Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting

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Loic Le Meur complained about his hosting last night. The other day John Furrier, my former boss, complained his host was down too and he told me that he’s looking for new hosting. Loic runs Seesmic, which includes the popular Twitter client Twhirl and John is starting a new blogging company that covers the tech industry.

I’m not going to pitch them on Rackspace (my new employer). Instead, I’m going to ask you to help them out. After all, maybe Joyent or GoGrid or Amazon’s Web services or Google’s App Engine or Microsoft’s Azure or something else is better for them to consider.

Some things to consider:

1. Uptime vs. service vs. cost. Which one is best? My cell phone number is +1-425-205-1921, how many hosting company employees make themselves available like that? How many have hundreds of people standing by on the phone to help you 24/7?
2. Hybrid approaches, important? Some companies want to have a stack of their own servers as well as keep some things in the cloud. As their file sizes get bigger and bigger having them on the same high performance network might be important, especially as they use new cloudbursting techniques (moving files from their own datacenter to the cloud when they get popular or their own servers start to get too busy).
3. Agnostic from religion? GoGrid, for instance, lets you spin up Windows or Linux instances. If you’ve already built your infrastructure on Windows, that might be important. For guys like Loic and John, though, it’s less important because they are already on LAMP stacks. But still, they might need WordPress loaded. That’ll be tough to get at some hosting companies.
4. Other things? Does your business need hosted email, for instance? Some hosters do that, others don’t.
5. Best-of-breed APIs? Here Amazon and Google are leading the way, but their approaches are very different. Which one might be appropriate to Seesmic or John’s new blogging company? (Rackspace is making sizeable investments here, too).

But if you were in their shoes, which hosting company would you go with? What other things should they consider? Who is doing the best for super small startups like John’s company, or already-established companies with tons of storage needs like Seesmic?

Published by Robert Scoble

I help entrepreneurs build their technology business' story, help with getting ready for investors, with other launch plans, and many other strategic things that can help your new startup. Call to talk: +1-425-205-1921 (text first).

Published

96 thoughts on “Help Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and John Furrier (Silicon Angle) find new hosting”

  6. +1 for Slicehost, which I guess is part of Rackspace. 2+ years for me and have never had a better hosting company. Google and Twitter searches confirm their awesomeness.

    Like

  8. +1 for Slicehost, which I guess is part of Rackspace. 2+ years for me and have never had a better hosting company. Google and Twitter searches confirm their awesomeness.

    Like

  15. My favorite all around host is MediaTemple. They been going through some rough times recently but their customer support has been impeccable. They provide easy to use tools and good packages.

    If you are looking to have full root access to a server for a medium sized project, Slicehost is still my favorite, although some of the Mosso offerings look good.

    Google AppEngine is great for small to medium sized projects and if it can be developed in Django then you can easily port it to a more powerful setup, so depending on their expectation for growth I might consider AppEngine as a starting point (I LOVE how easy it is to develop for).

    Like

  16. My favorite all around host is MediaTemple. They been going through some rough times recently but their customer support has been impeccable. They provide easy to use tools and good packages.

    If you are looking to have full root access to a server for a medium sized project, Slicehost is still my favorite, although some of the Mosso offerings look good.

    Google AppEngine is great for small to medium sized projects and if it can be developed in Django then you can easily port it to a more powerful setup, so depending on their expectation for growth I might consider AppEngine as a starting point (I LOVE how easy it is to develop for).

    Like

  17. in this economy cost is a huge factor too, and Rackspace has the reputation to be the most expensive, at least it was when we looked around 2 years ago.

    now that we’re considering a change, cost of moving the architecture is another criteria.

    Like

  18. in this economy cost is a huge factor too, and Rackspace has the reputation to be the most expensive, at least it was when we looked around 2 years ago.

    now that we’re considering a change, cost of moving the architecture is another criteria.

    Like

  21. I’ve recently started a hosting company geared towards small businesses and individuals. My customers so far are individual bloggers. I’m reselling space on a MediaTemple VPS account. For larger entities, like Seesmic, I would highly recommend MediaTemple. Rackspace looks very good, but I have no personal experience with them.

    For someone like John, my service at http://timbury.net would be perfect. It’s small, cheaper than any other shared hosting I’ve seen (including MT’s), yet scalable because I’m on the MT grid. I can offer the same MT technology at a lower price and with personal service. If his needs outgrew my capacity, it would be a simple process to switch him to his own VPS.

