Asymptomatic

I've been hosting my own content on the web since, oh, 1995. I've been on many hosts over that time, moving sites from host to host. During that time, I've been on some good hosts and some really awful hosts, and I have really yet to find the ultimate host that I can recommend unreservedly.

Perhaps you have been having sites hosted long enough to have acquired some horror stories. A while back, I had my sites hosted with a company called A World Wide Mall. AWWM was pretty reasonably priced, but as with most hosts, the customer service was pretty lousy. And one day, the guy who ran the service decided to fold up the company and move on without notifying any customers. He just took his datacenter and left. With all of my data. Lovely.

I'm sure that folks have similar (or worse) stories. I have had service where I thought I was getting protected backup and redundant storage, when really it was all on one box and when the box died, I lost a lot. I tried hosting at 1&1 once, and after playing with it, I immediately filled out their cancellation form. Total time with their service: about 5 minutes.

I signed up for VC hosting with TextDrive. That was one of the worst investments I've made. It sounds like a good deal, a fixed high amount for lifetime hosting - for as long as the company is in business. But it seems they put all of their lifetime hosting customers on the same lousy server. Running this site on WordPress took more SQL resources than all but 2 of their lifetime customers. Eventually, they throttled performance, and I was forced to move back to non-shared hosting after paying for that whole lifetime account.

I've got another lifetime account on A Small Orange. Since my experience with TextDrive, I haven't tried to host anything intense there, but it has been doing a good job for what I use it for. But one thing that bugs me about CPanel shared hosting is how it's configured to generate names for everything using your CPanel user account. So all of the database names are prefixed with "owinkler" and all of the database users are prefixed with "owinkler" and the web logins all require the domain name in them. What a mess.

I used to have an account at Dreamhost. It has similar issues, but that's to be expected from shared hosting. Still, the reliability of Dreamhost was fairly poor during my hosting there. You would think that separating the database hosting from teh web hosting would improve performance, but for Dreamhost it caused nothing but problems. There's some kind of latency that you can feel, but would require more investigation to determine the exact cause. Anyway, the database connection is also bothersome because you can't connect directly to it remotely, and that's how I prefer to use MySQL rather than through phpMyAdmin.

My primary hosting takes place with two hosts that use VPS technology. VPS is my preferred hosting technology, after a brief stint with dedicated. Dedicated was too much trouble. VPS is cheaper, easier to upgrade, easier to maintain and backup. The dedicated server was great until things started to go wrong, and then troubleshooting those issues became problematic. With a VPS, if there's an issue, you push a button and you've got backups restored.

UnixShell is the host that I described before, the one that was hosting backups on the same server. I've learned my lesson with that, and now have a separate dedicated service for housing backups. Most other things about UnixShell are decent. The problem with them at the moment is that they aren't offering new hosting accounts. There's something unsettling about a company that offers service but has no room to expand.

SliceHost is the VPS host where this site runs. SliceHost has been great, really. Their backup options are nice, with separate timed snapshots. The administrative interface is nice, too. But once again, it seems like they've got allocation problems.

In SliceHost's case, I couldn't recommend them to a client, because there's no option to install any kind of user-friendly control panel at the VPS-level. You'd have to add email accounts and configure the server entirely form the command line. This is not the best option for clients, although the flexibility of the server is relatively unmatched.

And this is where my issues with VPSes break down. I need something that is flexible enough that I can modify things at the shell, but friendly enough that clients can configure some settings like email and backup via a web interface. Where things usually don't work out with VPS software like Plesk is when Plesk has its own idea of how things are configured, and you need to work out changes around what Plesk requires. Maybe what I need is software that manages some of the server elements, but not all of them.

In any case, these hosts aren't perfect for clients. If something goes wrong, the client has no recourse with the host. Not that I mind getting requests for support, but it's the emergent support that usually happens that makes me think that this isn't the greatest situation. I don't want to get calls in the middle of the night when someone can't figure out why their server can't do one thing or another.

In any case, I've been wondering if there's a host that is supportive of web developers. Something that a developer can tweak, but a client can still easily manipulate for simple every day tasks. It would also be nice if the host would have a management interface that understood the client/contractor relationship.

Any suggestions?