Selecting a hosting provider is always a tough call. For the majority of users perhaps a simple shared hosting like Dreamhost, Godaddy etc is good enough for the 50 page views a month that they expect. However when your goal is to share a story with the world, you cannot wake up one day and find yourself limited by your host.
For the longest time I have used Dreamhost.com as my host since November of 2009. They hosted all of my small project sites, as well as most of my client sites from when I did freelance web development. Their administration platform and One-click installs are truly top of the line, and for the cost per month they are right on the spot. To this day all of my legacy clients are still hosted on Dreamhost Virtual Private Servers and they love the fact that they can scale their usage on the fly when they expect big peaks in traffic. I would always give a glowing review to Dreamhost and recommend it heartily to people who have small to medium projects they want to test out… you can feel it can’t you? The gigantic “But” looming on the horizon… Read on to get your fill of “However” and “But”.
But… there I said it… But, when I started to test high volume sites on Dreamhost, I found that the relative inflexibility of their installs, plus the lower level of support, led to some discomfort. That led me to two alternatives. Rackspace Managed Cloud and FireHost. I’d had good success with Rackspace on a client project, but they were less inclined to branch out of the standard LAMP stack and it sometimes felt like I had to fight tooth and nail for performance enhancing configurations. I suspected that the reason for this was one of two: 1) it was outside their comfort zone, 2) it would drastically reduce my need for more hardware ($$$/month). That said, they did build a really nice solution for us consisting of Varnis, LAMP and a load balanced environment… this powers www.PartnerwithSavings.com and the Savings.com iframe units to this day.
But… there it is again… But, for this site (and all future projects) I’ve chosen Firehost and I have never ever been happier. Their techs are absolutely amazing… they only do managed hosting so they have to be. These guys not only fix what needs fixing but they are knowledgeable in the whole open source stack. They’ve helped us to configure Nginx as our server instead of Apache, they’ve even helped us translate .htaccess into high performant nginx.confs. They configure and tune each piece of the server (PHP-fpm, MySQL, APC) to settings that are ideal for the RAM and CPU on our Virtual Machine. They are not afraid of newer crazier stuff like Node.js MongoDB, Redis. And they are fast in a scary way. Just this evening one of the techs reached out and asked “Hey would you like us to look into Varnish for your site to make it even faster?”, which if said another way could read “Hey I’m voluntarily going to suggest a solution to you that will make your server that much more performant and thus save you thousands of dollars over the course of the next year by not just trying to upsell you more server hardware”… I have a nerd crush on you Philip, and at least a hug for the rest of you awesome techs. Thanks.
All that said and done, we are ecstatically happy with our Firehost account and recommend it strongly to anyone looking for high performant, reliable, and knowledgeable managed hosting.
The breakdown of our server with them is the following:
- Ubuntu Linux
- Nginx
- MySQL
- PHP-fpm
- APC op-code cache
- 1Gb of RAM
- 1 core processor
If you follow servers that is not that much of a server… but this baby barely breaks 3% CPU utilization and runs on average at .4Gb or RAM, she is one lean piece of machinery. And that is when we are slamming her with a 250+ concurrent user load test. The best part is that when we need to, we can double our RAM and CPU with a single click. We are in love with Firehost… nuff said.
So yeah, get Dreamhost if you want a small to medium prototyping server, and get Firehost when you need a stinking race-car. Tomorrow or over the weekend I’ll talk about the middle teir of stuff sitting between our server and the web, and after that I’ll follow it up with some stuff about our application framework as a whole.
PS. if you sign up for dreamhost following that link then I get $ off of my old hosting there… and if Firehost approves my affiliate plea then I’d get cash for any referrals there as well… That’s an easy way to support this project by getting the stuff you need anyway. Win Win baby!
. But yeah, our goal with individual blogs is to give a bit of something for everyone. Just wait until Seba and Matias start posting regularly to their blogs… Hopefully by then I’ll have custom feeds for you to use to pick what you like to follow. Thanks for your support.
Follow up for all you non commenting readers… (I see you in analytics you sneaky devils you… why won’t you talk to me???)
We are now a FireHost trusted partner. So whenever you are on the lookout for kickass server hosting, we can help you get a quote, help you with suggestions on the server build out, etc, and then FireHost gives us a little economic love as an aside. So you get the same awesome service you’d be getting normally, and you help subsidize us by letting us have the pleasure of assisting you. Its the very definition of mutual Win.