    Btw, my cell # comes to every Premium subscriber. 🙂

    Thanks, Robert, for the opportunity to throw my two coins of the realm in.

    Like

  22. I’ve recently started a hosting company geared towards small businesses and individuals. My customers so far are individual bloggers. I’m reselling space on a MediaTemple VPS account. For larger entities, like Seesmic, I would highly recommend MediaTemple. Rackspace looks very good, but I have no personal experience with them.

    For someone like John, my service at http://timbury.net would be perfect. It’s small, cheaper than any other shared hosting I’ve seen (including MT’s), yet scalable because I’m on the MT grid. I can offer the same MT technology at a lower price and with personal service. If his needs outgrew my capacity, it would be a simple process to switch him to his own VPS.

    Btw, my cell # comes to every Premium subscriber. 🙂

    Thanks, Robert, for the opportunity to throw my two coins of the realm in.

    Like

  25. Loic: cost is ALWAYS a huge deal, but it’s obviously not the most important factor. Why? Because if it were you wouldn’t be complaining about where you’re hosted now. If it were my business uptime and service would be more important than just pure who has the lowest price. There will always be someone who offers a lower price. But will there be someone who has more uptime or a huge infrastructure available to take care of you when you’re having troubles?

    When I got a tour of Rackspace a week ago, there was a geek writing some custom code to help a customer get more performance, which ended up saving them a ton of money because their servers weren’t using more resources than necessary. Is that the kind of thing someone will do for you if they are just going for lowest price?

    Like

  26. Loic: cost is ALWAYS a huge deal, but it’s obviously not the most important factor. Why? Because if it were you wouldn’t be complaining about where you’re hosted now. If it were my business uptime and service would be more important than just pure who has the lowest price. There will always be someone who offers a lower price. But will there be someone who has more uptime or a huge infrastructure available to take care of you when you’re having troubles?

    When I got a tour of Rackspace a week ago, there was a geek writing some custom code to help a customer get more performance, which ended up saving them a ton of money because their servers weren’t using more resources than necessary. Is that the kind of thing someone will do for you if they are just going for lowest price?

    Like

  27. +1 again for Slicehost (owned by Rackspace). Awesome company. Remember though, that Slicehost is self-managed. I.e., you get a bare Linux install and the rest is up to you. I put a little tutorial together to get WordPress up and running on it, which has helped some people.

    While I am currently with Slicehost, I am considering moving to Mosso Cloud Servers (owned by Rackspace too) because it would be a cost savings given that I use so little bandwidth right now.

    But definitely consider Slicehost or Mosso, for sure!

    Like

  28. It depends on what they want, do they need cloud computing (virtual servers) or a hosted service/solution? One problem I see is that, the hosted services price their services one way and the cloud servers are priced another way. For example if you look at Rackspace’s site and look at cloud computing you get costs per virtual server per hour. If you look at eleven2 or Bluehost they have hosted solutions plans with costs per month. One sells you virtual servers priced per hour, the other sells you plans priced per month. Not sure if it is possible to recommend one over the other because of that. May the old adage keep them confused so you can milk them is the game plan. But I though web 2.0 and the transparent business model is what all these yahoos profess. Loic and John might just want a hosted solution for their products. If that is the case, the pricepoints are all pretty much even, with the hosted folks. With Rackspace and AWS I am not sure if you can always get what you want, because it is not clear and transparent. It would be nice to compare and know dont you think? I wish some one would write a nice price comparison one of these days between hosted and virtual servers in the cloud.

    Like

  29. +1 again for Slicehost (owned by Rackspace). Awesome company. Remember though, that Slicehost is self-managed. I.e., you get a bare Linux install and the rest is up to you. I put a little tutorial together to get WordPress up and running on it, which has helped some people.

    While I am currently with Slicehost, I am considering moving to Mosso Cloud Servers (owned by Rackspace too) because it would be a cost savings given that I use so little bandwidth right now.

    But definitely consider Slicehost or Mosso, for sure!

