Can you recommend a hosting company for swissmiss?

I am currently working on a complete swissmiss redesign which will include moving everything to wordpress and my own server. The big question is: What hosting company to go with? I have looked at mosso.com which sounds fantastic, but is pricy, and dreamhost, which I heard tends to be somewhat slow. What about Laughing Squid or Mediatemple?

Bandwith is key: I don’t want to be hit with a bill at the end of the month, in case I get dug, like the other day, when I had over 200,000 hits in 24hours.

Are you running a fairly high-traffic site? Are you happy with your host?

51 Comments leave a comment below

  1. Servage is pretty great, cheap and huge server space and bandwidth

  2. I recommend mediatemple. Reliable, lots of functionality, support is quite good. Quite a lot of popular sites/blogs use them.

  3. Tina,

    I use LunarPages (www.lunarpages.com) for myself and my clients. As far as bandwidth goes, LP basic hosting gives you 3500 Gigs Data Transfer. So, check your current traffic load to see how much data is actually transferred.

    If you go sign up for 2 years, the Basic Hosting plan:
    – costs $6.95/mo
    – 1 domain name is free for life (one time charge for transferring)
    – hosts up to 10 domains
    – comes with WordPress, easily installed from the control panel

    I don’t think I ever had problem with them. Few things to know though, live phone support is not a free call. You might need to file a problem ticket online, I usually hear back within 4 hours. Requests are filled quickly.

    Most importantly, whichever host you decide to go with, search for coupon codes online. I saved my clients some pretty dollars that way.

    May your new design and content transfer go smoothly!

    Iris

  4. I really like Media Temple

  5. Also, wordpress installs are one click on media temple (:

  6. I use both TextDrive and LunarPages. I used to be on Rackspace (Mosso’s parent) and that was downright A-W-E-S-O-M-E (but totally suited for large business).

    TextDrive has a geeky stripped down admin interface, but has been a solid performer. Even I, a pixel-pusher, can set up a database and wordpress blog there. Email sometimes hiccups, but never for a few minutes.
    http://www.textdrive.com

    LunarPages has a better management interface and overall I’ve been relatively happy with performance. I would say the server or FTP is not accessible for a few minutes every 3 weeks or so.
    http://www.lunarpages.com

    All that said, I deeply respect some folks that use Dreamhost and Laughing Squid. I’ve not heard any bad words, but have no personal experience with either.

  7. Godaddy.com might be worth considering. I have a few blogs and the economy hosting plan fits more than my needs.

  8. Hi,

    I am with Dreamhost and I am very satisfied with their services. I rarely notice a slowdown.

    If you want a rebate, use my promocode PATRICK50 and you gonna have a 50$ rebate on the cost of your plan.

    Some info on the basic plan:

    -Disk Storage at signup: 500 GB
    -Automatically Increases Weekly By: 2 GB

    -Monthly Bandwidth at signup: 5.0 TB
    -Automatically Increases Weekly By: 40 GB

    Go check https://dreamhost.com/hosting.html

    (Sorry for my poor english!!)

  9. I personally use Dreamhost – have been since about 2001. As of late, they have been kinda sketchy. I’m personally not worried about uptime, but as you can tell from their blog they have issues. Their blog works both ways though – it looks like they have a lot of issues but Dreamhost will actually tell you about them. It probably looks way worse than it really is. Dreamhost is awesome with their customers and really want to work with you on sorting out problems. If you are sucking up too much CPU or bandwidth they will move you off until the problem can be fixed. Also, they have tons of one click installs for software and are generally really nice people.

    Mediatemple I have heard great stuff about. Their new “grid” is supposed to be pretty sweet. The guy who does SlideShowPro recently switched from Dreamhost to MediaTemple for more uptime (I assume). Other than that, I have no experience with them.

    I just signed the company I work for up with hostgator. I haven’t heard a peep out of my boss and we have been on it for a few months now. They guarantee 99.9% uptime for ~10 bucks a month. It was really easy to switch the site over, and their support is AMAZING. Phone, chat, and e-mail 24/7. Just some food for thought!

    Hope the switch goes well and thanks for having such a wonderful blog. I constantly tell my designer friends to check it out and they love it too.

  10. I’d seriously recommend (mt).

    Not because they’re good, not because they have fast servers and reasonable pricing, and not because I get something (or anything) out of it.

    At some point something will break. It’s inevitable that a failure will occur. And when that happens, (mt) will respond and rise to the challenge.

    Anyone can provide hosting, it’s the support of said hosting that will makes or breaks the deal.

    The (gs) gridserver product tends to cope far better with a digg or slashdot burst-event than a number of shared-server products do.

