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Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

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61–70 of 129 posts

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#61
I've used MediaTemple which has become so awful as to be unusable and Slicehost which was great and reliable but now owned by Rackspace and starting to suffer from the problems with their datacenters...

Been hearing good things about Heroku and after reading this thread psyched to check out Linode

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#63
I have been using OVH to host my main projects They offer dedicated servers for the hobby market, at unbeatable prices (http://kimsufi.fr, you'll have to look for your local OVH distributor), but also top-level servers at very good price. Plus they're very good (have awesome peering/transit quality, unbeatable prices, 3 datacenters and 10 years of experience).

For my own thing, I've got a shared hosting at SurpassHosting.com. I used to rely on Dreamhost to host my blog and do random tests, but they're just crap. Surpass is just good for what I need in those cases...

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#64
I use dreamhost. Why? Because a while back they did that 777 deal, and I posted about it on a few forums, and ended up with like 250 primary referrals and 200 secondary referrals.

So basically I get paid money to host my stuff with them :) I made like 3 grand from them so far.

Also since they bump your storage/bw every week, at this point I have 10TB Bandwith and 500GB hosting. Which isn't half bad.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#67
post #38

Media Temple. I absolutely hate it, but moving to a new host is a bitch. When I get some time to move I am either moving back to Slicehost or Linode and built my server up from scratch. Note to everyone, don't ever use media temple. They are absolutely horrible. Every week, either the servers gets hacked, servers goes down or something is wrong with their admin panel and they won't let you access it. And of course it…

Haha same deal. The gridserver is $20/mo and I have a dozen sites on it, nice control panel but the uptime is horrible and its slow as molasses It blows yet I have to keep it unless I want to migrate 12 different sites...

I feel you. Migration can be a pain in the ass. Fortunately I only have 5 site with media temple. Next month I will have some free time and I will definitely dump this horrible hosting.

I personally recommend slicehost, there are excellent. Never had a problem with them, leaving them was a mistake. I was looking for a managed solution and MT was recommended by some guys so I jumped.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#68
post #16

+1 for Webfaction. You get a shell, a gazillion different application types (CGI, Rails, PHP, Django, custom). You can compile Apache and/or MySQL and configure a custom port for it. Their support is responsive. Service has competitive pricing. I've been with them for three years and haven't experience any outages.

Another vote for WebFaction. I've tried half a dozen hosts over the years, and WebFaction is the best one so far.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#69
post #30

Chunkhost.com is giving away half-gig instances right now.

Sorta, they're not free, it's only for the beta period, and they still require a (valid) credit card number, and presumably they'll start charging you once the beta period ends (and they don't specify when that is on their homepage).

I have no experience with these people and never heard of them, but I am guessing that the CC information is needed because they are giving you root access to their server. From a purely legal and business point of view, it seems to make sense.

What if someone registers for more than one vps (or dozens with the help of proxies and gmail account) and runs illegal activity like spamming or DDOSing some other site? These are all plausible scenario and having valid CC number is the most reasonable thing to do.

Re: Ask HN: What hosting do you use for personal projects?

#70
post #34

I've been a happy Linode customer since August 2007. There were two minor issues with DNS (not their fault, I believe) during that time. Once I had to do an emergency RAM upgrade on a Sunday -- it was the best customer service experience I've ever had. I run two servers -- Gentoo and Ubuntu. I recommend Ubuntu.

I was with a company who used Linode from about 2003 to 2007. It was awful. We had a one-day outage when someone kicked out the power cord. Another outage with some routing mishap by Linode. DDoS floods destined for our VM due to irc bots or whatever running on another VM. Linode would start an upgrade without notice during normal business hours, and then only admit they were messing with things if there was a crash.…

Since Linode started in June 2003 (and your company was one of the first customers -- I'm looking at your tickets), you got to experience a lot of the growing pains of a new company. If you were to try us today, you wouldn't walk away with the same impression as you did then. I'd bet on that.

We learned a lot during that time, and I think it's a defining aspect of our company that we can admit that.

I am, however, unable to find a one-day outage for your account; the longest I've come across -- which is power-related, so I'm assuming the one you're referring to -- was reported by your company at 5:39 p.m. and resolved at 8:01 p.m.

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