Okay, so I'm about to embark on a new venture, and need a web host to do it. I'm reaching out to the bit-tech community for suggestions. My requirements are fairly specific: (1) I *need* the capability to run cron jobs. My previous venture was with Zen internet, which doesn't allow cron jobs, and it is a nightmare having to keep a web browser alive to run my periodic jobs. For my current project, that isn't a massive issue, as jobs only need to be run infrequently, but my new project will be reliant on regular background jobs. (2) Reliability is a big issue. (3) UK based ideally - I don't want the hassle of dealing with international support, etc., and most traffic is likely (at least initially) to be UK-centric. (4) I probably won't need massive amounts of bandwidth, or a huge data store. 1GB/month and 1GB of storage is probably plenty, but obviously I won't say no to more, it just isn't a priority. (5) Preferably cPanel based, as that is what I am used to. (6) *must* have php and mySQL (preferably with myPHPadmin). I will also need curl (or I guess wget) with the capability to scrape external URLs. (7) I don't need domain parking. Zen does everything I need apart from cron. Anyone got any recommendations? I'm sorry to be cryptic - I just want to get this thing out there before announcing what it is, because I think the idea will generate a level of (perhaps fairly niche) success, and I don't want anyone getting hte jump on me! I promise you guys will be the first to be filled in when it goes public. Huges thanks in advance for any contributions
Hey, no small amount of self promotion here, but my hosting will suit all your needs: 1) You can have up to 3 cron jobs running, each one running up to once an hour 2) I've not had a site go down yet, but I'll be honest, we've not been doing hosting very long, so it's hard to really comment on that. 3) My company is UK based, and pretty small, so you get a friendly service 4) Unlimited everything is a possibility for £60 per year, limited services are obviously cheaper 5) Not cPanel based, we run a custom control panel, not had a single complaint yet, I can set you up a demo if you like. 6) All servers run PHP 4 or 5 (your choice) and MySQL w/ phpMyAdmin, cURL is also installed and running on all servers. As is mod_rewrite 7) OK Drop me an email if you want more info, links to my website are in my Sig.
Hello matey, thanks for the quick response. This all sounds great, and I see from your site you have solutions with scheduled jobs from £17 a year, which is pretty competitive! Let's take this to PM and we can talk about the details - my reservation is the limit on the frequency of jobs to once an hour. Maybe we can talk about a bit of flexibility here, as I need to run a (very small) job more frequently than that. Not wishing to snub your response, but as I'm sure you'll appreciate I want to consider all the options, so I'll consider other solutions if anyone has any suggestions. Thanks again!
Reliability on Zen isn't all that great. They had a storage failure on their shared hosting in the last year which took out my site for two whole days. When they restored the backups, it turned out they were a week out of date and I had to re-FTP a whole load of stuff. They lost a lot of user-uploaded content too, and would only restore it when I rang them up and told them the precise file names, and even that took them another 36 hours! Thank god their database server wasn't affected, because I hadn't thought to do a backup. I just assumed they had their own systems in place.
Yowch! Thanks for the heads up, though the project I have on Zen isn't as uptime sensitive as my new effort. For my existing project hosted on Zen, I am performing a rigorous backup routine. I actually use a custom PHP script which traverses the directory tree and creates a zip archive according to last-modified metadata (I generally do a weekly full backup and daily differentials, but we're not generating masses of new content, so it isn't too heavy). The zip file is simply automatically e-mailed to me. The database is heavier, and constantly growing, so I simply extract the new rows and pack them in a CSV file. Annoyingly I have to initiate this process manually as I don't have a facility to schedule cron jobs. I don't have user generated content to worry about (save limited DB stuff), so I can be sure I have a full copy of everything. I've been generally impressed with Zen, though their failure to implement cron is a big bugbear of mine.
Ah so you're a Heart Internet reseller (hint: you really should be using custom name servers and not the HI name servers. Kind of gives the game away). I used to work for Heart Internet so I have quite a bit of experience with the company and the whole reseller thing. I was hosting my websites with heart but I moved them to Media Temple this year. A lot cheaper and support is 24/7 and quick. And they offer telephone support via a UK number. Not bad for a US host.
Backing up websites and databases is the single most important thing you can possibly do. I'm shocked how many people assume that hosts backup regularly enough for them to rely on if things go wrong. Backing up is always the customers responsibility and I'm really glad you have a facility in place to do automated backups.
backup, backup, backup, I was in the middle of the Vaserv incident this year in which I lost three servers, luckily I have backups to a remote server and rsync'ed straight to my home. You can get remote calls to scripts via web cron btw, http://www.webcron.org/
Another vote for MediaTemple here, while they aren't UK based their support and service I've had from them is one of the best I've found so far. There's some 15% discount codes floating around as well.
I am indeed a Heart Internet resller, and I don't try and hide it. I actually thought I'd said that in the reliability comment (but apparently not :s ) Should have been: I chose heart as I've found they give the most flexibilty on shared hosting, for example, you can specify your own limits for PHP max POST size, max execution time, etc. Full SSH access, mod_rewrite, and they don't stuff too many websites on each server. I don't see a problem with being a reseller, as you get everything you get form heart, but at a much cheaper price
I recommend www.dreamhost.com been using them for years and they should fit your needs just fine. If you go for em, lemme know so I can get a referral
I will alos second Darklord's suggestion of Dreamhost, they are a very good company. I have had an account with them for 2 years now. If your willing to roll your sleaves up then I can recomend http://xenvz.co.uk/ I've signed up for their Gold VPS package the other week and am so far impressed, I'm going to be using it for a quick trial of running a web proxy<shameless plug> webbench.co.uk if anyone is interested </shameless plug>.
