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Web host with similar level of control to DreamHost, but better reliability?

rogersmj

rogersmj

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Sep 10, 2006
2,161
1
Indianapolis, IN
I've been on DreamHost for awhile, and although I love their control panel I'm not a big fan of how slow my sites tend to run on their overcrowded servers. They recently throttled my bandwidth too after my site "was creating too many connections to the server, resulting in a loss of performance for other customers." For the record, my blog gets around 2,000-3,000 hits a day -- hardly a huge load. I'm not even using 1% of my allocated bandwidth from DreamHost, but they still throttled me. Awesome. And even when I wasn't, the servers are sluggish. Anyway...

What I really, really like about DH is the level of control their control panel provides -- most importantly, the full and complete DNS control over add-on domains. A lot of companies use CPanel -- which I loathe -- and don't allow you much DNS control, if any at all.

The other thing I like about DH is that I have shell access, which makes it really easy to get in and view logs, move directories around, make symlinks, etc.

So what I'm looking for is a relatively inexpensive host that provides the same level of control as DH, but better reliability and fast performance. Most of my stuff is PHP, but the ability to run Rails apps in FastCGI would be great too. And I really don't want to break the bank. Any recommendations?
 
Dimwhit

Dimwhit

macrumors 68020
Apr 10, 2007
2,068
297
Getting suggestions for a host is hard, because for each one someone loves, another three people will tell you they suck.

I use Host Gator. I've been with them over a year and have had almost no problems, and they support has been fast. I host about 2 dozen sites with my account. Most of them are very low volume, but I have a couple busy ones, one of which is my company's website with dished out 25GB of traffic in January (which is quite a bit for a website).

Anyway, they're pretty cheap and offer a good reseller package. They use WHM/CPanel for administering sites.
 
T

ThePrimeDreamer

macrumors newbie
Nov 12, 2006
27
0
It's been a while since I've looked at what Dreamhost provides in terms of service but a good web host I've used is Downtownhost.com. It's gotten good reviews from WebHostingTalk.com as well. Try them and good lucking find a host. Just like the previous poster said, it's all very subjective.
 
M

macsig

macrumors regular
Oct 27, 2006
236
0
Marina del Rey, CA
Hello, I guess there are so many good hosting out there.
By the way my pick is bluehost. I have a domain with them (currently it is running 2 rails app) and in my opinion they work well. They have a online support chat that is very useful.

Hope helping
 
E

exabytes18

macrumors 6502
Jun 14, 2006
287
0
Suburb of Chicago
I personally use Dreamhost but it is starting to become really slow (overall). I also have suspicions they are capping my bandwidth for certain files. Media files seem to be limited to ~150kbps while the rest is pretty much unlimited.

I help manage another site on Bluehost. I don't like the control panel (Cpanel) but they are fast. We have a CPU intensive app that was staling resulting in the dreaded "Exceeded CPU Quota" message, but instead of fixing it, we upgraded our CPU quota (temporary fix). It's a super fast server but its crowded. I'm watching the MySQL status and it's on average handling 60 queries per second over the last 5 minutes. Reliability is also better than that of Dreamhost. Gahh I hate http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/. Both suffer from overloaded mail servers though.

From experience, I think Bluehost is marginally better than Dreamhost, but since I can directly connect to MySQL servers on either host, I'm content with both.
 
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