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Ask YC: Recommend a hosting company.

6 points by samwise ↗ HN
Simple request. I will be launching my site in a couple days, but i need a reliable host.

Looking to spend between $50-$150 a month. Needs to scale up easily. Has to be able to survive Digg and Techcrunch (wishful thinking). Will be severing images mostly.

Trying to avoid amazon.

30 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 78.5 ms ] thread
[dead] djingorix
joyent uses solaris so a pain
[dead] djingorix
try to use a colo or a fedora linux host
davidw
1) site:news.ycombinator.com hosting - its been discussed before, fairly recently too, if I recall.

2) Layered Tech has been a good place for me.

1gor
You may be better off serving images off Amazon S3.

As to hosting providers, I have 4 years good experience with openhosting.com -- they provide virtual servers with root access etc, pay-as-you scale (starting $20 a month, then growing as your RAM /CPU/Disk/bandwidth grows). Another plus is that they sit on a very thick pipe.

samwise
We plan to jack some bandwidth from flickr and other photo sharing sites (legally). Amazon EC2 seems like a great option, but have issues with reliability and SQL.
bayareaguy
I like amazon. I also like slicehost. www.intuix.com is small but good too.
bigbee
I've been using ServerBeach for about 8 months now, growing from 1 dedicated server to 4, and am quite happy with them. No downtimes or problems of any kind so far. If you decide to use them, you can use my referral code - ND86GGNNTQ - to get $100 off.
tzury
slicehost.com, not expensive, scale-up, scale-down, no extra fees, various selection of distros. simply great!
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NoBSWebDesign
I really enjoy using Slicehost. You get a whole lot of server for very little money. The trade-off is that unlike many other VPS's you must set up the entire server yourself from scratch through the command line. This can be a little frustrating the first week, but VERY rewarding in that you learn the intricacies of server setup in the process (assuming you don't already have that capability).

Even more importantly though, they have excellent support. Forums, wikis, and live chat through their site. I remember getting help one time when I was first starting out, chatting with one of the owners at 3am on a Tuesday night as he helped me work out a bug with my server.

projectileboy
I second all of the above - I'm a complete Linux know-nothing turd, and the articles in the forums got me completely up and running. I'm a big fan of the Slicehosters.
rms
Very happy with slicehost. Great latency, too.
carpo
I've got a vps at slicehost and they've been great - would definately recommend them. For my next project im thinking of going Joyent, as their storage seems more scalable. I was thinking of using Amazon S3 with Slicehost, but am worried about the speed. The bandwidth costs seem pretty expensive too.
icey
Do some research in regards to Joyent's stability before you make any moves to them.
icky
> For my next project im thinking of going Joyent, as their storage seems more scalable.

One of my past clients used them (around when they merged with TextDrive). Their Solaris setup is a PITA if you're used to Linux or *BSD. If you set up a 25-cent swear jar, you'll probably be able to pay your hosting fees in quarters!

The other thing to realize is that Joyent slices scale vertically: a larger slice is just a larger piece of a very large Solaris box, and there's a limit to how big they can get. (Don't know if it's still true, but at the time, they also had no way of directly upgrading a slice "in-place").

You'd be better off figuring out how to scale your storage (preferably with redundancy) across multiple computers. Look into MogileFS or Hadoop's DFS.

altano
If you're serving up mostly static or cached content, you can survive any onslaught of traffic with a VPS, and I'll throw in my vote for Rimuhosting
ericb
Agreed. Rimuhosting rocks. They have awesome support, too.
chasingsparks
Like bigbee, I also use ServerBeach. They are (very) affordable and offer support above the level that would be suggested by the cost.
plusbryan
mosso.com is $100 for clustered windows/linux hosting. good tech support, rails support. it's a rackspace venture.
patrickg-zill
Buy your own 1U system, install max ram and max disk you can or can afford.

Colocate system for under $100 per month.

See http://webhostingtalk.com, look under "Colo Hosting Offers" forum for various offers from $39 per month on up. If you can get an offer that is local to where you are, that is better.

Reason: if you are serving images you will want lots of local disk space, and RAM to serve as disk cache or to serve as RAM for your webserver with its 1000+ connections.

tx
This advice is not for everybody. We needed our own mailserver with a TON of storage, so getting our own U1 worked best. But for most people it's too much hassle.
inklesspen
www.linode.com has been great for me.
thorax
http://www.xlhost.com is who I use and they have solid dedicated server prices and no contracts. Many times when they upgrade their hardware I "hop" servers to one of the new servers at the same price.

I've heard people say good things about http://www.servage.com for light processing sites that need high bandwidth and lots of space.

modoc
I love SoftLayer. They've been amazing. Dedicated boxes only, but you can get something decent for under $150, and they can get you new hardware in about two hours, which is great. Granted our needs are a bit larger than yours at this time, but even when I just had a single server, I thought they were a great host. Amazing support, simple plans, etc...
zinxq
Serverbeach is excellent. Google on "serverbeach referral" - there's plenty of codes out there to get you money off.
silencio
softlayer, layeredtech as mentioned above are both fantastic albeit on the pricey side.

currently with vectoral.info, have been with them for something like a year now and love them in general, but their selection of linux distros is meh.

what was wrong with amazon s3?