    Like

  30. It depends on what they want, do they need cloud computing (virtual servers) or a hosted service/solution? One problem I see is that, the hosted services price their services one way and the cloud servers are priced another way. For example if you look at Rackspace’s site and look at cloud computing you get costs per virtual server per hour. If you look at eleven2 or Bluehost they have hosted solutions plans with costs per month. One sells you virtual servers priced per hour, the other sells you plans priced per month. Not sure if it is possible to recommend one over the other because of that. May the old adage keep them confused so you can milk them is the game plan. But I though web 2.0 and the transparent business model is what all these yahoos profess. Loic and John might just want a hosted solution for their products. If that is the case, the pricepoints are all pretty much even, with the hosted folks. With Rackspace and AWS I am not sure if you can always get what you want, because it is not clear and transparent. It would be nice to compare and know dont you think? I wish some one would write a nice price comparison one of these days between hosted and virtual servers in the cloud.

    Like

  31. Robert, true. We did not go for the lowest price. Servepath was just slightly cheaper than Rackspace when we looked, for what appeared to be similar services.

    I want to make it clear that we are not really dissatisfied with Servepath at all, they had a few outages over the year, like yesterday, but who does not? Even Amazon went down a few times.

    Right now I am obviously looking for high quality first, cost next. Let’s sit down if you like next week, I am all open to hear what your team can offer, and trust you fully. That is a great start!

    The Amazon cloud is VERY tempting though, if not…. obvious.

    Like

  32. Robert, true. We did not go for the lowest price. Servepath was just slightly cheaper than Rackspace when we looked, for what appeared to be similar services.

    I want to make it clear that we are not really dissatisfied with Servepath at all, they had a few outages over the year, like yesterday, but who does not? Even Amazon went down a few times.

    Right now I am obviously looking for high quality first, cost next. Let’s sit down if you like next week, I am all open to hear what your team can offer, and trust you fully. That is a great start!

    The Amazon cloud is VERY tempting though, if not…. obvious.

    Like

  33. Robert – i’ll jump in and pitch an amazing rackspace product – mosso.

    I’ve been on mosso for a year now and love it. I currently have around 15 sites running on it. I switched to it from mediatemple because last year my IowaFlood.com hyperlocal experiment crashed an entire mediatemple grid at a big traffic surge. Mosso helped me move the site to their systems without a hitch and I saw no hiccups after that while getting 60k hits a day. Their admins even helped me optimize wordpress to handle the load better.

    If anything is close to the holy Grail of hosting – it’s mosso. I’ve used just about evertly host out there and this comes from lots of experience. Mosso is more $$$ than alternatives but what I’ve learned is that you get what you pay for… And what you get from mosso is fanatical support and a killer platform.

    Like

  34. Robert – i’ll jump in and pitch an amazing rackspace product – mosso.

    I’ve been on mosso for a year now and love it. I currently have around 15 sites running on it. I switched to it from mediatemple because last year my IowaFlood.com hyperlocal experiment crashed an entire mediatemple grid at a big traffic surge. Mosso helped me move the site to their systems without a hitch and I saw no hiccups after that while getting 60k hits a day. Their admins even helped me optimize wordpress to handle the load better.

    If anything is close to the holy Grail of hosting – it’s mosso. I’ve used just about evertly host out there and this comes from lots of experience. Mosso is more $$$ than alternatives but what I’ve learned is that you get what you pay for… And what you get from mosso is fanatical support and a killer platform.

    Like

  39. Media Temple: not the shared but dedicated (although the cloud shared product in terms of downtime was great for us). Costs an am and a leg, but only really had one hiccup in nearly 12 months. You can usually get good phone support as well; they host a pile of sites like TechCrunch, Mashable and others, a sign perhaps….

    Like

  40. Media Temple: not the shared but dedicated (although the cloud shared product in terms of downtime was great for us). Costs an am and a leg, but only really had one hiccup in nearly 12 months. You can usually get good phone support as well; they host a pile of sites like TechCrunch, Mashable and others, a sign perhaps….

    Like

  42. John and Loic – I’d be glad to talk to you about what RackForce can offer for enterprise clients. Call me M-F GMT -8 1-800-941-1921 ext 2301

    Like

  43. Definitely Gigenet.com. We’ve been using them for a while, and are nothing but the best to work with. Their support is great, and are always available to talk to when something is going on. I’ve gotten ticket responses, to even the most complex of issues within 5 minutes of me submitting a ticket.

    Like

  44. Definitely Gigenet.com. We’ve been using them for a while, and are nothing but the best to work with. Their support is great, and are always available to talk to when something is going on. I’ve gotten ticket responses, to even the most complex of issues within 5 minutes of me submitting a ticket.

