Shared Hosting and MODX

Hi all
Thanks for the replies.
Hostgator (US) I know are good from experience with them. It’s good to know MODX can be installed on their shared hosting accounts. Only downside is that they are US based and that can affect UK based sites in the UK SERPs if they’re hosted in the US. This customer will be very much a UK resource.
I’ve posted a question at Clook and am waiting for an official response. They look good except for no telephone support.
Media Temple looks great, but again US based..
Onesmarthost is a possibility, I may contact them to find out if they can help with the initial setup etc... and see what they say...
Titanhosts seems to have huge steps between it’s hosting plans, which would not be ideal for steady growth ... the bandwidth seems very low for the price too.

I’m thinking it’s going to be between Clook, Onesmarthost and Hostgator.....
Unless anyone has any other ideas?

Anni

I use a2b2 for our development server (VPS) but they also do shared hosing: uk and US

http://www.a2b2.com/index.php?s=caf7418efe2dd965a04856fc2c05deb7&showforum=23

Again service is Excellent, but servers don’t seem to be as quick as titan.

Hosting is a really important decision if its for a client, as it needs to be reliable, when the sh t hit the fan you need someone you can rely on.

John

Hi John
Yes I absolutely concur on the reliability issue. This is why I’m asking so many questions here.
I need to know that the customer will get great hosting with fantastic service and 99.99999% uptime and that I will have the freedom to implement the site (and script) in an unfettered fashion.
I could of course host it for them on my dedicated server (which I have had with m3server since forever) ... they are amazing. Fast personal service and great backup all the way. But I really don’t want the responsibility. You have just given me an idea though... I could of course check out their shared hosting plans! Having said that, I was trying to avoid US based hosting.....

Anni

Its always best to do your homework before choosing a host, in the past before i setup my hosting business I received poor service from many hosting providers.

When we first setup onesmarthost formally shosting.co.uk we rented servers in the US, the speed from the UK to US was a little slow with pings over 130ms, so last year we invested in our own servers and moved all our customers to the UK Which I think was a great move considering all my customers are UK based and their potential customers are in Europe.

In regards to your other post I take a hands on approach with new customers and quite often assist them with moving their website from an old host, transferring ftp files site to site to save new users having to download files to their PC then upload to the new server, I also help out in fixing the PHP scripts and databases during the migration to ensure they run smoothly as well with minimal downtime for the customer.

As 0ad says I’m a big fan of MODx so helping out any customers with the installation is always a pleasure. We also run daily MYSQL backups and can also offer customers hourly MYSQL backups for business critical applications.

Aaron.

Hi Aaron
That certainly sounds good....
My only 2 concerns are:
A) The relative newness of your Company and the size. What happens to the Company if you are run over by the proverbial bus? What backing does the Company have etc.
B) I know nothing about windows based servers or iis. I need SE friendly Urls and PHP is really important to me. Having only ever used Linux hosting, what won’t I be able to do with your servers that I’m able to do now?

Whoever we choose for this customer (as long as I get it right), I’m sure we will be recommending to others in the future, and the needs may well be different for other designs and projects....

Annii

Hi Annii,

We actually started off Mid 2004, although onesmarthost is still a relative new company we do currently host 145 websites, our aim is to provide the best hosting service possible and to help customers as much as possible each new customer also receives my personal mobile telephone number for emergency support.

If I was to be run over by a bus I have legal documents in place which will hand over all access to the servers to a long trusted friend who currently works for a blue chip company providing server support so for our customers the service will carry on as normal, in case of the worst i.e death the business "Smart PC solutions Limited" will be signed over to my partner and my good friend will take over the server operations.

Regarding Windows and IIS, PHP works exactly the same, somethings such as PHP Gallery http://gallery.menalto.com/ is an example of something which does not work straight out of the box with Windows due to its need to access windows cmd.exe, but we can help customers to get it working within a few minutes by applying the relevant security permissions for that domain.

.htaccess is another component which is not available in IIS but we run on all our servers an IIS ISAPI Filter http://www.isapirewrite.com/ which handles SE Friendly Urls which our website is running at the moment again we can help customers get the right rewrite rules for their sites.

We also run the best mail software and stats software on our servers http://www.smartertools.com - smartermail and smarterstats

Thanks

Aaron
Thanks for your fast response. Re .htaccess
As an example, I sometimes use the following (I have my reasons!!) in .htaccess
<FilesMatch "\.htm([l])*$">

ForceType application/x-httpd-php

</FilesMatch>
Is there a method for achieving the same result with IIS?
I’m assuming error docs are no problem?

Anni

Sure we could edit the IIS site extension .htm or .html for that domain and set the processor to the PHP so that all .htm* files will be loaded using PHP

Custom error pages are not a problem as well and can be configured in the Helm control panel.

Aaaron
Okay, so it sounds like there are ways around most things with iis ... Thanks
I’ve still got a few niggling worries about company size, sorry to keep on about it. What happens when you go on holiday? and do you guarantee a level of uptime? What happens if you suddenly double in size? Can you cope?
Are you likely to sell out to the big boys? or.... worst case scenario go bust?
I love everything else you are saying, but I’m sure you’ll understand my caution re the above as I’d be recommending you to my customer....

Anni

not meaning to butt in - one company i worked for used fasthosts - who were really slack - the company im working for now use rackspace - who are really great (the champagne at christmas swings it for me!) but rackspace arent cheap. theres a lot to be said about small to medium businesses - and the level of personal support you get compared to larger ones.... big companies need other big companies - but if youre running a relatively small company, like me, you might find yourself better off dealing with a similarly scaled supplier...