Hosting Providers

[PaulSonny]

Hello everyone!

I'm currently having issues with my current host and fast becoming a needle in my side!

I was wondering if anyone could tell me who their currency host is/costs and give them a general review?

I only need something small, it's to host a company website and some demo scripts.

Thanks in advance.

Edited April 11, 2017 by PaulSonny

[hurricaneviolet]

I've been with Liquid Web for 6 years now, and I couldn't be happier with them. I've had a dedicated server and a VPS with them and have been exceptionally happy with both. Their customer service is always helpful and prompt, and once when I was thinking of downgrading they gave me the price of a smaller server without actually switching me. Honestly, the only issue I've ever had is with their automatic billing system doing some weirdness, but it was worked out.

I've also been with The Planet, which I think is SoftLayer now, and I was extremely unhappy with them. Their customer service was terrible. And when I was first starting out, I used Host Gator, but I think we all know to steer clear of them at this point :P.

[Regnant]

I'm using A2 hosting and they have great support, an easy control panel, and good prices. Plus they can add Let's Encrypt to your hosting account so you can get free SSLs

[Digital]

I personally use DigitalOcean for the forums and my site, its a VPS, however I self-admin my servers so in terms of support I am happy doing that stuff myself.

[PaulSonny]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Liquid Web looks expensive for what I want/need it to do.

A2 Hosting looks promising.

I shot $5 into Digital Ocean to realise it's very much self-help self-build type stuff. I'd struggle to get basic email accounts working haha!

Thanks again.

[Hare]

I don't name my host anymore, but I am keeping an eye out for one!

 I have two friends looking for cheap or free hosts to develop a site on, though. Something that you can use PHP, mySQL, and imagemagick on. 

Edited April 11, 2017 by Hare

[HappyDemon]

I'm currently with Digital Ocean as well, but I'm also trying out Vultr (same principle as DO, but the pricing is a bit different).

For all the non-devops, there's plenty of services that help you setup your server and do basic upkeep (https://serverpilot.io, https://forge.laravel.com to name 2).

[Syntax]

I am personally in LOVE with Digital Ocean. Our server at work is old so we are migrating most of our large websites and any new development to Digital Ocean. It is pretty DIY server wise but they have some really awesome tutorials(I've learned a lot) and they work well with my IDE of choice CodeAnywhere(I'm switching computers and OS's constantly). Their pricing structure is inexpensive for my needs and once you're familiar with spinning up droplets it's really not that much hassle.

[Anoua]

I use Linode, which is pretty similar to Digital Ocean. I personally love it. Have both my games on the $10 tier (was the lowest at the time I purchased but there are $5 tiers now) and haven't had any issues and actually just recently received free upgrades too. It is all self managed, which is definitely not my favorite, but has been a good learning experience and the cost savings are worth it. And like Digital Ocean, they have good tutorials that you can follow step by step pretty easily.

You can also allocate your space however you want, so you can divide it easily if that's wanted for any reason. And it's super easy to upsize or downsize as needed. And you are charged by the hour, so if you do expand you just start paying the new per hour price from that point on.

[Pepper-Head]

For my small school projects when I have to make mock sites and portfolios, I just find it really convenient and cheap to use one of my friend's hosting sites (Spottywolf from VPL)

http://spotontechsupportllc.com/hosting/cart.php

It's super freaking cheap x'D 
Anytime I've had to contact them with questions (usually about cancelling said side sites before the billing period, or if I had a question about paypal's subscription service) they have been speedy to reply and extremely helpful. I've been using them for Kasaria's development since 2015.

[Cadence]

/stalks this thread for information  

I'm currently with Dreamhost on a VPS. I upgraded from shared hosting because one of my clients's websites is taking off. I'm pretty satisfied with their customer service (they've been extremely helpful) but I am not a big fan of how the prices are in USD... I might find a Canadian hosting company since the exchange rate is hurting me pretty badly lol. 

 

[SugarFoxKym]

I use eHost, both for my actual site and for my messing-with-coding site. I forget exactly how much it costs, but it's really inexpensive, especially if you linger on the payment page.

[glitch]

+1 for Linode!

Although if you're really small and don't want / need a VPS (i.e. you're fine with shared hosting), check out NearlyFreeSpeech.net -- they're hands down the best shared host I've ever used (and they're the only shared host I've ever not hated). It's also super inexpensive, with a pay-what-you-use model.

[Nate]

I've tried free and small/cheaper hosts before, however I actually got screwed over by one of them (Host Addon).. They blocked me out of my account for no reason, continued to try to take payment (i blocked it after no support responses), and to this day, 7 or so years later.. I'm STILL receiving my "monthly affiliates report" email from them. Auto-spam.

