Looking for a Good Drupal Hosting Company


published by thomas on Tue, 07/13/2010 - 12:43

This morning when I, as usual, got online to check Nutshell I was greeted with with an ugly holding page saying "Your website is NOT YET AVAILABLE". Between I went to bed last night and this morning the hosting company had made a serious $%&#-up and started to redirect all our websites to their default holding pages.

E-mail, ftp and other services seemed all to work just fine, only the websites where affected.

I immediately logged into the account and started a live chat session. As usual when things go wrong, the do it in style. I ended up in a long queue, guessing I wasn't the only one affected by this, and it took well over one hour before it was finally my turn. By this time I had also fired an issue ticket just to get ahead of the chat person suggesting I do that...

Anyhow, Nutshell is once again live, but this is just another item in a very long list of problems I have had with this hosting company.

I need to find a new one, especially since business is starting to take of and I need a reliable service that offers good performance and service.

Good Drupal Hosting Company Needed

We are mainly looking for a VPS provider at a reasonable price that offers excellent performance for Drupal based websites.

Besides our own websites we also need to offer hosting solutions to clients, there too mainly Drupal websites. Thus we need to find a provider that offers a good reseller program with excellent client management solutions making it easy to monitor, maintain and administrate our clients websites. Some clients are small and will only require shared hosting, while others will need more reliable solutions.

We have lately looked at the Aegir hosting system for Drupal and it looks very promising for what we need.

I would be very grateful for tips from all the Drupalers out there, as well as hear about your experience when it comes to hosting Drupal websites.

  • What hosting company are you using?
  • How is their reliability?
  • How good and especially quick are they on support requests?
  • Have you tried Aegir? If so, what's your experience of it?

Feel free to leave a comment with your experience below, any feedback is much appreciated.

Tags: 
Drupal
Webhosting

Comments

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SandStorm (not verified)

Tue, 07/13/2010 - 14:07

Re: Looking for a Good Drupal Hosting Company

Hi,

I use a company called Hetzner. www.hetzner.de in germany www.hetzner.co.za in South Africa.

They are a very professional company. A few years back they had a problem where the sub-contractor who was doing routine maintenance on the backup generators messed up somehow, shutting down a part of the data centre for a few minutes. They promptly refunded the monthly hosting fee for that month to all the clients who were affected by this. This showed me that although everyone makes mistakes, they are not shy to take action when something goes wrong. Although I was not affected, I have not had 1 minute of problems with them in 8 years.

Even migrating all my hosted domains from a South African server to a leased server in Germany went without a hitch. They even changed all the database access settings of the various php scripts on the domains (keeping the original as a backup) for me.

The one thing I noticed was that they are fairly unflexible for custom php settings or memory requirements, which understandable when multiple domains are hosted on a single machine. The main issue for me was the memory available to php on sites with many modules.

I hope this helps.

#

thomas

Tue, 07/13/2010 - 14:35

Re: Looking for a Good Drupal Hosting Company

Hi SandStorm,

Thanks for the tip. Had a quick look and must say I like what I seen so far. Their Root Server packages are reasonable priced and includes a lot.

The fact they are in Germany, within EU, is also great since that otherwise could have been an issue.

Definitely will be on my list of options.

/thomas

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Adrián (not verified)

Tue, 07/13/2010 - 19:53

Re: Looking for a Good Drupal Hosting Company

I've never had experience with Drupal hosting. In the past I have had experience with Joomla + Godaddy, then Hostgator. This Hostgator surprised me a lot when I was coming from Godaddy.

They are very fast and in several years, I've never seen my website offline. Well yeah, I've seen but my fault and they helped me fix the problem.

Good luck with the change.

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jpw1116 (not verified)

Fri, 07/16/2010 - 19:54

Re: Looking for a Good Drupal Hosting Company

I have had excellent support from hotdrupal.com here in the States. I opted to steer clear of "big box" registrar hosting in favor of a smaller Drupal-centric host with all its plans on a VPS, making it easy to upgrade.

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zuberuber (not verified)

Tue, 12/21/2010 - 18:38

Re: Looking for a Good Drupal Hosting Company

I using hostinghowhq.com they provide cheap prices and supports php 5.3 :)