Your Hosting Recomendations

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Author	Message
Mark Gilbert	Sunday 25 April 2004 10:33:38 pm When looking for a hosting company to host eZ Publish what questions should you ask? Now that you have installed eZ what do you wish you had asked up front? Do you have any strong recomendations of a company to use?
Alex Jones	Monday 26 April 2004 7:25:29 am Just a note, you may want to check out the partner area of ez.no as there are hosts who specifically focus on eZ publish installations - plus they support the project monetarily, and in many cases by answering questions on these forums. Check out http://ez.no/partner/partner_list A few things to keep in mind when looking at the hosting requirements: - Do they provide enough RAM for PHP - a lot of people run into issues here because they aren't able to get more than 8 or 12 Megs. More is recommended. - Do they keep their versions of Apache and PHP up to date? At the same time, make sure they haven't jumped into Apache 2 as that has issues with PHP 4. - Do they run with Safe Mode on or off? There have been issues in the past with servers running with Safe Mode enabled. - Is PHP running as CGI? There have been issues with this configuration as well. Hopefully others will chime in with ideas as well. Again, I highly recommend you check out the Partners. I am not associated with any of them. Alex Alex [ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ] <i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
Mark Gilbert	Monday 26 April 2004 7:49:17 am I have looked at the hosting companies listed. I am in the united states, so I would prefer working with a hosting company in the US. I have looked at the pages of the hosting companies I found on the eZ site. Mar Labs seem to be the primary for the US. Unfortunatily they seem to be charging quite a premium for thier services. With them I would need to spend around $80 to $100 per month. Since I run a non-profit that is on the expensive side for us. We would prefer to keep the cost closer to the $20 range. Besides for $100 per month I would think I should get more the 2 Gig bandwidth. I also looked at the other hosting companies and did not find one that quite fit the bill for me.
Alex Jones	Monday 26 April 2004 8:06:39 am Yeah, it sounds like most of the companies are focused on corporate accounts. Well, hopefully other people will provide information on what you should look for in a hosting company. Good luck! Alex Alex [ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ] <i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
Erik Fretheim	Monday 26 April 2004 9:08:55 am I would not recommend MarLabs. Everytime I ask for support it takes 3-5 days to get a response. Then the answer is usually "there is nothing wrong with our configuration". A week later, it works. No notice from them, I just try it and it works. I also asked for a proposal for some specific work to be done. A while later, they asked for detailed designs rather than providing a proposal. I'm still waiting for a response. I guess you can infer a list of items to evaluate. Erik
Lazaro Ferreira	Monday 26 April 2004 9:21:40 am Hi, You can try Verio Bronce Hosting Plan, it is 20 USD/m a year or under 20/m for more than a year contract We have developed an EZP 3.2.4 site for a client, http://www.niassa.info, this is an informative EZP Site, so we didn't use any advanced functionalty there The site runs well, but we had to face an issue because of Verio Bronce setup uses CGI PHP We solved the issue using a patch published here in the forum, you should search the forum for EZP 3 PHP CGI Issues There was another issue because Verio Bronce Web Server behaves like Apache 2.0 , there is a documented issue with AcceptPahtInfo directive for Apache 2.0 and EZP 3, URL setup (we preffered the URL setup in order to evoid any issue regarding lack of permissions for Virtual Host Setup ), but right now we aren't sure whether Virtual Host Setup is an issue with Verio Bronce Plan or not By the way their support was good, we even chatted online with the guy (the expert) responsivel for setting up our area Lazaro http://www.mzbusiness.com Lazaro http://www.mzbusiness.com
