Editors note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on February 26th.  He agreed to republish it here at our request.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.

If you pay any attention to the web hosting world you will have noticed there has been a bit of a stir over DreamHost this past week. One of the data centres they use had to completely power down, resulting in a few hours of downtime. Unfortunately, this meant M Cubed and this blog were both down for several hours Sunday morning. This has prompted me look at other hosts. I moved to DreamHost enticed by their amazing package for an amazingly low price. After years of preaching to PC users that you get what you pay for when it comes to quality on the Mac, I seem to have fallen into the trap of buying the “just good enough” of web hosting.

All credit to DreamHost though. They do offer a great package; it gives me everything I need: multiple websites, PHP, MySQL, Subversion, Ruby on Rails and near infinite bandwidth and storage space. And you can’t fault the price: $9.95 a month with no set up fee if you pay for the full year. Unfortunately this doesn’t give you speed or reliability, hence my looking for other hosting. So what are my options?

Web Hosting Buzz

Reason: Until last September I’d been on Web Hosting Buzz for nearly 3 years. I’d basically outgrown them and so I moved to DreamHost. So of course my first port of call is to look back at WHB. They may not have had the features, but they had the speed, the reliability, the price and most of all, the tech support. It is the best tech support I’ve ever dealt with, including both Apple and BT (British Telecom for those who don’t know), two companies whose tech support I have always admired. So what do they have on offer now for my needs?

Well, they now offer a new Ultimate Web Hosting package. The main point of this package is that there are only 35 sites per server, and that each server is quite good to start with. For $35 I get almost everything I need. Unfortunately I’d need a dedicated server to get subversion. They also offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which earns you 5% of your fee back for each hour over that guarantee your server is down.

Pros: Good past experiences, amazing tech support, uptime guarantee

Cons: No Subversion, pushing it budget wise

Conclusion: As much as I’d like to go back to Web Hosting Buzz, the lack of Subversion is a bit of a deal-breaker, but coupled with the cost it seems to be a reluctant no.

MacDock

Reason: I’ve seen MacDock around quite a bit. It seems kinda popular with UK Mac developers, hosting both RealMac Software and ThinkMac Software. It is Mac-powered hosting, running on G5 Xserves. Those who I have talked to who use it have never had any problems with it. Unfortunately that’s where the positives stop.

The packages they offer are nice, but unfortunately they’re just too expensive. $19.95 a month will get you just 250MB of disk space, 10GB of bandwidth and a single MySQL database. Their highest-end account costs $50 a month and only offers you 500MB of space and 30GB of bandwidth, with the same single MySQL database. When WHB were offering 10GB of space and 100GB of bandwidth for $15 you start to realise that Mac hosting really is a lot more expensive than Linux or Windows hosting. Another minus again is the lack of Subversion.

Pros: Mac-powered

Cons: No Subversion, very expensive, 500MB space for $50 a month is a bit of a joke

Conclusion: It sounds nice and is well recommended, but I need to host two websites, one of which gets 20-30MB of photos uploaded to it each week. The disk space would be the deal killer at any price, but at the prices they’re charging it’s little more than a joke.

Pair

Reason: The post that got me thinking about hosts was one by Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog (posts by that man always seem to make me write essay-like blog posts). He praised Pair, the hosting they use. If what they say is to be believed, Pair never goes down… ever. So of course it’s worth looking.

Their first real hosting plan costs $9.95 a month. Unfortunately that’s only 500MB of disk space, so the starting place is the next package up. The Advanced package offers 80GB of bandwidth, 1.5GB of disk space and 10 MySQL databases for $17.95. It also includes telephone support, though that wouldn’t be cheap for an international call (then again, I have Skype). It doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of frills, but I’ve learnt what happens with that with Dreamhost. That said, there is also a $30 set up fee on top of the $17.95 a month, and there is apparently a $50 fee to install Subversion.

Pros: Extremely well recommended, very reliable

Cons: A bit expensive especially to install Subversion, a bit limited

Conclusion: Pair offers the reliability, but I can’t see anything mentioning Ruby on Rails support. 1.5GB of space also sounds like a lot, but I’m used to getting a lot more space for my money, which helps me feel less worried about running out.

Media Temple

Reason: Media Temple seem to be the rising star of web hosting at the moment. A few years ago I hadn’t heard of them, and now everyone seems to be recommending them. A quick look at their packages and it’s not hard to see why. Their Grid-Server package is very interesting. Instead of normal shared hosting, where multiple domains are hosted on a server, with multiple servers, Grid-Server seems to merge everything into one pool. This allows multiple servers to handle your requests and hold your data. They claim to have multiple levels of redundancy meaning that they don’t have to take the grid down, even to perform maintenance.

The package costs $20 a month, but seems to cover everything I want: 100GB of storage, 1TB of bandwidth, up to 100 sites, Ruby on Rails, Subversion, speed and reliability. $20 a month is again a little expensive compared to what I have, and in the long run would be more expensive than Pair, but I am getting quite a bit more than I would with Pair.

Pros: Lots of goodies, Subversion and Ruby on Rails, lots of recommendations

Cons: A little expensive

Conclusion: Like all the packages, Media Temple is a little expensive, but they do seem to offer the most for your money and they are the only host to offer all I want.

So where to go?

Well the obvious place is Media Temple. They give me everything I want for a reasonable price. Of course that price is twice as much as I’m paying now. The other question is when to move. Well the likely time would be over summer. I have the time then and my account with DreamHost will be coming to an end. Until then I just hope DreamHost doesn’t have anymore of the same troubles.

If anyone has any other recommendations then link to them below and I’ll check them out.