[wp-hackers] Cheap webhosts

[Roy Schestowitz]

_____/ On Wed 12 Oct 2005 16:07:27 BST, [Bruce Alderson] wrote : \_____

>>> I personally recommend http://www.dreamhost.com/  Very reasonable, PHP,
>>> MySQL, full ssh access.
>>
>>
>> I rarely require SSH access. SSH is merely a luxury that one can adapt to by
>> changing a few habits e.g. using command-line rather than front-ends to file
>> management. The last thing I want to do is move away from hosts that 
>> served me
>> so well with approximately 99.9% uptime, even now that I suffer the spam
>> equivalent of the Slashdot Effect on a daily basis.
>>
>> I think I once read about Dreamhost.com banning a user from establishment of
>> database connections as he was hammering it too hard. That sounds 
>> incompetent
>> to me as they appeared to have not preceded the move with a gentle warning.
>> That's the problem with large 'meat market' companies that perceive their
>> clients as 'little people'.
>
> That's certainly not their standard practice, and if it did happen 
> it's more likely that the user was not telling the whole story.  I've 
> hosted with dozens of hosts over the last ten years, and dreamhost is 
> easily the most friendly.


As in many circumstances, I hear what you say about denial of crucial 
facts and
I agree. Like one of these "my password doesn't work, so it MUST be 
YOUR fault"
type-of-situations. Or a "by the way, I re-installed my operating system
yesterday. Can THAT be why VPN no longer works, as opposed to a problem 
at your
end?" situation.


> I've had several instances of zombied processes, and a few 
> slashdottings (well, boingboingings) on my own sites.  Dreamhost 
> didn't punish me for the events, rather they forgave the high 
> bandwidth on those days (saving me hundreds of dollars).  A good 
> host, by my measure.
>
> I'm not sure I'd call ssh a luxury either.  As a developer (often of 
> web applications), tools like scp, and rsync are minimally required 
> for keeping large sites synchronized.  Having tools like CVS, too, 
> make the life of a web dev really quite nice.  Try to live without 
> those, with only FTP, SMB or web forms?  You would be wasting a lot 
> of time incrementally updating by hand (or uploading the whole damned 
> thing).


I guess it depends on the nature of the site. gFTP and Konqueror multi-thread
FTP traffic so they are not too bad as an SCP alternative. CVS is intended to
serve sites whose purpose in unorthodox, unless the host is not a /Web/ 
host or
content is tightly-correlated to programming or documentation. I run CVS and
MATLAB on one such Web server which I SSH to, but it's only accessible to the
Faculty and is located in the server room a few metres to my left. Such 
servers
are prone to breakage and are unlikely to be maintained by or be 
considered good
business to Web hosts (for a reasonable price). It's a niche.

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      | Prevalence does not imply ideali$M
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