    Like

  45. Pingback: Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm » Blog … - Local Tech Experts

  50. If you’re hosting a site that big, someone that offers co-lo is your best option. Why even bother with a hosting company’s servers if you can roll your own? Just check out the datacenter, and see if they’re managed or unmanaged. If they’re unmanaged, you’ll need someone who can do work on the server for you.

    Also, your point #3 makes no sense. WordPress simply runs on top of PHP, so if you had a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl) platform running, installing WordPress is trivial.

    Like

  51. If you’re hosting a site that big, someone that offers co-lo is your best option. Why even bother with a hosting company’s servers if you can roll your own? Just check out the datacenter, and see if they’re managed or unmanaged. If they’re unmanaged, you’ll need someone who can do work on the server for you.

    Also, your point #3 makes no sense. WordPress simply runs on top of PHP, so if you had a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl) platform running, installing WordPress is trivial.

    Like

  52. I appreciate the vote of confidence, Tim. I’ve reached out to both Loic and John. You can reach me at brandon.hale@gigenet.com with any additional questions.

    My suggestion to both: research the recommended hosting companies; see what their customers have to say; determine what type of hosting environment (cloud vs. dedicated vs. colocation) best meets your needs, and take it from there.

    Like

  53. I appreciate the vote of confidence, Tim. I’ve reached out to both Loic and John. You can reach me at brandon.hale@gigenet.com with any additional questions.

    My suggestion to both: research the recommended hosting companies; see what their customers have to say; determine what type of hosting environment (cloud vs. dedicated vs. colocation) best meets your needs, and take it from there.

    Like

  54. Hi Robert,

    Feedly is currently hosted by Hurricane Electric (co-location). We have been really happy with their offering. As our bandwidth requirements started to increase over the last 3 months, we are now looking at what we should be doing next.

    I briefly looked at Rackspace because we heard from a couple of people that they offer really good support. One way you could really help them is to improve their website so that the pricing is more transparent: Let me enter my parameters: number of servers, in bandwidth, out bandwidth, storage, backup option and give me in real-time a quote and then let me opt-in to talk to a sales person.

    Right now, there is a lot of marketing bla bla and no easy way for me to determine the price. No?

    Like

  55. Hi Robert,

    Feedly is currently hosted by Hurricane Electric (co-location). We have been really happy with their offering. As our bandwidth requirements started to increase over the last 3 months, we are now looking at what we should be doing next.

    I briefly looked at Rackspace because we heard from a couple of people that they offer really good support. One way you could really help them is to improve their website so that the pricing is more transparent: Let me enter my parameters: number of servers, in bandwidth, out bandwidth, storage, backup option and give me in real-time a quote and then let me opt-in to talk to a sales person.

    Right now, there is a lot of marketing bla bla and no easy way for me to determine the price. No?

    Like

  56. Companies that host their sites on a $10 a month virtual server and “develop” their Websites using a WordPress instance, a slightly modified “off the shelf” WP theme, and a dizzying array of open source plugins right on the production machine should expect the occasional catastrophic failure. I wouldn’t blame the hosting service.

    Like

  57. Companies that host their sites on a $10 a month virtual server and “develop” their Websites using a WordPress instance, a slightly modified “off the shelf” WP theme, and a dizzying array of open source plugins right on the production machine should expect the occasional catastrophic failure. I wouldn’t blame the hosting service.

    Like

  58. Edwin, great feedback. I agree. We are working on making the pricing process much more clear and transparent. Our cloud offerings are completely transparent. We have a ways to go on the managed hosting side.

    Like

  59. Edwin, great feedback. I agree. We are working on making the pricing process much more clear and transparent. Our cloud offerings are completely transparent. We have a ways to go on the managed hosting side.

    Like

  60. We are now in the process of looking for an alternate hosting provider and have made a decision on going with theplanet. We have looked at several hosting companies and really liked rackspace but cost was too high for us. Theplanet seemed very professional and we would move one of our servers there now for a proof of concept. The fact that nobody mentioned them worries me now. Has anybody had any experience with theplanet?

    Like

  61. We are now in the process of looking for an alternate hosting provider and have made a decision on going with theplanet. We have looked at several hosting companies and really liked rackspace but cost was too high for us. Theplanet seemed very professional and we would move one of our servers there now for a proof of concept. The fact that nobody mentioned them worries me now. Has anybody had any experience with theplanet?