  11. I use mediatemple on my personal sites and it has done a super job handling static pages under heavy load (diggs, boing boing mentions, etc)…

    But all is not perfect, I also went with mediatemple for 20×200 and found that Media Temple became very unhappy with us when we had bursts of traffic and were hitting mysql (for dynamic pages) and using ajax (in our case doing live inventory counts). They were going to hit us with GPU overage charges so we had to dial back our ajax until we moved the site to a Virtual Private Server which is much more expensive than the grid service. And our ajax calls are nothing extraordinary…so the grid isn’t perfect for all situations, but it is great at pumping out pages and I can’t say enough good things about Media Temple’s customer service (you can call and talk to a real live informed human being).

    Dreamhost give you lots of configurability but it has always failed under load for me. Also there’s no phone support.

    I’ve done a few sites with Fatcow which is a friendly hands on company and have been impressed although none of the sites on those servers were high traffic.

    I’ve also done a few sites with Verio. They did a decent job with traffic on static sites. But failed miserably with sites that hit mysql. Also at least in my experience their tech support has gone downhill.

    Finally I’m a big textdrive fan. It’s a bit less slick mediatemple and on the cheapest plans a bit less robust, but their joynet accelerator plan is excellent probably about equal to MT’s grid service, but more expensive for an equivalent plan…. I’ve done many client sites with them. Great for businessy high end stuff.

  12. Textdrive is the best. Now a Joyent company, it’s run by great people who blog. I used to use Dreamhost, but there were too many breakdowns. Never had a problem in years with Textdrive.

    http://www.textdrive.com

  13. MediaTemple definitely, I’ve been using them for 2+ years now and they’re support is the best of any company I’ve ever dealt with. It’s much more reliable than dreamhost, and the prices are still fair.

  14. I’m with GeekHosting (http://geekhosting.com/) they have a pretty wide range of plans ranging from $25/year up to $170/year for a premium plan with:

    Max. Domains Hosted: 40
    Disk Space: 1,200 mb
    Data Transfer: 50,000 mb/month

    Very good service.

  15. (MT) certainly garners a great deal of praise. Deservedly so.

    I’ll personally recommend Pair (pair.com). They’re not cutting edge by any means, but they’re rock solid in terms of uptime and availability. Been with them since 1999.

  16. We use eleven2.com, cheap ($6.00/mo), reliable, everything you need. They have the most amazing customer service; feedback is nearly instantaneous.

  17. Mediatemple
    no doubt
    quality is everything
    and now they have better prices

    even if you get something not so good as the other comapanies this will work and they will care

    i love it

  18. Dreamhost. Simple, Reliable, Affordable.

  19. maybe a swiss solution would be good? perfect service and no data transfer limitation…

    http://www.cyon.ch

  20. I recomenden you Aruba (Italian Hosting)
    No problem
    Good Call Center
    Unlimited GB and hosting.
    The link http://ad.zanox.com/ppc/?6012612C1832533929T
    or http://hosting.aruba.it/Index.asp?Lang=EN

    Enjoy my blog coldchiliandhotchilly.com

    Thanks and good blog

  21. (mt) MediaTemple — been a happy with them for 5 years.

    run -/+ 10 personal sites on a grid account and work stuff on a vps. support is fast.

    swissmiss will become a rockstar if you choose to get powered by (mt).

  22. I’ve been very happy with Dreamhost, but at the moment I wouldn’t recommened it. There has been a lot of downtime lately for both web and mail related services (and actually the whole network has been a bit flaky).
    I’m still hoping they will recover though, because it was great before, but if I’d have to choose a new host today I’d go with mediatemple.

  23. I have to second eleven2. Service and dedication are fantastic and prices are some of reasonable. I used to manage an internet provider back in the day and eleven2 is probably the one that has given me the most peace of mind.

  24. I have to agree on the Dreamhost thing. I’m not using them, but a friend is and his site tends to be a bit slow at times.

    If you want your site to be digg-proof, I definitely suggest using the WP-Cache plugin for WordPress, no matter which host you go with.

  25. I use dreamhost and ikhost, both are great, been a user for 3 years now with at least 10 successful blog on my dreamhost.

  26. As a current Rackspace customer, I have to say they are fantastic – so I imagine Mosso would be too. If you want reliability and great customer service, they are hard to beat. But like you say, very pricey.

    I had a dedicated Windows server at 1&1 for about 2 years. Customer service sucks and is hard to reach, but they have spent a lot of time making it so that 99.9% of what you would want to do can be done through their web control panels. If you feel comfortable doing things yourself you don’t really need them except in emergencies. And that’s why I left, I didn’t trust that they would respond very fast if my server had a hardware failure.

  27. Either way, Tina, good luck! I really enjoy your blog and am looking forward to seeing what you have up your sleeve. Very exciting!

  28. I’d stay away from companies promising hundreds (in not thousands) of GB for a few bucks: in my experience they tend to miss expectations.