Dzevad Fazlic	Monday 26 April 2004 4:54:00 pm Mark Gilbert if you looking for cheap and good host that ez systems will run on smootly i have one for you .Email me at [email protected]
Björn [email protected]	Tuesday 27 April 2004 4:18:41 am http://www.xrow.de We also target eZ hosting for ¤ 20/month. All servers are optimized for eZ. We have also plans with full utf-8 support. Looking for a new job? http://www.xrow.com/xrow-GmbH/Jobs Looking for hosting? http://hostingezpublish.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- GMT +01:00 Hannover, Germany Web: http://www.xrow.com/
James Packham	Thursday 29 April 2004 2:48:34 am Hi, One of my EZ sites is hosted by Adept hosting (http://www.adepthosting.co.uk) It's a UK company, but the server (Or atleast the one I'm on) is in the US. I pay £50/year (What is that something like $70 or $80 US?) for 600 MB Web Space and 12 GB Bandwidth. I'm not sure if Adept have a US sister, or subsidary. Their support seems quite good - though I haven't pushed them for much yet. Cpanel setup, the only problem is no SSH. Regards, James
Paul K Egell-Johnsen	Thursday 29 April 2004 7:45:14 am I successfully installed and ran eZ 3.2 on http://www.pair.com, it wasn't a production site, though, I just installed it and started working on it there, just to test the possibility, because eZ publish 2.x series didn't work on pair at all. Pair has been around for many years (since 1996 I think) and they're very good with their support. I think http://php.net runs on pair, btw. -- http://www.vogol.com/user/spdyvkng/blog/
Vivek Chopra	Thursday 29 April 2004 11:02:50 am Check out http://www.firebright.com/solutions/ezpublish.php Firbright (previously Ourbox) also provides hosting in the US. Rates seem reasonable. they are offering virtual server accounts with "True root access to the server". Regards, Vivek
Derick Rethans	Thursday 29 April 2004 11:05:33 am www.php.net doesn't run on pair, but we have some services running there (http://pear.php.net and CVS).
Tony Wood	Thursday 29 April 2004 1:37:51 pm Normally I would not post blatent ads on a forum, but it looks like this is an exception as everyone is on it so... here goes. Those offended by ads please look away now. ad http://www.visionwt.com/products/developer_hosting This UK based hosting service is created for eZ publish developers by eZ publish developers. Currently offering free trials. ad ok you can look back now. There, i've done it. I don't feel confirtable about posting it, but I hope people offended by this will forgive me. If you are offended come and see me at the summer conference, and if I have enough money left after buying the expensive beer in Norway. I'll buy you a beer to help ease the hurt this ad has caused you. --tony Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood Vision with Technology Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development Power to the Editor! Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future
Ozzy Cow	Thursday 29 April 2004 2:56:17 pm in some cases ez publish is very needy in terms of php and apache configuration. If dedicated server is out of budget, you can try to get VPS with root access for around $20 per month. I use http://rimuhosting.com (not affiliated with, just a happy customer)
Peter Quennell	Friday 21 May 2004 4:45:28 am Mark: If you still have the need, please see my "breakthrough" post on 21 May? The hoster mentioned ( internetconnection.net) is really outta sight support-wise, and we pay hust $20 a month for a rock-solid and very fast Linux site. Google them for quite a mountain of positive feedback. Fastpete
Peter Quennell	Wednesday 26 May 2004 2:22:55 pm My message above needs retracting.. IC is a great hosters in general. Very helpful support. Low prices. BUT! With PHP as a CGI and therefore no possibility of acceleartion we deided to look furher. We are now setting up our flagship site with VisionWT in north London: http://www.visionwt.com/visionwt/content_management_within_reach And a major client site with Firebright in Sacrameto: http://firebright.com/ Both are EZ Systems partners. Both have great packages. Looking good. Anybody wanting a take on our merging experience is welcome to email me: quennell [at] modeltwo.com
Peter Quennell	Wednesday 26 May 2004 2:23:59 pm "emerging" not "merging" experience in the above please.
