Hi everybody, I have my own web forum which is currently hosted in the US but I am not satisfied with the service so I am changing my hosting company.
Since I am in Switzerland now, I might try with Swiss servers and hosting companies, I was looking around but many of them don't offer cpanel and it was difficult to navigate.
Do you have some suggestion on which hosting company I choose? I search for a shared web hosting on linux, php 5, cpanel, 1 gig of space and 30 gigs of transfer a month. I have 2 databases and 3 emails.
Do you have some acquaintances or friend that have good web host solution? My requirements are simple, fast servers and 99. something % uptime as promised. Uptime is really, really important for me.
Well, I work at an ISP - but we don't really have a control-panel for the web-stuff (we're working on it, though). Our customers prefer calling us and letting us do the configuration anyway.
ISPs in Switzerland usually require one year contracts paid in advance - if you don't like the service, you either wait out that year or pay for another one at a different company.
A lot of them offer their own control-panels - so don't get confused by that.
The questions are really: how busy is the forum (in terms of visitors per day), how many peak concurrent users does it have, how much bandwidth does it suck up? Are you going to solve all the scaling-problems yourself or do you need hand-holding from the ISP?
I already have one, around 2000 members and 80,000 posts. It's pilot/controllers forum.
I don't need the Cpanel for me that much (because Im not using it anyway) but I need it for the transfer from the old hosting server to the new one, so all databases entries, settings, emails, redirects and similar go along and don't make me a hassle. I will than change the A record with my old host and than change the DNS record with my registrar so I don't have any downtime.
I have no problem to pay in advance as long as they give me the 99.8 o 9 % uptime. That's all I ask. Nothing fancy, not to many resources.
I saw couple of companies had their own Cpanels, it was confusing.
The forum has around 6000 unique visitors per months and 285949 pages per month...total 25 gigs of transfer last month. Peak hour are around 13 and 14.
What I am searching for is a shared hosting where the server management is done by the company and I am only left to dealt with my installations and similar...I was searching for prices and it's around 5 to 7 SFR a month...which isn't bad it's just that I don't want to make a mistake and get stuck with some crappy host that will have frequent downtimes...
i'd locate the server where your main audiences are. i have no experience of swiss ISP service and would be wary of swiss colocation providers given my experience of swiss service in other areas.
I work for none of those companies. And I do business with none of them.
So I would hesitate to recommend or warn about a particular company.
My helpdesk guys tell me though, that we have people coming back from Green to us - even though they have a super-duper control-panel.
Their customer service is apparently ... sub-optimal.
Your requirements sound pretty modest. If you have other domains, you could try moving one of those first to the cheapest account at one of those companies and see if you like what you see.
Cheap mass-hosting can be had in Germany for a much lower price. But try getting someone on the phone at 1&1 who can actually make a decision...
I see. Maybe Germany is a better option. I will get on that tomorrow...
Yes, my requirements are modest. I would go along with somebody I "know" for example with you even if your company don't have cpanel, as long as we transfer everything in place. I will contact you privately.
Well if anybody have other ideas...Thanks Phil_MCR for the heads up!
fwiw, i colocate with rapidswitch in the UK - they have pissed me off a few times, but not enough for me to go to the UK and physically relocate my server. though i would probably try a different host if i started again.
the UK tends to have pretty good links. i'm not sure how well connected switzerland is - but you might want to research it - and report back
My previous hosting provider (for which I have no complains, the reason of departure is explained here ) was hosted on http://www.netdirekt.de/ and had awesome service. Never ever had a downtime and killer server, really fast. Bad thing about them is that they are offering only self managed dedicated servers. They are cheap, the cheapest one is 30 euro a month for 250 Gigs of space, 1000 gigs of transfer on a 2x1.6 intel Atom processor with 4 gigs of ram. For my needs, EXCESSIVE. And, I will have to do server management, for which I don't have time.
It will be cool to find somebody to share that server since it has a lot of resource that I don't need. I won't be using 0.1% of it. So my options are HostGator or 1&1, or some local one...
I should say that I currently do run my own server at a colocation-company in Germany (it's rented). It does my email and hosts my blog and around 900 full-size photos from my digital camera.
However, my girl-friends wants me to kill the contract when it's due (calling it "a waste of money")....
I don't want to colocate it at my employer - I'd like to keep work and play separated to avoid conflicts of interest or other mishaps.
i also have a dedicated server 8gb ram, 750gb storage and e8400 processor. but i pay around 3x what you quoted and am probably using about 1/100th of the capacity on it
i've toyed with selling the spare capacity on the server (it's already virtualised with Xen) but i'm not sure i want the hassle with dealing with somebody else's server problems
Another +1 for cyon. I've been using cyon.ch for many years without issue for a number of projects/domains. Their support is very responsive considering the price (not that I've had to use it much ).