    I recently moved my websites to MediaLayer (http://www.medialayer.com/). They are not cheap, but their servers are really fast and customer support is top-notch.
    They focus on hosting websites needing a lot of power, so they should easily handle your blog.

  29. Am I the only person with vervehosting.com love? LOVE!

  30. I have 2 dedicated servers with HostDime.com, and 2 Accelerators at Joyent. I’ve been at both companies, almost since their inception. In fact, I am a “VC” customer at Joyent (part of the original lifetime subscribers).

    Joyent’s Accelerators are setup for high-traffic sites like yours and although pricey (compared to most), I guarantee you won’t find a better group of engineers working for you. They’re the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world, and the primary host for Ruby on Rails.

    Very cool stuff they’re doing.

  31. I’ve been using LaughingSquid and have been very happy with them. Reasonable prices and decent stuff. No complains with them at all, so far. *knocks on wood*

  32. I’d stay away from Dreamhost. People are switching from them in droves. I just switched to MediaTemple, but its a bit too early to comment on their performance.

  33. Everything but WordPress?

  34. Hello

    Maybe you could have a look at NearlyFreeSpeech.net ? They offer pay as you go (1GB = 1USD + 1USD/MB-month) service. You credit them say 20 $ and it will last until someone downloads the last of the 20GB (they remind you when you reach 5 usd credit). they do offer discounted bandwidth valid for a limited period of time. I think I saw 5GB for 3USD valid for one month.

  35. Hey Tina,

    Long time reader, first time commenter. I have to give some love to A Small Orange hosting.
    http://www.asmallorange.com/
    They have spectacular hosting for people with tiny bandwidth needs like me, though I don’t know if their deals are as great for higher-traffic sites like yours. They start at 75MB/3GB bandwidth for $25/yr and go up to 4500MB/100GB for $30/mo.

  36. LunarPages would not be my first pick. I currently host 5 domains with them, and although the bandwidth and storage space is fine, they can be incredibly slow loading.

  37. Hi. I use Hostican. They have shared servers and virtual servers. I use the tera host plan, look at this.
    bye

  38. I recommend HostRocket. I have had them for going on 11 years and have been down for about 3 days total in that 11 years.
    Their main site is: http://www.hostrocket.com or if you want my affiliate link, it is: http://affiliatecenter.hostrocket.com//idevaffiliate.php?id=5144
    They support PHP, CGI-BIN, and have a host of other additions that make them well worth while.

    As a side note, I work for a web design company and it is also one that we recommend to our clients.

  39. My vote is Textdrive. I haven’t had a problem in the almost 3 years I’ve been with them (I would say my site’s been down no more than 10 times in that time and never for more than an hour or so — which is incredible compared to Dreamhost which seems to go down at least once or twice a month). Also with TextDrive you get some other goodies like Strongspace, which is excellent.

  40. i’m with lunarpages.com – we can handle that many hits.

  41. I was really happy with 1&1. Reasonable pricing and really good servers. I ran osvids.com on it (till I ran out of time) and had over a Terabyte of transfer in one month, the servers never skipped a beat.

  42. HostMonster in Salt Lake City. Lots of everything for very little money. Reliable, etc…

    John

    Love your blog.

  43. TextDrive. Theirs are “soft limits,” so they won’t automatically bill you or shut off your site if you go over. Plus, nice folks.

  44. I use hostcolor.com for my commercial sites. A decent site with good tech support and reasonable cost for a really decent package.

  45. I’m at midphase. Starts at storage 250,000 MB, bandwidth 2,500,000 MB, $6/95/mo. Pretty reliable, although one of the servers has had a few problems lately. Includes WordPress/Fantastico, more.

  46. Don’t use dreamhost. Gigposters.com uses it, and the owner recently changed hosts because of lots of troubles he had.

    Mediatemple is good,
    I use nearlyfreespeech.net, which has “bandwidth buckets” for times when you get digg a lot :)

  47. Edit: I mean, gigposters USED dreamhost

  48. I’d recommend TextDrive/Joyent, especially as their new infrastructure they’re rolling out is very solid. Looks like all new customers go directly onto the “Shared Accelerator” hosting.

  49. Use Dreamhost or MT, either way your good to go.

  50. Hello,

    http://www.swiss-miss.com is een goede homepage, daarom ik heb een vraag aan u.

    Ik kan niet beslissen de meeste van de put, waar ik wil mijn vakantie te maken.

    Overal in de wereld, het is geweldig…

    Het zou ideaal zijn: reizen en de hele wereld !

    Ik zou graag willen weten: in welk land je zou willen maken vakantie? Naar Dominicaanse Republiek, Duitsland, Turkije,…?

    Veel groeten aan alle!
    UncereJuntece
    Mijn laatste vakantie: Nederland