File/Website Hosting opinions.

[BongPig]

After posting previous, looking for opinions on SelectedHosting.com, it occured to me the one thing we all have in common is the need for decent hosting.

Jack pointed me toward www.powweb.com who seem pretty good value.

Ive also found www.LunarPages.com who offer what sounds like a good service with a fair bit of positive feedback.

Can anybody else post some info regards thier current hosting sevice and how they feel its going for them? A decent list could make for a decent sticky that could be very handy in the future. ( and VERY handy for me right now seeing as we need to shift our files! )

cheers

[simonh]

I'm currently using lunarpages.com, who I went with mainly because of the good rep they seem to have and also low price. I haven't released a game yet so I can't say how they'd be if my site got busy, but I've got a feeling they're perhaps not the best option if you're going to have quite a bit of traffic.

[Nikster]

I'm with simonh, I took my hosting with Lizardsoft(hosting), seems fine, but unlike the hits that your likely to get I can't say as I have no content on my site, nor does anyone know about it.. so.... :) I think this was a pointless post.. I might remove it :(

[Mike Boeh]

I would suggest getting a vps server from defenderhosting.com or servint.net that uses the DirectAdmin control panel... With a VPS, other users can't steal your resources....

[Jack Norton]

I've looked at those VPN offers but the bandwidth/price ratio isn't much good than powweb... I pay 7.75$ for 150Gb/month, they offer starter plans at 49$ for 200Gb/month...!!! only 50Gb difference and I have to pay seven times the price? :) what make them so special if I may ask?
(as far as I know users are able to download from my powweb site without problems at high speeds like 200kb/s...)

[Mike Boeh]

I've looked at those VPN offers but the bandwidth/price ratio isn't much good than powweb... I pay 7.75$ for 150Gb/month, they offer starter plans at 49$ for 200Gb/month...!!! only 50Gb difference and I have to pay seven times the price? :) what make them so special if I may ask?
(as far as I know users are able to download from my powweb site without problems at high speeds like 200kb/s...)
First, with Powweb, if you exceed 5 gigs in a day, they will turn your site off. So if you are featured and linked from somewhere, this could easily happen.

Second is reliability. With shared hosting, anybody who is sharing the same server can hog all the resources. For example, they could write a bad script that continuously hits mysql and brings the server to its knees. Or someone on your box could be attacked, etc. This kind of stuff can and will happen.

[Kai Backman]

I'm just in the process of transfering the site over to a server at Layeredtech (http://www.layeredtech.com). They offer dedicated hosts at pretty decent rates and with a good service (they have been quick to respond to support tickets). They share location with The Planet giving them a decent backbone.

I went for dedicated hosting almost two years ago, much for the reasons Mike cited. I had some experience setting up Linux, which made the process a lot easier. I feel I got my moneys worth, the availability of the site has been good and it is quick to respond even with high traffic loads. The flexibility of a dedicated host has also been a boon (flexibility was the original reason for switching).

[Mike Boeh]

I thought all new servers from layered tech were going into the savvis datacenter in texas instead of the planet...

[Jack Norton]

In effect their quality/price is absolutely competitive. getting a startup server for 58$/month with 1000Gb/monthly transfer is quite great.

Bongping, you've found the deal :D

EDIT: what's the point in having 5 IP addresses instead of one? Some expert please enlighten me... :)

[Mike Boeh]

I have heard mostly good about layered tech, and their prices are outstanding too...

More IP addresses can have lots of uses- like if you want to host a few different sites, but want them on different IP addresses... It has also long been rumored that you will rank higher in google if your site has its own dedicated IP. Most shared hosting companies will put you on the same IP with 100 other sites.

I pointed this out earlier in the thread, but 150 gigs/month is much different than 5 gigs/day, because 150 gigs/month allows for bursting. But there are so many more things about a host to consider besides the price/bandwidth ratio. Consider these questions:

Does your provider have 24/7 support and answer support tickets quickly?
Can you pick up the phone and call them 24/7?
Do they perform security patches to your server?
Is their network multi-homed with quality bandwidth providers?
Is their network oversold?
Do they provide quality hardware that wont die in 2 months?
How often do they have network outages?


For example, I pay 55$/month for the server that hosts this forum. It is of modest specs: p3 800 mhz, 36 gig scsi hd, 250 gigs bandwidth and 1 gig of ram. But it is located at Cyberwurx, and they have great support, a quality network, and their uptime is among the best in the entire industry (no outages at all in the last 18 months). So you can be pretty much assured that if you can't reach these forums, it's probably on your end- or we had a hardware failure :)

[MattInglot]

I'm with simonh, I took my hosting with Lizardsoft(hosting), seems fine, but unlike the hits that your likely to get I can't say as I have no content on my site, nor does anyone know about it.. so.... :) I think this was a pointless post.. I might remove it :(

We do have several clients pulling 40GB/month or more with no problems. ;) Resources aren't oversold so there's always plenty of bandwidth available.

