Choosing the Right Hosting Company
So you've decided on open source, chosen the appropriate technology and hired a great developer. Now it's time to find the right hosting company. A simple Google search will leave you with a dizzying array of choices to pick from. How do you select the hosting company that's best for you?
Get a Recommendation
There are several forums and mailing lists that would be an appropriate venue to ask for a recommendation. If you chose a specific open source technology (Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, etc.) then you may want to ask on a forum that is dedicated to that specific technology. Before you ask, you should search the archived mailing list or forum posts since this is a commonly asked question on most mailing lists. You should also ask your developer which hosting companies he or she recommend. Most developers have a preferred company they use for hosting. If you select a provider that your developer is familiar with, then you can save yourself a lot of billable hours and aggravation.
Consider the Technology
Most hosting solutions will claim to be experts in any technology you can think of. The reality is that there are special considerations for setting up a J2EE server for a Java application that differ significantly from the requirements for configuring Apache Passenger for a Ruby application. A decent hosting provider can work with any technology but this is your store we're talking about. Are you going to settle for someone who could probably muddle his or her way through?
Start with your list of recommendations we mentioned above and call their tech support staff to ask a few basic questions to see how comfortable they are with the technology in question. Do they give a simple "Yes we support that?"
I'd rather hear something more specific like, "We have thousands of Ruby applications hosted here. We can set you up with Passenger using Nginx or Apache on either Ruby 1.8 or Ruby 1.9." Maybe the person with the simple answer is just giving the simplest possible answer but with thousands of hosting providers to choose from, you're going to have to narrow it down somehow.
Customer Service
Customer service is extremely important in a hosting provider. If you're not very technical, a good company will have sysadmins that can help you install and configure your server. The really large companies won't do this for you but there is a sweet spot of medium-sized companies that have excellent pricing as well as a very responsive support staff. Again, it pays to test the company by calling it and asking questions before you sign up. If it can't be bothered with your questions before you sign up, it's a safe bet it won't care when you have a problem later on.
Hosting Plans and Other Offerings
Shared hosting is generally the cheapest option. It involves sharing the server resources with other customers, which is not typically a problem for low volume applications. Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are generally superior to shared hosting but they also cost more. With a VPS server, you share resources on the same machine with other users, but you have a dedicated amount of resources that does not change depending on the usage of the other tenants. There is also plenty of other advantages to using VPS vs. shared hosting. Dedicated hosting involves purchasing or leasing a dedicated, physical server. This is typically the most expensive option and it might be overkill for a small-to-medium sized ecommerce site.
Cloud hosting is also becoming very popular these days. These plans offer a very economical way to host a server and pay for exactly the amount of resources that you need. Think of these offerings as a utility: You pay for what you use. So if your bandwidth is low one month, you pay less. You can also rent these servers by the minute, so if you have a short term need for a server they are a perfect option. The downside to cloud hosting is that it is usually bare bones when it comes to customer service. If you are working with an experienced developer, however, then you should consider Amazon EC2, Rackspace or one of the other popular cloud hosting options.
What Do I Recommend?
I've been very happy lately with a company called Liquid Web. It's got great tech support and the staff is very knowledgeable in the area of Ruby/Rails hosting, even though that is not a specific area of expertise that it promotes.
Mostly I'm interested in hearing what hosting companies everyone else recommends. Feel free to add a comment with your suggestions.
2 Comments
cybrhost says:
You can also look for providers who specialize in your specific cart. Some will provide the installation and possibly basic optimizations for you.
There are other unique aspects and demands that e-commerce sites to consider, such as PCI compliance. Some hosts, especially budget hosts, will not go through the necessary steps to respond to PCI scans.
Ask your host how they handle holiday demand. Certain holidays can cause traffic increases that some sites or hosts are not prepared for. This is especially true if your site focuses on a specific season, such as Halloween costumes. And, of course, nearly all e-commerce sites see traffic increases during the Christmas shopping season.
Louis Camassa says:
Some other critical questions to ask:
Uptime guarantee SLA for: response time on tickets, outages, and hardware replacement Hardware limits on space and bandwidth
I list out all the most important questions based upon my requirements, and send it to the top 5 hosting providers in my price range.
There are A LOT of hosting companies out there-many that are smaller and less specialized. I recommend going with a larger company that has established SLA's and helps to develop and implement business best practices. Some that I found that meet this requirement and are more cost effective are; Rackspace, SoftLayer, Media Temple, and Layered Technologies (including fastservers.net). Although, some of these companies specialize more in managed services (which is much more costly).
I’ve personally used fastservers.net for many years (before they merged with layeredtech) and have nothing but good things to say about the company. Their support was responsive, articulate and always upbeat. Check out their SLA at http://www.layeredtech.com/managed-services/defcon/defcon-levels/
Feel free to use my hosting checklist at http://www.lc7inc.com/hosting-servers/web-hosting-checklist/
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