ThemBid.com

Who is the Best Web Host?

For ThemBid.com we use dedicated servers; however, we have hosted over 200 clients through a sister company, using virtual servers through Layered Tech. Before Layered Tech, over period of six years, we have utilized hosting services from a variety of vendors with varying levels of success. My goal here is to take a look at what is needed from a current host and make a determination on who is the best hosting provider available today.

The first issue is to define what “best web host” means. For the purpose of this article I will assume that you already have a development and backup server; what we want to examine are servers that allow the easy hosting and administration of websites that use any of the popular frameworks, content management systems and/or blogging software.

Reliability (uptime), customer support, application support, latency and cost are the metrics which we care most about when looking at web hosts.

Since the hosting industry changes continuously (along with the web applications the industry needs to support), I will rely on active hosting communities on the Internet and perhaps even responses to this blog post and the social networks where this gets posted.

Once all the data is collected from the various Internet communities, I will post the results here.

Following are five resources that should help you determine who is the best web host for your project.

1. WebHostingTalk Forums
I suggest that you do a search for any host you are considering here. We have found a vibrant community that is liberal with sharing experiences with various hosts.

2. WHReviews
There are not that many reviews here; however, there are some good articles about web hosting in general that should be useful for people just getting started with using web hosting services.

3. FindMyHost
The web hosting report card provides a good quick overview of several hosts. While not very large, they have a guaranteed web host program that claims to help protect you after you purchase your hosting.

4. Rails on Rails Hosting
This one is geared specifically to Ruby on Rails. There are also tutorials on how to get up and running on host that don’t specifically target Ruby on Rails users.

5. Web Hosting Reviews
They base their ranking 50% on users and 50% on an internal algorithm.

Please post any sources you may use in determining a hosting environment or list your favorite here with reasons why.

For us, we favor LayeredTech.com for our production server because they have been reliable and their support has been good. The service is affordable, and after experiencing the digg effect and being slashdotted without an issue, we are confident that our servers can scale nicely.

We like DreamHost.com for hosting Trac and SVN ( storage space is cheap ) and MediaTemple.net for side projects ( I like the containers and 1 click install for quick hacking, also the cost is reasonable ). We use 1and1.com for Exchange hosting, but it’s unfortunate that they only support Microsoft Software for the end user ( on the flip side, they offer license to that software free ).