[Nikster]

In that case, maybe I should affiliate and use my bandwidth until I get my game done :)

[BongPig]

Well, I dont think we'll need a dedicated server just yet. We are not focusing on getting more demo downloads right now. In truth, were trying to get away from PC downloadable games ( even though we've got a third, absolute corker of a game in the wings! ;) ). However we cant just abandon our current online games so we still need space to make sure our demos are always available.
I cant see us needing more than 40-50gb per month to be honest.

I must have mailed around 25 different webspace providers and one stood out for me.
Lunarpages got through around 6 of my mails with clear answers before any one of the others had got back to me even once. ( some still havent gotten back. )
Well, they got my vote and we've signed up. Thier support since has been bloody amazing. Im happy.

LayeredTech sound excellent too. If we ever do need a server im gonna look them up sharpish.

.. and we've finally buckled under pressure and got hold of the www.pompomgames.com domain.

[Nikster]

I just been looking at the $7.95 deal @ Lunarpages, doesn't look too bad, has double bandwidth I have and nearly three times as much storage, mind you it only has a 99.9% uptime ;) Maybe I jumped into the buying domain names and space too early..

[moonpxi]

A question pops in my mind: what is the average bandwith used by your site, monthly?

I am seeing all these adds with huge bandwidth per month, but have no idea if all of this is necessary!

[Nikster]

Well I personally use about 120KB average so far ;) but, I have 15GIG traffic as standard (and extra with forums offer) now my game will be at least 15 meg, as I'm not prepared to sacrifice polish, so for arguments sake lets call it 20meg, for a 15gig BW per month this would allow roughly the downloading of it 750 times, this doesn't taken into account the incoming bandwidth either, so if you had more than one title your reducing average bandwidth per title, hence why for games more bandwidth for your $$ is better imho, unless you are using your site as a go between to some other hosting and it's just means as a company page etc. but in Lizardnetworks deal you get 10 free add on domains so if you have great titles as in Pompom's case you could have MutantStorm.com pointing to the mutant storm page on pompomgames.com it's not needed, but it's useful.. Look at me talking like I have a clue about anything :)

[dan]

Well, I dont think we'll need a dedicated server just yet. We are not focusing on getting more demo downloads right now. In truth, were trying to get away from PC downloadable games ( even though we've got a third, absolute corker of a game in the wings! ;) ). However we cant just abandon our current online games so we still need space to make sure our demos are always available.
I cant see us needing more than 40-50gb per month to be honest.


You should look at the RealArcade service that Xbox is doing soon. Your games are perfect for that niche. I think Atari is doing some of its classic collections that way, but your games just destroy the classics they're based on.

I gotta go find a two stick PC gamepad because of Pom Pom....

Incidentally, I've noticed you do Mac ports. Do you do them yourself or contract them out? Our game is C++ with DirectX, so it shouldn't be too much of a beast to port... but we don't want to do it. Got any recommendations?

[BongPig]

We're already well on our way to getting both our games on Xbox live arcade. Mutant Storm is already ported.
We do our own mac ports, but dont enjoy it! ;)

Back on topic, lunarpages has some serious options in the control panel. Im lost. Not a bloody clue me.
Still, always feels nice to have lots of features doesnt it!?

[patrox]

I'm just in the process of transfering the site over to a server at Layeredtech (http://www.layeredtech.com). They offer dedicated hosts at pretty decent rates and with a good service (they have been quick to respond to support tickets). They share location with The Planet giving them a decent backbone.


Got a server there last week, it's a real nightmare. I do not recommand this company. I am already closing my account since they already want to charge me 75$ for an OS reload. ( they advertise Debian and Cpanel fully supported, and then they tell me these 2 are not compatible, and ask me 75$ to change the OS to one that is UNSUPPORTED by their company but compatible with cpanel ).
The support can be summarised in command lines they ask you to type ( several times they sent me emails of instructions with inexisting debian commands, funny... )

I will definitely get my second dedicated at Servermatrix, i've been very pleased with them so far. I know i can call them anytime in case of problem and that they'll really fix the problems.

pat.

