Oh man, I am asked all the time how to pick a hosting company. And although I do all my hosting in just two places now, the evolution has been interesting, and I don’t have an answer that I completely like yet. I can see that for most people, you have to go with something easy, and the domain registrars provide easy solutions – like Network Solutions and GoDaddy, for instance. But if you’re a geek and can handle your own simple installations, then a virtual private server can be a tempting idea.
Here’s my history of hosting on the Internet. Before 1994 I built software for everything from supercomputers to home computers (I’ll tell you more about DesignWare some day).
- 1994- Virtual hosts on Best.com; 1999- Virtual hosts on Verio (bought Best.com)
- 2003-2005: New X-Serves on Maccius (Mac-only host in San Jose)
- 2009: Slicehost, and then Rackspace cheap virtual hosts- “slices” in the cloud
- 2012: WPEngine — specializing in WordPress, with caveats
Why this particular migration and what would I recommend that you do today?1994-2003: Virtual hosts were the way to go when the Web was first ramping up. They’re easy to start up (click a few buttons) and you can use FTP to upload, and most of the provide root access so you can load any software you want to. But they were relatively expensive, given that they are on shared computers and you’re at the mercy of the other users who’re on that same computer – if someone runs away with the CPU you end up with a very slow site. (And I’ve been guilty of messing up the other users too…)[1]
2003-2008: Later on, I tired of paying $95 a month for a slice of a larger computer and bought my own Apple servers. These machines really rock. Lots of power, and dedicated to me alone. No need to worry about other users getting in my way. For $125 a month I get a space in a rack and I can run my server at 100% CPU if I want to. Cranks out sites really quickly.
2009: Virtual servers have come down in price. I looked around early in the year and chose Slicehost, which has a simple $25/month server with 256MB of “RAM” and 10GB of RAID storage, and they give me 100GB of data transfer per slice per month. I wouldn’t have gone back to virtual hosting except for the low price. Slicehost was acquired by Rackspace, and made a part of their cloud late this year, and I also had a few virtual servers on Rackspace. So they’re all consolidated under Rackspace now.
2012: WordPress specialists, such as WPEngine, have come along, providing service for those who use WP but don’t care to do the security and system upgrading.
Only for the brave: The pros and cons of slicing up a big server: Well, 256MB of RAM is pretty small, and that’s what Slicehost allowed you to start with. Rackspace starts at 512MB now. You gotta install a lean operating system (Ubuntu 8.04 was my choice — but now Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), and you gotta really tune it up so it functions well in tight places. The nicest thing about the old Rackspace slices is the 4 powerful CPUs, which give you lots of headroom if you have to crank out a page. If you buy a new Rackspace VPS now (December, 2012) you’ll get a single CPU allocated, with 512MB of RAM as the minimum.
Yup, if you like getting your hands really dirty, then a slice might be for you. Ubuntu has gotten pretty easy to install – and on Rackspace you just click a button and a few minutes later they send you a hostname and IP address and it’s running. And adding new features is about as simple as running “apt-get install foo” and then you do a few configuration changes. Well, almost that easy. Every once in a while I run into something that I think is going to take an hour and it takes two days. But I can configure a new host from scratch in about 25 minutes (Apache, PHP, MySQL) and bring up new web sites in about 20 minutes each.
WordPress specialists: I’ve got to say something about WPEngine here because it’s a love/hate relationship. First, WPE provides a great service because they give you a functioning WP engine in one click, for as little as USD $25 a month. They provide a one-click staging version of your site where you can test new plugins and do your own PHP coding without upsetting your live site. They host under your own domain name or theirs — you pick. They “curate” common plugins, taking care of any problems and updating them so you’re always up to date. The one caveat is that you can’t use certain banned plugins (mostly those that are database intensive), and they sometimes push upgrades without warning you, which might break your non-curated plugins! I recommend them if you have plain vanilla WordPress needs, but my jury is still out in terms of whether more sophisticated sites should use them or not.[2]
[1] A Virtual Server or Virtual Host or Virtual Private Server [VPS] is a piece of software that subdivides a big server into smaller “servers” that from a user’s viewpoint look like independent machines, but in real life are just logical (thus “virtual”) subdivisions of the larger computer.
[2] I’ve brought up several sites that needed large bursts of speed and high reliability. WPE is great for the bursts, which would have bogged down a VPS. However, we’ve been surprised several times when our sites just stopped working due to unexpected WPE upgrades. They do not tell you in advance when they’re going to change some plugin out in the middle of the night, so you have to be on call 24/7 watching for such things. You just don’t have the same degree of control here in terms of staging your upgrades and improvements and then rolling them on particular days because they might do one suddenly that you didn’t expect.
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