Phine Solutions web work notes

Finding the right hosting can be a real headache for the webmasters.

When I put my first website on the Internet I picked one that only to be mediocre, to say the least. With the growing number of my sites and the real need for the site up-time and service quality, upgrading my hosting company is a necessity.

I was pretty much blind in the hosting world and had to do a lot of research to and listen to what other webmasters say about the hosting and learn from their experiences. webhostingtalk.com is still the place I go to for research and opinions.

I guess a good hosting company should just offer the solid service and let you forget about them. If I often have things like “what the @#$% is going on with company blah and what happened to my supporting ticket…” popping up in my mind it certainly not a good thing. Also see my post about “5 signs you should start planning changing your hosting company“.

Based on my experience I have compiled a short list of hosting companies in different arena. Hopefully it can help someone in the same shoes to get started.

An updated note: I am an affiliated seller for dreamhost.com and hostgator.com. However the review is only based on my true personal experience and it also helps me to track their service quality as well.

Shared hosting

Pair Networks - pair.com

A truly fantastic company. Solid service and support. One thing worth to note is that their MySQL server runs on different boxes (physical or virtual), this really isolate the issues that come across between Apache and MySQL.

Pair supports both PHP4 and PHP5. Since PHP5 runs in CGI mode all you need to do is to put an executable PHP wrapper in the CGI-BIN directory and make the proper configuration change in your .htaccss file.

However they do not provide cpanel…not sure if this is out of the consideration of the high resource usage of cpanel. If you start off a serious site and want some top notch shared hosting service I would strongly recommend Pair.com.

Update: I moved one of my forum site (vbulletin) over to Pair and it has been 2 monthes without any problem. Two thumbs up.

Although Pair is the best shared hosting service that I’ve ever had, I do want to point out that they’ll charge a $5 installation fee on every domain that you add to your account. This may hurt a little if you frequently add/remove domain from your account, which apparently they discourage.

Bluehost.com

I have a few sites hosted with bluehost.com and haven’t had much complaint so far. One thing I do wish to have is to have the capability to run both PHP4 and PHP5 in one single account, and currently this is not possible at Bluehost.

Just a few days back I received a email from bluehost.com stating that they will need to remove all the “catch-all” email accounts to reduce the server load from the spam. And a few days later another email came and canceled this plan. According to bluehost it was apparently due to the customer feedback.

On Jan 18th I received a email announcement from Bluehost President Matt Heaton about the new changes on Bluehost servers for better performance. Some more observations need to be done to see the actual effect on my sites hosted by Bluehost. As a customer I do like their effort of constant improvement.

On Feb. 22 one of my sites hosted by bluehost.com went down for almost 10 hours. The server was down and I am guessing it was some hardware failure and they had to do a whole lot to make it back on line. There was no explanation given after the incidence and I figured even I asked I would probably just get some general answers. NOT a good sign for me.

The bluehost service has been pretty stable lately. One thing I’d like to brought up about their web supporting system. It appears one can log a ticket even without creating an account, but based on my experience, there will be no response to the ticket created this way.

Incident:

It appears the database hasn’t been quite stable recently and I have a few occasions that DB was not accessible. I emailed the support in one case, and DB was back up later. Next day an email arrives, from support, and ask more detail about how I use DB, what error I saw, blah blah…

On Dec.26 my site at Bluehost stopped responding again. It took about 5 hours to get back online and none of my two support tickets got a single response except the automatic message. Maybe one of the site on the same server is a E-Comm site? Who knows. But at this point I am very disappointed with Bluehost and I don’t recommend using it.

Dreamhost.com

A hosting company with a fairly good reputation. It seems so hard to find a company that has no gripe from someone, and dreamhost is not an exception.
I started to use Dreamhost this year. The experience has been good so far.

What I like:
The easy and no frill setup process. I placed an order and literally within a minute or so I received the turn up email.
Nice domain directory management. Most hosting service lets you create multiple domains in one account. But the hosting directory for your second domain will reside under your main domain as a sub-directory.

For example, if you have domain1.com setup and create a second one for domain2.com, the web server directory will look something like this:

/home/username/public_html/ <– this is for domain1.com
/home/username/public_html/domain2 <– this is for domain2.com

A big deal? not really. But it definitely add some complication when maintaining the code.

In a Dreamhost account, you will have them separate:
/home/username/domain1.com <– this is for domain1.com
/home/username/domain2.com <– this is for domain2.com

Dreamhost also has their own version of control panel, which maybe a problem for someone. In my opinion, their control panel is simple and functional. The only issue I have is the naming and organizing of the left navigation menu of the control panel. For example, the “Managing MySQL” link is under “Goodies”… I guess it depends on how much you are bothered with this, for most people, this shouldn’t be a big deal.

Dreamhost has a very generous hosting plan. You can add/remove domain at your wish and the disk space and bandwidth limits grow as you stay with them. I do get occasional downtime with my sites at dreamhost. But if you have some domains that just want to put aside with a few pages, dreamhost is a nice place to start. 

Lunarpages.com

Can’t say I have a lot of experience with the company but once I did buy the basis hosting plan for 12 months and later found out the plan doesn’t include the SSH access. I cancelled the plan and it was quite simple with their 30 day money back ganrantee feature. It was totally my fault and their support was great on this matter.

