hosting recommendations?

[Eric Theise-4]

Hi everyone,

I'm working with a non-profit that hosts their site and email with an
ISP that's probably charging them too much for what they're getting,
which includes old software, fees per database, and no PostgreSQL.
The non-profit is willing to shift their operations elsewhere, so I'm
writing to see if anyone has praise for/positive experience with any
of the ISPs listed at

    http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting_northamerica

They have a modest site, maybe a dozen email addresses, a blog, and
we're rolling out a few web-facing databases that will interact with
php or python.

Feel free to post to the list, to me alone, or to tell me in person
tonight at the meeting in Berkeley.

Thanks in advance, Eric

[webb.sprague]

> The non-profit is willing to shift their operations elsewhere,

I would look seriously into virtualizing their setup, so that it can
be shipped, cloned, upgraded, backed up, etc.

I can't say I have done this myself, but at work we host with an
internal ISP (basically), and I REALLY wish I had virtualized when I
started and set up the current system -- especially every time they
whine about upgrading Postgres past 8.2 ....

For your client they probably still need somebody to do the admin on
it, but I can't imagine virtualization would make that either easier
or harder.

> so I'm
> writing to see if anyone has praise for/positive experience with any
> of the ISPs listed at ...

Sorry, but I am talking off the cuff anyway ;)

[Josh Berkus]

On 9/8/09 2:15 PM, Eric Theise wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm working with a non-profit that hosts their site and email with an
> ISP that's probably charging them too much for what they're getting,
> which includes old software, fees per database, and no PostgreSQL.
> The non-profit is willing to shift their operations elsewhere, so I'm
> writing to see if anyone has praise for/positive experience with any
> of the ISPs listed at

Hub.org is your best bet for cheap-but-unreliable.  If cost is the main
motivation, then they're a good choice.

For better-than-Hub, Joyent offers excellent virtual hosts if you can
live with Solaris.

Those are the two I have personal experience with.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com

[David Fetter]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 02:15:03PM -0700, Eric Theise wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm working with a non-profit that hosts their site and email with
> an ISP that's probably charging them too much for what they're
> getting, which includes old software, fees per database, and no
> PostgreSQL.  The non-profit is willing to shift their operations
> elsewhere, so I'm writing to see if anyone has praise for/positive
> experience with any of the ISPs listed at
>
>     http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting_northamerica
>
> They have a modest site, maybe a dozen email addresses, a blog, and
> we're rolling out a few web-facing databases that will interact with
> php or python.
>
> Feel free to post to the list, to me alone, or to tell me in person
> tonight at the meeting in Berkeley.

Check out www.gogrid.com :)

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david@...> http://fetter.org/
Phone: [phone]  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: david.fetter@...

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[Jamie Flournoy]

Choosing a web host is like choosing a taxi cab. There are so many it's
hard to rate them in any meaningful way.

That said, virtualization does help. I'm a big fan of just getting an
empty slice with no control panel and setting up DNS, mail, and backups
myself. Virtualization allows this to be cost effective (more power than
locked down shared hosting, and cheaper than a real dedicated server).
It also makes it easy to set up a very similar test environment on your
laptop.

I also recommend that you avoid 3rd-party web-GUI control panels such as
CPanel. Those packages only make sense if you never, ever want to SSH
into the server and just want it to magically work without any
customization whatsoever. As soon as you want to do anything fancy --
which is why you'd want a VPS -- they just get in the way.

(I personally use RimuHosting, and I'm very happy with them.)


Eric Theise wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm working with a non-profit that hosts their site and email with an
> ISP that's probably charging them too much for what they're getting,
> which includes old software, fees per database, and no PostgreSQL.
> The non-profit is willing to shift their operations elsewhere, so I'm
> writing to see if anyone has praise for/positive experience with any
> of the ISPs listed at
>
>     http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting_northamerica
>
> They have a modest site, maybe a dozen email addresses, a blog, and
> we're rolling out a few web-facing databases that will interact with
> php or python.
>
> Feel free to post to the list, to me alone, or to tell me in person
> tonight at the meeting in Berkeley.
>
> Thanks in advance, Eric
>