Ask HN: Quality shared hosting or affordable managed VPS

3 points by benohear 13 years ago | 8 comments

OK shared hosting is available for about $10 / month, but I would really like premium shared hosting for $20-$30 and I am struggling to find that.

The improvements I'm looking for over "normal" hosting is more reliability, consistent performance and competent tech support. Titan Internet in the UK used to be just that, but they got acquired and "things ain't what they used to be".

VPS's exist in that price range, but I don't need the control nor the hassle of self management. Then there's a huge leap between that and the managed VPSs of someone like Rackspace ($200 / month seems to be the starting price there).

Suggestions, anyone?

subsection1h 13 years ago |

WebFaction[1] is commonly recommended on Hacker News[2] for shared hosting. Their service uses cgroups, which gets rid of the traditional "bad neighbor problem" in shared hosting.[3]

This week I needed a shared hosting service for a low-traffic legacy PHP app and I chose WebFaction based on the recommendations on Hacker News.[2] I don't have enough experience with WebFaction to recommend it, but the experience I've had so far has been good. My account was ready roughly one hour after I signed up, and I successfully transferred the aforementioned PHP app to WebFaction very quickly.

You mentioned that you previously used a web host in the UK. WebFaction.com has servers in Europe (Amsterdam).[4]

[1] http://www.webfaction.com/

[2] https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=WebFaction

[3] http://blog.webfaction.com/2011/11/fair-shared-hosting/

[4] http://blog.webfaction.com/2011/06/europe-here-we-come/

benohear 13 years ago | |

Webfaction looks really good. Many thanks!

andyhart 13 years ago |

I run my own web hosting company with servers based in the UK if you don't mind me self-promoting. Cheapest package for shared hosting is £4.25 but we also do VPS which can be based in the UK (slightly more expensive) or alternatively Europe or US.

benohear 13 years ago | |

You're more than welcome to self-promote, but I don't see much difference between what you offer and what, for example, Hetzner offers.

andyhart 13 years ago | | |

Here's our offerings on the shared hosting front: http://www.hartserver.net/hosting/shared/

They are offering better webspace and data transfer by the looks of it. We offer unlimited features where they don't as well as a telephone support offering. We also offer free setup on everything.

In terms of VPS comparison we offer unmetered transfer on all packages and a bit more flexibility in terms of customisation.

We can do even cheaper VPS servers also in Europe and US on request, starting from £6/month for a 1 core, 512MB RAM 20GB SSD with unmetered transfer.

X4 13 years ago |

I'm looking for a VPS that costs no more than 6EUR/$8 a month. 2TB Bandwith / 512MB RAM, should be hacker friendly, ie custom sysctl settings. But I fear there is no such VPS for that price.

ricardobeat 13 years ago | |

http://digitalocean.com costs $5/month for 512/1TB transfer/20G SSD.