So I didn’t have a chance to use their supporting system. Anyway, it is a company scores a lot of good reviews. My own little experience adds point to this company too.

hostgator.com

A fast growing and fairly new company. It also has received a lot of positive reviews. It may worth a try if the price is right.

VPS

servint.com

I use its VPS for a couple of my sites.
Since I am not in the reseller or hosting business I don’t fully utilize tools like Cpanel so my review has some limited perspective.
So far I have been very satisfied with servint’s service. I bought the Essential VPS package and it was setup in a couple of days. I did have an inquiry about the status and the response was prompt.

With the growth of the site the server started to slow down. I upgraded by VPS and still saw load average constantly over 1.00 mark. This is when great support can really help. I email the support and Tommy quickly adjusted a setting of mysql configuration and the server started to fly again. This also prompted me to look into my.cnf file more carefully and make necessary tweaking.

Fully managed VPS != holding hands on everything. But Servint’s tech support has been great with their knowledge.

liquidweb.com

This is another company that has great reviews.
I almost went to Liquidweb and a post on webhostingtalk.com changed my mind and I signed up for Servint (This proves how easy it is to lose a potential customer on the internet). However my previous research has favored this company and I still want to recommend them.

powervps.com

This is another company mentioned frequently by webmasters and has mostly good reviews.

Wordpress has released 2.1 and this post is written in this new release.

I upgraded my wordpress code base pretty painlessly. With the SSH access to my box, I used a little bit different process to upgrade.

1. download the latest release.

wget should do this perfectly. wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

2. unzip the tar file into a folder at the same level with the current wordpress host directory, which maybe public_html in some cases.

tar xzf latest.tar.gz

3. a new “wordpress” directory should be created. At this point I will copy the files or directories that are supposed to be retained from the old version to the new directory. These files are: wp-config.php, .htaccess, robots.txt, any language directories under wp-includes, any customized stuff under wp-content, and other directories or files created by myself.

4. backup the database and deactivate the plugins.

5. change the current wp host directory to something else and rename the new “wordpress” directory as the wp host directory. I also created an index.htm file to let the visitor know we are in the middle of an upgrade.

6. Step 5 enssentially upgraded the wp codebase to 2.1, now I can run the /wp-admin/upgrade.php from the browser. The rest will be re-activate the plugins.

This upgrade process saves me some time to backup the existing version of worpress and by having a copy of fully functional code base on the server, it makes it simpler to switch back to the old version if there is any problem during the upgrade. A couple of “mv” command should do the job, and of course, the database may need to be reloaded from the backup.

The new 2.1 definitely has some cool enhancements. The new visual editor works much better and I may not need the additional WYSIWYG plugin now.

Moving your site to a new host needs some serious planning.

Research different hosting providers and plans

Research and find the best suitable host in your budget. webhostingtalk.com is a good place to look around.
Sign up an account and set up a testing/staging environment on the new host. No matter how close the

Set up testing/staging 

No matter how similar the hosting plan the new host offers comparing with the existing one, there will always be some configuration changes that you need to watch out and test out.

A staging environment simply mirrors the current site in terms of the code base, database setup, batch jobs, etc…

Regression testing

Test the new site. This is a good opportunity to improve the code and add enhancement since all the functionality and features will be re-tested.

This step is mainly to test the code and environment. Although not using the actual domain name you should still be able to test the pages, emails and database setup to make sure the new site is ready.

Moving day 

Once you are satisfied with the new site, you can pick a "light" traffic day, for example, around holidays or weekends, to move the data of the current site over to the new host. Since the code base has been on the server already you can dump the latest database copy and upload it to the new server DB. After some quick smoking test you can flip the DNS switch at your registrar. The DNS change propagation could take up to 48 hours.

While waiting for the internet to finish its work, you can periodically check your new DNS information through dnsreport.com and spot any potential problems in the early stage.

Maintain the old site 

The old host should remain up for at least 3-4 days (I'll give it a week). Since it may still have visitors (including the searching engine bots), you shouldn't shutdown your old site too early. A little trick is to make a small change on the old site, for example, add a "dash" to the footer so only you will notice. In this way, you can easily identify which site serves the page yourself. If your site takes any user input you should also monitor them and move them to the new place.

1. Your site has been down frequently, by frequently I mean more than once a month.
2. When you feel like you are part of your hosting company’s support team because it is always you who detect the problem first and report it.
3. When your wife actually asked why your site is broken again… if you are not married, I guess friends will do.
4. When you open a technical support ticket, you get a standard message: “your server has experienced a crash, we are trying our best to fix it…”.
5. When you actually phoned the support and keyed in the “urgent support” option, you were taken back to the support main menu again…

Whenever you get a new *nix environment the shell you are offered to use may not be the one you like.

To change the default login shell is pretty simple:

first, check the available shells in the system:

more /etc/shells

Output:

/bin/sh
/bin/csh
/bin/tcsh
/usr/local/bin/tcsh
/usr/local/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/fdsh
/usr/local/bin/ksh
…

second, use chsh command

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/ksh

This should do it.

If your system has bash, which is my favorate, you will also need to create .bash_profile and .bashrc for the alias, promot etc… settings.

A sample .bashrc can be found here.

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