    Like

  64. I had been using Carbonite but switched because I seemed to be paying a premium for what I store .

    I’m now using Amazon S3 for home and Mosso Cloud Files for work (as that is what work prescribes_ through a service called smestorage.com. I can see al files at once in a virtual file system and I get some really nice windows tools which include sync, plug-ins for office and a virtual drive. I like this hybrid approach, I use one service but can get access to all my files. They recently started supporting email-as-a-cloud which allows me to pull all my email and attachments back into this same virtual file system. I can see my having all my files stored in this fashion,

    Like

  65. I had been using Carbonite but switched because I seemed to be paying a premium for what I store .

    I’m now using Amazon S3 for home and Mosso Cloud Files for work (as that is what work prescribes_ through a service called smestorage.com. I can see al files at once in a virtual file system and I get some really nice windows tools which include sync, plug-ins for office and a virtual drive. I like this hybrid approach, I use one service but can get access to all my files. They recently started supporting email-as-a-cloud which allows me to pull all my email and attachments back into this same virtual file system. I can see my having all my files stored in this fashion,

    Like

  66. If you want cutting-edge dedicated-servers (like the latest quad core processors, up to 96GB of ram, SSD hard disks), all kind of network stuff (firewalls, load balancers, SAN) and cost-effective prices, softlayer.com is a damn good hosting. But they don’t offer any cloud service (yet), and although i think people is understimating old-fashion dedicated-servers nowadays, i cannot deny the beneficits of cloud servers. So, right now, i think the best hosting company is rackspace, they offer the better of both worlds: you can have dedicated managed hosting, virtual-self managed servers (@ slicehost) or cloud servers (@mosso). Slicehost/Mosso combined, IMO, are way better than amazon EC2.

    Like

  67. If you want cutting-edge dedicated-servers (like the latest quad core processors, up to 96GB of ram, SSD hard disks), all kind of network stuff (firewalls, load balancers, SAN) and cost-effective prices, softlayer.com is a damn good hosting. But they don’t offer any cloud service (yet), and although i think people is understimating old-fashion dedicated-servers nowadays, i cannot deny the beneficits of cloud servers. So, right now, i think the best hosting company is rackspace, they offer the better of both worlds: you can have dedicated managed hosting, virtual-self managed servers (@ slicehost) or cloud servers (@mosso). Slicehost/Mosso combined, IMO, are way better than amazon EC2.

    Like

  68. Agnostic from religion? GoGrid, for instance, lets you spin up Windows or Linux instances. If you’ve already built your infrastructure on Windows, that might be important. For guys like Loic and John, though, it’s less important because they are already on LAMP stacks. But still, they might need WordPress loaded. That’ll be tough to get at some hosting companies.

    WordPress thrives on a LAMP stack (indeed the “M” and “P” parts of its are required), but it’ll run on Windows, as well as non-Apache http servers such as IIS, LiteSpeed, Lighttpd, and others. As far as getting it installed, many hosts have “Wizard” installers like cPanel’s Fantastico or their own custom installer scripts. And even without an installer script, it’s about a 5 minute process to do a manual FTP upload of the files and enter your MySQL user/pass/database info.

    As to the matter at hand, Rackspace is amazing if you can afford them. If you’re willing to sacrifice some uptime and systems redundancy and save a bunch of money, Server Beach is worth considering. Layered Technologies is somewhere in the middle in terms of the price/fanatical-service tradeoff. I wouldn’t hesitate to do business with any of these companies.

    Cloud hosting is a riskier proposition. It’s new technology, and while it’s great in theory, I’ve found the execution to be universally lacking. For example, Rackspace’s Mosso CloudSites offering offers only FTP/SFTP as an interface — Subversion and Rsync support would really help. Cloud hosting isn’t what you want if you need your service to be super-responsive. All those virtualization layers add overhead. If you have customized needs or low latency requirements, you’re going to be better off with a custom solution. Where cloud hosting wins is that you can cut your IT costs and just deal with application developers.

    Like

  69. Agnostic from religion? GoGrid, for instance, lets you spin up Windows or Linux instances. If you’ve already built your infrastructure on Windows, that might be important. For guys like Loic and John, though, it’s less important because they are already on LAMP stacks. But still, they might need WordPress loaded. That’ll be tough to get at some hosting companies.

