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Ask HN: Update from Midphase hosting status thread

10 points by brandnewlow 18y ago

Earlier this week I shared some hosting issues I'm facing. 42 comments followed, all of which were helpful, detailed, encouraging and (most importantly) useful. Here's the thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326012 I wanted to share a quick update. Based on advice here I took the following steps: 1. Posted to linode.com and Slicehost.com forums as well as the Drupal paid-services forum, soliciting paid, contract work to migrate to better hosting and optimize my server situation. 2. I received 18 responses. Many were impressively detailed. A few were hilarious: "My brother's setting up a box. It's 10x more powerful than anything out there. Let us host you." 3. I heard from a developer I already knew and have worked a bit with in the past. Turns out he's interested and knows his way around Slicehost. I hired him based on our past track record, at a price we both thought was fair. 4. Last night we moved my Drupal site to a 1GB slice. It's already noticeably faster and is no longer crashing every 2 hours. 5. Next week I have some "Drupal sharks" who'll start crawling over my install looking to optimize the Drupal piece of it. So thanks, HN. It was really useful to learn that I needed more RAM for my setup in addition to Drupal optimization. I am happily on a Slice and now have an experienced hacker to defer to now and then.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Excellent news! Hope you are happier in your new home.
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  So far, yes indeed. The performance difference is like night and day. We're still combing out blips from the migration, but all's well thus far.
vaksel 18y ago
Congrats, your host is one of the most important decisions you'll make. And slicehost is one of the better options, frankly I never heard of midphase
- lsc 18y ago
  A tested disaster recovery plan (including tested off-site backups) is much more important, in many situations, than your choice of host. Choosing a good host is like running on raid disk. It's a great idea, and it dramatically reduces downtime, but if you keep important data it's not nearly as important as a good, tested, offsite backup. This does depend on your business model. Ask yourself: what is worse, being down for a few days? or losing all your data? Now, you did say that your site was news focused, so it's quite likely that losing the archives would be a fairly survivable event, if expensive (as you'd need to rewrite the code) but if you are entrusted with customer data, well, a failure without backups usually means death (or starting over with no customers and a bad reputation.) My experience has been that if you lose a customer's data, even if you warned them ahead of time that you were not keeping backups, the customer will leave, and more importantly will tell other people to avoid your service.
tdavis 18y ago
Let this be a lesson to everyone: the time you invest in finding a web host is critical. I went through 3 VPS and 2 Dedicated hosts before finally finding and going with Softlayer and boy oh boy was it worth the time and effort, not to mention the anger I caused other companies by calling them incompetent and issuing chargebacks ;)

10 points by brandnewlow 18y ago

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Excellent news! Hope you are happier in your new home.

brandnewlow 18y ago
So far, yes indeed. The performance difference is like night and day. We're still combing out blips from the migration, but all's well thus far.

vaksel 18y ago

Congrats, your host is one of the most important decisions you'll make. And slicehost is one of the better options, frankly I never heard of midphase

lsc 18y ago
A tested disaster recovery plan (including tested off-site backups) is much more important, in many situations, than your choice of host. Choosing a good host is like running on raid disk. It's a great idea, and it dramatically reduces downtime, but if you keep important data it's not nearly as important as a good, tested, offsite backup. This does depend on your business model. Ask yourself: what is worse, being down for a few days? or losing all your data? Now, you did say that your site was news focused, so it's quite likely that losing the archives would be a fairly survivable event, if expensive (as you'd need to rewrite the code) but if you are entrusted with customer data, well, a failure without backups usually means death (or starting over with no customers and a bad reputation.) My experience has been that if you lose a customer's data, even if you warned them ahead of time that you were not keeping backups, the customer will leave, and more importantly will tell other people to avoid your service.

tdavis 18y ago

Let this be a lesson to everyone: the time you invest in finding a web host is critical. I went through 3 VPS and 2 Dedicated hosts before finally finding and going with Softlayer and boy oh boy was it worth the time and effort, not to mention the anger I caused other companies by calling them incompetent and issuing chargebacks ;)