are poor and support slow to act in emergencies. System status messages are 10 month out of date.

Clook

http://www.clook.co.uk/ - Clook - very reliable, superb 24x7 real UK support, small company who refuse to grow too fast. I have used them as a reseller for 4 years and host 60 accounts. Currently no offering for RoR. Slgavin 20:17, 4 March 2008 (GMT)

United Hosting

comes highly recommended for friendly support and reliability

default "Piki" install produces:

   MediaWiki (http://wikipedia.sf.net/): 1.4.15 
   PHP (http://www.php.net/): 4.4.4 (cgi) 
   MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/): 4.1.20-log

No ability to unpack archive files at the server from the control panel, only by using command line access.

Recently upgraded everything over to PHP5.

bionic-hosting.co.uk

A small new hosting service based in docklands. Good telephone support reported, willing to customise cpanel to meet requirements, Live support online and a users forum.

US web hosting

recently converted to http://www.siteground.com, they have a control panel which allows you to quickly create sub-domains and even to automatically load VLEs such as Moodle or Blogs such as Word Press. It costs approx £45 a year and I have found it very efficient so far

http://www.hostingzoom.com/

http://www.resellerzoom.com/cheap-reseller-hosting.shtml

Dreamhost very popular. Includes mediawiki autoinstaller

Bluehost also popular $6.99 a month if you buy 2 years. Overseller. Can be problematic with CPU usage but improving

Favhost starts at $2.99 a month http://www.favhost.com/more.php

http://asmallorange.com/ are cool webhosts

http://www.acceleratebiz.com/web_hosting.html - uses Hsphere control panel with Linux hosting

http://www.logicworks.net/ for heavy traffic sites, no prices displayed

http://www.vip-hosting.com/ starts at $4.95 pm Hsphere recommended sequential autoresponder

EU web hosting

http://www.servage.net

Doesn't work with mediawiki straight out of the box but got there after a few days. Unlimited added domains

WordPress autoinstall script only installs 2.3.1 and you have to create .htaccess manually before upgrade permalinks works.

tools

Who Is Hosting This is a tool that enables you to find out who is hosting any web site. Simply type in any domain name, and you'll get a link to the company that's hosting this particular domain. It's that simple!