[ggambett]

A PowWeb satisfied customer here. It's reasonably reliable (there have been a few ocassional problems, but they are very far apart and quickly fixed), we aren't even near the 5 GB daily limit (and have a FileBurst account just in case) and it's extremely cheap ($7.77/month).

[tolik]

I have a lot of experience with my own servers and hosting different projects in a scope of non-commercial internet holding with daily traffic at 50+gb of WWW (20+ sites). It was a very niche project (russian resources about emulation, gaming, specific game-resources (neogeo, kof, dizzy, zx spectrum), online gaming services, on-demand internet radio (icecast, stream, later shoutcast)). The way I was able to handle it - I was maintaining biggest latvian gaming services (battle.net - first based on fsgs, later on other stuff which I already don't remember, 't was 2000; quake*, counter strike (20+ players 24h7d for 3 years)). In exchange for maintaining this stuff (building communities around it, gathering meetings and creating championships) I was able to demand any equipment and any bandwith. It was a very nice experience to learn hundreds of technologies, I was young and had a lot of free time at work to do this in my own pleasure.

Later I was involved in some USA projects and was forced to maintain some dull elearning and b2b resources.

The thing I want to say:

INTERLAND.NET SUCKS

If you will ever encounter any (even free) promotional offers, forget about them. They were charging money from CC without notices, they wanted dozens of bucks for domain transfers, their support (they have hundreds of thousands clients plus they buy more hosting competitors yearly) takes days and is useless, you can't call and solve the problem, your access might be slow. It doesn't matter whether it was shared, vpn or dedicated one. You can't install anything there - this violates your support agreement, their software updates come only couple of times a year so you might be vulnerable for monthes!

If somebody will ever experience any hosting or server problems, you can always count on my consulting support.

[Jack Norton]

Hehe good to know Emulynx :)
What are the best hosting companies in your opinion/experience? thanks for info.

[tolik]

What are the best hosting companies in your opinion/experience? thanks for info.

I don't have any good experience with hosting companies.
OOPS, I DO, read below.

!) SourceForge.
Yes, it's great. As any gigantic project it has his own good and bad times, but the general impression - awesome. Full freedom of actions, great support and the community. There are two "BUT"s. 1st one is OSI and 2nd is "you are on your own". Great connection, mirrors, cvs (all the problems are gone nowadays).
With some experience you can establish big OSI project and move a forum which has a bit of development (like this one!)-related theme there and nobody will blame you.


0) Bad services.
I can't remember it right now, 't was 99 and we were hosting our last english-talking emulation site at some huge service provider. We've decided to subhost one promising emulation project (LittleJohn, combines NES/SNES emulators) and these guys used us as a proxy or something (dos? can't remember). This was the first time when we had problems with provider. He issued us a bill and suspended the service. Argh, he was claiming to be "unlimited". I'll try to ask one of old buds to name this provider, it does still exist and it's quite popular.

1) My own services were quite good services ;)
Years ago I was handling about 5 different co-location servers for different purposes (personal non-commercial (communities and gaming services) and private commercial services). Again, this is Europe and not USA so situation is very different. Our country has direct channels to Finland which has main European internet "hubs". You can get colocation with good medium size provider (this means they haven't lost their mind and they respect their clients who pay more than 50$ a month) which has his own room/stack. This means you can put your own server (which has to comply with some very basic rules like size), it gets isolated in the internal subnet and you can do whatever you want. You need to administrate it yourself, though. The only services good provider does give is a secondary DNS and remote-reboot feature. With such approach you will not need to worry about DDoS attacks, since good provider does monitor entire network and will prevent any network slowdowns by isolating dangerous incoming network flows for couple of days.

Administration is a routine task, but it was enjoyable years ago with more and more innovations which made your task easier.

Now, it's a real hell. It's all about security. I dare to run one server in the wild internet for my own needs but it really needs to be updated couple of times a month with all the patches and fixes. All the mainstream software is holy (read as "hole") :( And believe, running a standard "openbsd/freebsd/debian/redhat/whatever" software package is unreasonable. You need to recompile all the software manually because you need to have all the advanced features. If it's a web service, you need to have bandwith-related modules, link-tracking services and dozens of other things.
You've got 99999 mails? Blacklists, spamassassin, region blacklists. I don't dare to run my own mail server anymore. I've changed my old email recently, no kind of Bayesian filter can handle 3 language spams together.


Again, in order to maintain your own services, you need to have a permanent robust connection and 0 second response...


Nowadays our company (I'll reveal my "real" identity a bit later, after a press release) has own internet services (and no, we have nothing to do with web hosting) with a team of system administrators. I trust them, know their expertise and don't care about these things. It's their work to handle it and we can work safely.