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Ask HN: Web app hosting...fast, reliable, affordable vendors?

• SHOwnsYou 16y ago
  Level 3 VPS at Hostgator is great for a startup and only around $40/month. I've been using Hostgator for ~2 years and I can only imagine leaving if I plan to run my own servers.
  • secret 16y ago
    I'll second that. I've used HostGator in the past and they are very reliable for the price.
• davidw 16y ago
  Linode is popular. Heroku or Google's thing seem like popular choices as well, depending on what platform/language you're using.
  • LeBlanc 16y ago
    I am currently using a Linode right now and it is great. You get full root access to your virtual server which is great. If don't have any server running experience they have great documentation to help you get started. If you get the 512MB plan for $20/mo you should be good to go until you get a whole ton of users.
• andrewtbham 16y ago
  Amazon ec2 is extremely popular. I use it for my current client, and my side project. I know lots of other startups use it. However, it is lacking in the control panel department.
• kingofspain 16y ago
  I gave Dreamhost a whirl a whirl based on a few suggestions off here and though I've only been a customer for a month, I'm very impressed so far. A friend of mine is paying £100pm for a 'reseller' account that has less than I pay $7pm for. No idea how it scales with the "unlimited" bandwidth/disk space but it's more than enough for me now. This is a genuine response btw - I'm not gonna give you a referral code :)
  • shadowz 16y ago
    I had a terrible experience years back (no longer with them now). If it works, it works well, but when it's down, it goes down for almost 24 hours!
• shadowz 16y ago
  Check out the folks at Storm on Demand and Liquid Web. They fit your budget range and provide fully managed hosting. I've very happy with them.
• ericabiz 16y ago
  I ran a managed hosting company (dedicated servers and colo) for 6 years. Because of that, I'm pretty picky about where I host. I currently have my sites at ServInt on 2 VPSes (a Signature VPS for my production sites and an Essential VPS for testing my new startup company.) The primary VPS serves about 2,000 pageviews per day with no complaints. My advice, having been in the industry for many years: 1) NEVER use shared hosting for a startup company. I would always budget and start with a VPS...even a small one. Shared hosting is likely to fall over at random times and it often fails at the worst times--when you launch a product and get a ton of visitors, for instance. Shared hosting is fine for things like small company blogs, etc. But not for a scalable business. 2) Go managed, unless you want to wear a sysadmin hat as well as a developer hat (hint: you probably don't.) I recommend letting the hosting company do updates while you focus on writing code and testing. 3) DON'T cheap out! Hosting is not a place to save money. $50/month for a managed VPS is completely reasonable and is well worth the extra $40 over shared hosting if you need to scale. You do not want to have to move your hosting when you're in the middle of a really good run with clients. I picked ServInt because they have been in business since 1995 and they host some pretty large sites. Their reviews are overwhelmingly good and their prices are reasonable. Their support responds quickly. I recently put in a ticket asking for server monitoring to be installed. I know this would have taken 1 hour+ of my time (and I used to admin servers for a living!) They not only responded to the ticket within a few minutes, but had monitoring installed quickly. I cannot stress enough that it is worth the extra money to go with a higher-end hosting solution. Yes, inevitably there will be "But shared hosting works for me!" replies. It works...until it doesn't. You get an Alexa top 10,000 site, and even with good caching, your site doesn't work so well with shared hosting--then you have to scramble around and muck with switching providers when you should be working with your new customers and working on your product. That's why I don't even recommend starting with shared.
• iworkforthem 16y ago
  I was looking at a few reliable hosting options recently; here's a few options you can consider too; - VPS; a few good men are Linode, Slicehost, ServInt. - Dedicated Server. - Cloud Computing with Amazon Cloud or Rackspace. One of my consideration is not to overpay what I dun need. First I look at the bandwidth I am using currently utilizing, do a rough estimate how much it will cost on Amazon Cloud/Rackspace/VPS. Also consider yr long terms options, do you want to go dedicated or in the cloud later on. Cause it can be quite challenging to move the DB and files around later on.
• jawns 16y ago
  I've used Dreamhost's $10/mo. shared hosting (one of the few shared hosting providers with shell access) for the past four years, and I can confirm that when it works, it works -- but there have been at least two outages during my time with them that have lasted upwards of 24 hours. Obviously, that's unacceptable for most businesses, but if you think your business won't get sunk by that type of outage ... then I'd say Dreamhost might work well for you. For me, it's handled occasional heavy bursts of traffic without crashing, and I bet its resources are enough to handle most startups' demands. Once you hit the point at which it can't keep up with your demands, you should probably be able to afford something better -- assuming you have a viable business model.