Stuart DH	Wednesday 22 December 2004 12:47:34 pm We've been with Firebright for the past few months and I really liked the service - so much so that I even agreed to write a testimonial for them. However, recent problems have left us with major headaches and so we're now planning on moving. It seems as though they're expanding too fast and the service has really suffered as a result. Yesterday, our site was down for about half a day, at the weeekend it was down for several hours and for the past week or so we couldn't login to control panel because the link on their site and the my.firebright.com URL wasn't working. Apparently, the CP could still be accessed by the IP but we never got an email to say that was what we would need to do. It's a shame as we really thought we could rely on Firebright to provide a good service. However, we now have several days of moving everything over to a new host during Christmas!!! It's a nightmare scenario that we could really do without. http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk
Peter Quennell	Wednesday 22 December 2004 1:35:01 pm Also on Firebright: They are just moving from Sacramento to San Jose, so performance may take some hits. I may head back to them one day. But for now we have also left them - they wanted a credit card number re-entered for the hosting payment and by the time I returned from a trip and had this figured out as not being a scam... they had yanked our site!! Any other Firebright users here who also got the demand for credit card number re-entry? What was behind THAT? Weird is putting it mildly. Pete
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Tuesday 04 January 2005 9:00:22 pm Hey guys - I'm sorry to lose the business, but understand. As one of the principles here at FireBright, I'd like to respond to your experiences. For starters, in terms of credit cards, we had some sneaking database corruption on our main server. No issue right? Well, we were keeping an archive of our billing data for two weeks, and after that only once a month for archival purposes. The corruption happened over a several week period, and by the time we discovered the problem, it was too late to do anything about it. The backups we had all had the same problem going back for quite some time. Our staff sent out a very apologetic letter to clients explaining all this in our monthly newsletter, but it only went to active clients. Also of note was that we extended a free month of service to anyone who contacted us who was unable to get a credit card in the system -- I'm sorry you were on vacation but there isn't much I can do about that! ;-( We've seen some intermitten outages for some clients resulting from DNS resulting the same problems with the database corruption above -- it wasn't just billing data but all parts of the customer records -- it's just that you can rebuild the customer records -- the credit cards are encrypted. A small number of our clients had DNS issues, but we were able to resolve every single one of them almost as soon as they cropped up (DNS however, has a fantastic way of causing problems LONG after you have fixed the problem). We did not have a 12 hour outage at any point. We also had a planned outage (2-4 hours) when we moved all of our systems from HE.net to Mae West. This was unavoidable, as we couldn't replicate our infrastructure in the new facility. We ran out of power at HE.net, and were actually having problems keeping our Enterprise systems cool enough (they have really cheap cabinets). When you put enough Dell 2650s in a rack, they generate a LOT of heat. We lost 4 disks in a couple day period (and we're talking about 146gb 10k and 36gb 15k SCSI Seagates) due to the heat. So it was getting to the point where it needed to happen in a hurry. I mean, it was so bad that one of our guys had to put a freekin' house fan in the rack to keep the cirulation good enough! Mae West is heads and shoulders above the old facility, and we've been able to build out the racks to spec, so systems stay cool. We're also sitting on something like 8 substations (aka, it's rediculous how many) so power hasn't been an issue. We did move to daily backups ongoing, so the corruption we experienced will never happen again. We bought a NAS system just for backing up billing data offsite. I'm really sorry you had such bad experiences. I hope that knowing why would make a difference to you. I really hate to read this kind of stuff in the forums -- it's bad for business, but more importantly, you guys were good customers (and yes, we have definitely had some bad customers), and it's personally sad that we lost your business. At the end of the day, we've had some growing pains. We're really struggled to find competent staff members to service our client base, which is a little bit high-end of a hosting crowd. We've built our system out right, and had to make some tough choices, and deal with some tough technological hurdles, along the way. Right now, I'm finally feel confident in our infrastructure. FireBright is actually focused on expanding operations right now. We're going to be announcing new eZ Publish products and services towards the end of January. Pete, if you guys want to come back at any point, get in touch. I will make it worth your time, and do whatever I can to take care of you. Stuart, one thing I'm confused about is that you site is still on our servers. Do get in touch with me if you're still unhappy, and I'll compensate you for your troubles with a free month of service on the house. We're a small company, focused almost entirely on this product (eZ), and we really, really, really, really want to keep our customers happy. We cannot survive without you! Most Sincerely, Jonathan Dillon-Hayes --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/