The BEST host i have ever used in HostGator. I'm been with them for like 6-7 years and they have always helped me with issues etc (like the time I tried to restore my local database onto their server and ended up removing my own admin permissions within phpmyadmin on their cpanel console.. wtf haha).

Also some people do have bad experiences with them, i gotta say, ive never had a bad experience.

I currently pay about £9 a month for theirn "Baby Plan". It has unlimited bandwidth, 5TB of Storage/Nodes, unlimited emails/database accounts, and unlimited addon domains.

I'm currently hosting around 16 websites on there with no problems.

Edit: Full disclosure: I also purchase ALL my domains through 123-reg.co.uk and point them at hostgator nameservers.

Edited April 25, 2017 by Nate.Tube

[juliet]

I also have to say good things about Liquid Web.  I was with my previous host for almost 10 years, and in that time the company got sold a lot and their support went downhill to the point I could no longer stay with them.

For point of reference, my server holds 3 games.  1 dead, and 2 with moderate traffic (peak times of the month maybe 400+ users online all together).  And I am the dev of my games.

So, earlier this month we moved to a Liquid Web dedicated server.  It's been a little bit bumpy (as is expected as new servers need to be custom configured), but the tech support has been outstanding.  

My previous company provided self managed servers and Liquid Web is fully managed.  They monitor my systems and jump in unasked when stuff doesn't go right. (my offsite backups were failing, and they fixed that for me without me contacting them.  They monitor their servers very thoroughly).  And I find their techs to be very knowledgeable and responsive.  No more waiting 5 hours to hear from the host.  They respond within a few minutes in their Support Chat.   They helped me tune both Apache and MySql to better work with the new server load without me even asking. (We were troubleshooting some lag spikes, I didn't really expect them to get that involved, but they did.)

Also, my new server is on brand new hardware (not refurbished), top of the line performance, way better offsite backup solution, and a lot cheaper than my old server.

I am really super happy with them, and recommend them to anyone who wants to focus on development of their game and not on the server admin part of it.  Knowing server admin stuff is good and important, but it's difficult to do everything yourself and keep up on knowledge of all things.  This helps a lot.  And there is a certain peace of mind from knowing you have people in your corner if things go sideways.

Also, thanks goes to Sam from HP @hurricaneviolet as she always recommended this host, for a long time whenever this topic gets brought up in VP forums.  It made me think to consider Liquid Web.  So, thank you!

Edited April 28, 2019 by juliet

[Mobotropolis]

If you just have to host some HTML/CSS/JavaScript I have two to recommend. 

NeoCities is a throwback to the Geocities/Angelfire era of web hosting. You can get signed up in about a minute and have your site up in less than five minutes if your HTML Files are already ready. They have a generous free tier. If you pay $5 a month you can use a custom domain and make multiple basic sites. 

Netifly is something I've come across recently while trying to modernize my approach to development. The magic here is that you can connect it to your GitHub account and push updates live as you push things to your repositories. Free Tier comes with SSL and the ability to use a Custom Domain. 

If you need something for PHP and don't want to deal with a DigitalOcean setup, I'll review the host I just left - 

Hostwinds will allow you to buy a domain and some hosting with CPanel for about $100 a year. They sometimes have sales on their hosting and I've gotten it as low as $50 a year before. The one thing I will say is that even when I did have a problem with their technical setup (linking domains, updating PHP, one click scripts) their support center was very responsive and friendly. Think this is more than enough for most people who want to host a site. I only left because for the amount of stuff I have to host and the amount of traffic I get I'm sure I can get it cheaper. 

[judda]

I used to be hosted on HostGator, but then they got stupidly terrible, yay EIG, and way more expensive at the same time.

I used to host IcePets.Com on VPS Dime, pretty darn cheap for what you got.  Really reliable.

But now, I'm on QNEZ's servers like Misticpets is.  @GeekGirl is amazing to work with.

[ShadowMage]

When I ran my own business I was using Quadranet for a dedicated server. I found a deal they offered on low-end-box for a cheaper server and so we got it. Had it for 3 years with only a couple issues that weren't caused by my mistake, both of which were hardware related. Since the business has closed down, that server went away, and I'm still using them for a dedicated with a couple friends. Excellent service,

If you're thinking about looking through low-end-box I advise you to be very careful of VPS providers unless they are a bigger company. There are a lot of scams going around and my friend and I got hit with it. Not fun having to go back in backups by 3 months. Interestingly enough, Through Quadranet you can get a VPS as well through their InfraCloud services. Was hosting a UniFi controller on one as opposed to a cloudkey on our customers sites, and it was very reliable.

[judda]

This is very true - I wouldn't go for just any, VPSDime had a great rating on LowEndBox, I also used BuyVm for a while.  VPSDime didn't have a parent company I believe but BuyVM does with Frantech, still small but they were both really good in my past experiences.