Web Hosting Reviews
I’m currently in the market for a new favorite web hosting company (or two).
From a technical standpoint, I am a Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL guy with a preference for cPanel and WHM. However, an increasing number of my client projects these days are larger online applications using Ruby on Rails.
In the past, I’ve worked with FatCow (a B minus, at best, ever since they were bought out by a larger company a couple years ago), HostRocket (a C plus since their phone support can be bogus), and The Planet (an A minus for their managed dedicated server I’ve used for a couple years now).
It’s time to upgrade my server at the Planet, and I’m looking around to see if I can find a company that I’m more excited about. The Planet has been pretty good, all things considered, but sometimes they make me pay for an hour of “advanced support” (at $125 or so an hour) for something that seems to take their support guy three minutes to do.
So now I’m hunting around for other peoples’ reviews of web hosting companies. So far, by far the best web site I’ve found for reading reviews of web hosting companies is Web Hosting Unleashed.
Most “review” sites seem like little more than aggregators of web hosting advertisements. Web Hosting Unleashed has a pleasant design, helpful reviews from real users, and a wide variety of hosting companies on the chopping block. They also offer some good coupons.
My personal favorite so far, based on these WHU reviews, is HostGator. I’m seriously considering moving some of my sites onto their servers.
Check out their blog for more useful background about them as a company. This post particularly impressed me. Imagine, a hosting company with a life — and some serious incentives for their employees to provide first-rate customer service.
For those of us with a need for serious SEO, HostGator has a spin-off company called SEO Hosting that specializes in selling multiple C classes of IP addresses. So all your sites aren’t sitting there on one incestuous IP block, getting devalued by Google for all their cross-links.
I’m skeptical about whether HostGator will work well for Ruby on Rails sites, however, since the conventional wisdom is that you want a VPS server with dedicated resources for the Rails platform.
For that, word on the street is that RailsMachine is awesome and well worth the money, if you can afford the uptick in price.
So I’m using them for both of my new Ruby on Rails projects. I should be able to say much more about them in a couple months.
I’m basically a website tinkerer, recently introduced to RoR. The claims are that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bologna, and “able to create multimedia enterprise sites with only 7 lines of code”.
That’s no doubt an exaggeration, but I’d like to ask what your experience has been using RoR. (A quick summary would be OK.)
Mike,
My experiences so far:
a) steep learning curve for a guy like me who’s not used to making his living at the command line.
b) still takes a lot of work to create an enterprise web site if your solutions require custom programming
c) the ruby code is elegant and minimalist and rather intuitive to learn
d) you’ve got a bunch of flexibility afterwards, e.g., moving to an entirely different database platform, being able to re-use code in multiple place rather than copying & pasting, etc.
But I’m still fairly early in my learning curve, so we’ll see….
Perhaps my buddy Marsh (who has far more experience with RoR) would be willing leave his comments here as well.
Joshua