    WordPress thrives on a LAMP stack (indeed the “M” and “P” parts of its are required), but it’ll run on Windows, as well as non-Apache http servers such as IIS, LiteSpeed, Lighttpd, and others. As far as getting it installed, many hosts have “Wizard” installers like cPanel’s Fantastico or their own custom installer scripts. And even without an installer script, it’s about a 5 minute process to do a manual FTP upload of the files and enter your MySQL user/pass/database info.

    As to the matter at hand, Rackspace is amazing if you can afford them. If you’re willing to sacrifice some uptime and systems redundancy and save a bunch of money, Server Beach is worth considering. Layered Technologies is somewhere in the middle in terms of the price/fanatical-service tradeoff. I wouldn’t hesitate to do business with any of these companies.

    Cloud hosting is a riskier proposition. It’s new technology, and while it’s great in theory, I’ve found the execution to be universally lacking. For example, Rackspace’s Mosso CloudSites offering offers only FTP/SFTP as an interface — Subversion and Rsync support would really help. Cloud hosting isn’t what you want if you need your service to be super-responsive. All those virtualization layers add overhead. If you have customized needs or low latency requirements, you’re going to be better off with a custom solution. Where cloud hosting wins is that you can cut your IT costs and just deal with application developers.

    Like

  70. I thought WP.com was becoming LNMP (Nginx) based.

    Ultimately you need to spend the most on the Achilles heel of your system, the load balancers.
    Then you host in multiple locations.

    The new Rackspace / Mosso Gridservers are actually tempting, because they can also connect to large DB servers on the backend.

    To reduce rackspace costs, use a CDN

    I have seen a couple of negative reviews of SimpleCDN because their pricing is too good to be true, or the ping time to their primary DNS is a little slow (but that isn’t the server delivering the content)
    They are cheap if you use a lot of bandwidth rather than storage – you don’t need to store everything in the CDN, just what is popular.

    Thus ideal system would be to upload content to Amazon, then cycle newest content through a SimpleCDN bucket, automatically clearing out stale content on a weekly basis, and dynamically switching links back to Amazon.

    Like

  71. I thought WP.com was becoming LNMP (Nginx) based.

    Ultimately you need to spend the most on the Achilles heel of your system, the load balancers.
    Then you host in multiple locations.

    The new Rackspace / Mosso Gridservers are actually tempting, because they can also connect to large DB servers on the backend.

    To reduce rackspace costs, use a CDN

    I have seen a couple of negative reviews of SimpleCDN because their pricing is too good to be true, or the ping time to their primary DNS is a little slow (but that isn’t the server delivering the content)
    They are cheap if you use a lot of bandwidth rather than storage – you don’t need to store everything in the CDN, just what is popular.

    Thus ideal system would be to upload content to Amazon, then cycle newest content through a SimpleCDN bucket, automatically clearing out stale content on a weekly basis, and dynamically switching links back to Amazon.

    Like

  72. All of my sites are hosted in house now, but over the years I have gone through a bunch of hosts and I’d say the best experience I had was with Pacific Rack. They have great prices and awesome support, when I first signed up with them they had my server spun up with a custom install of Linux within an hour of me signing the contract. I also received responses to my emails within minutes and their backbone is connected to a ton of providers.

    Like

  73. All of my sites are hosted in house now, but over the years I have gone through a bunch of hosts and I’d say the best experience I had was with Pacific Rack. They have great prices and awesome support, when I first signed up with them they had my server spun up with a custom install of Linux within an hour of me signing the contract. I also received responses to my emails within minutes and their backbone is connected to a ton of providers.

    Like

  78. We started out hosting our site on a basic Joyent Connector shared hosting plan – this was good enough for testing purposes and having a few people try out the service.

    Recently we switched to Slicehost to give ourselves more capacity – as noted above, this is a self-managed solution but gives you full control over your environment which is what we wanted. It’s early but so far the experience has been positive – the Slicehost documentation is quite good with articles covering just about everything you’d want to know (esp. for running Ruby+Rails as we are).

    Like

  79. We started out hosting our site on a basic Joyent Connector shared hosting plan – this was good enough for testing purposes and having a few people try out the service.

    Recently we switched to Slicehost to give ourselves more capacity – as noted above, this is a self-managed solution but gives you full control over your environment which is what we wanted. It’s early but so far the experience has been positive – the Slicehost documentation is quite good with articles covering just about everything you’d want to know (esp. for running Ruby+Rails as we are).

    Like

  82. We are new SaaS (http://www.goldeneyedms.com) and evaluating hosters right now. Rackspace definitely appears to have the deepest bench of talent if we needed to draw on them. Even offered to bring you in on my call Robert. 🙂

    Big difference too, between Managed Hosters, Clouds, Co-lo. We’re looking at Fusion Storm (SwitchNAP), Exacent, Rackspace, and Latisys.

    Datacenters and their facilities are such commodities now. Biggest differentiators are the specific skills and value added services that come through the team that runs the environment.

    Like

  83. We are new SaaS (http://www.goldeneyedms.com) and evaluating hosters right now. Rackspace definitely appears to have the deepest bench of talent if we needed to draw on them. Even offered to bring you in on my call Robert. 🙂

    Big difference too, between Managed Hosters, Clouds, Co-lo. We’re looking at Fusion Storm (SwitchNAP), Exacent, Rackspace, and Latisys.

    Datacenters and their facilities are such commodities now. Biggest differentiators are the specific skills and value added services that come through the team that runs the environment.

    Like

  84. http://www.hostmysite.com/ has been good for me. Granted my site is small and run in a shared hosting setup. But for about $25 a month I get 24/7 customer service with an actual human on the phone.
    When I have needed to call about something, there was usually little or no waiting on hold before I got to talk to someone who could help me.

    Like

  85. http://www.hostmysite.com/ has been good for me. Granted my site is small and run in a shared hosting setup. But for about $25 a month I get 24/7 customer service with an actual human on the phone.
    When I have needed to call about something, there was usually little or no waiting on hold before I got to talk to someone who could help me.

    Like

  88. Slicehost is the way to go hands down. While Mosso may be offering similar packages now, Slicehosts support team have proven themselves time and time again. The sense of community you get with Slicehost is hard to put into words, but it feels like home.

    Like

  89. Slicehost is the way to go hands down. While Mosso may be offering similar packages now, Slicehosts support team have proven themselves time and time again. The sense of community you get with Slicehost is hard to put into words, but it feels like home.

    Like

  90. I just moved to GoGrid, due to the abitility to rapidly deploy instances.

    However there will always be a trade off. Recently my web apps have become unreachable due to net work performance issues.

    Shame cos I would have recommended them, no questions asked.

    Like

  91. I just moved to GoGrid, due to the abitility to rapidly deploy instances.

    However there will always be a trade off. Recently my web apps have become unreachable due to net work performance issues.

    Shame cos I would have recommended them, no questions asked.

    Like

  92. Choosing a webhost is always a challenge. Having helped build one of the first, I know there is a lot you need to consider. What I suggest is that you determine what are the critical factors for your site (such as bandwidth, control of servers, uptime, support, remote hands, high-volume storage, etc.) and rank those. Each hoster will be good and bad at some of these. By ranking, you can help narrow the list for making a good cost/benefit analysis.

    Also, make sure to consider some of the “other” factors. Do they have a good DAR (disaster avoidance and recovery plan – you’d be surprised that many don’t, that they often don’t include avoidance and/or that it is seriously out of date), how do they access the Internet (while some will tell you they have gobs of bandwidth, depending on how it is connected your network performance still may not be good, and how do they address security (this includes network, server and most importantly physical (don’t forget the easiest way to access a server is from the server itself)).

    There are lots of good referrals and recommendations listed. Hopefully this helps in the decision. Good luck.

    Like

  93. Choosing a webhost is always a challenge. Having helped build one of the first, I know there is a lot you need to consider. What I suggest is that you determine what are the critical factors for your site (such as bandwidth, control of servers, uptime, support, remote hands, high-volume storage, etc.) and rank those. Each hoster will be good and bad at some of these. By ranking, you can help narrow the list for making a good cost/benefit analysis.

    Also, make sure to consider some of the “other” factors. Do they have a good DAR (disaster avoidance and recovery plan – you’d be surprised that many don’t, that they often don’t include avoidance and/or that it is seriously out of date), how do they access the Internet (while some will tell you they have gobs of bandwidth, depending on how it is connected your network performance still may not be good, and how do they address security (this includes network, server and most importantly physical (don’t forget the easiest way to access a server is from the server itself)).

    There are lots of good referrals and recommendations listed. Hopefully this helps in the decision. Good luck.

    Like

  94. Pingback: Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Blogging from Tahoe ‘09

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