Hi DV,
Yeah I checked through your list a couple of times when I was hunting for alternatives - thanks for making it available.
I couldn't find a suitable replacement host although I did write directly to 3 of them with sets of questions. Ultimahosts has an interesting "Integrated" VPS account that could possibly be made to do do everything with a little work. I'll definitely be continuing to look around other hosts during the 6 months I've paid in advance at WH4L now. hmm.. mind you, that account only provides 200Gb monthly bandwidth where my VPS at WH4L gives me 500Gb. Thats the sort of detail that one needs to check for as well.
In fact, one of the problems that is not visible in the chart is just how well and reliable a site will run on any of the shared accounts. These accounts with masses or unlimited bandwidth don't actually deliver on the promise. The overall responsiveness and reliability of a site on a server shared with hundreds of sites makes running a high-usage site completely impossible. It doesn't matter how much space or bandwidth one has when 300 other sites are fighting for it and 10 of them are also regularly causing the server to fall over. Whilst working on my own sites, I could always tell when someone else was recompiling or when someone's site had hung or when LA went to work in the morning.
There is a clue in the fact that none of the hosts offer unlimited bandwidth on their VPS or dedicated accounts... they just wouldn't be able to. With the shared accounts, one is basically getting the performance required for 3-4 well-running sites spread across 300 or more.. or alternatively, like your dad saying you can have unlimited use of the family car, but you have to share it with your fifteen brothers and sisters. It just doesn't work.
In the case of building and running DNN sites it gets much worse. DNN is so resource hungry that servers that could happily run a few hundered conventional sites get totally crushed under the load of a few DNN sites starting up. Just compiling a site after a module install can bring everyone else' sites to a halt for a few minutes.
I did get nearly 3 years of running 8-10 sites out of the Wh4L Premium Shared account, but the overall performance and reliability was just terrible. I have a hundred or so unresolved support tickets to show for the bother. They are unresolved because there was really only one unstated answer: Buy an account with dedicated resources.
Another issue that is not visible in the numbers is the performance of the email servers and the db servers. When my sites went down, I'd have to then determine which server was actaully causing the problem and it was often the overloaded db server. Any host that gives out huge volumes of db space is basically saying that you're going to be sharing the server with hundereds or people.
Email servers can be useless if for example you have clients who require ther ability to send or receive large emails. I have two clients who run photo printing services and require this. Their customers will usually send their photos when they are home in the evenings and so the files need to reside on the mail server overnight. Having unlimited accounts available is of no use when each one can only hold a couple of 6Mb image attachments plus a ton of spam.. 20Mb or less all up. It's just not workable as a commerical service.
It goes on... loads of monthly bandwidth available is of little use when the flow of data from the server is so slow that one cannot even begin to utilise it. It's like an ISP saying you get 100Gb of monthly data on your 4Mbps account.. but then you find out you can't even download a tenth of it at the speeds delivered. I found that (when it was running properly) the shared account at WH4L would deliver about 1/4 -1/10 the outgoing data-rate of the VPS account I now have. When I queried them on this, they said they don't limit the shared accounts in any way... so one can only assume that it's the overloaded servers that just can't pump it out fast enough.
There really needs to be more hosting choice in the mid-range.. where there is now very little available. This would be a shared account that promises to only share with say 50-70 sites. I would have been happy to pay double the cost of my account for a just a bit more of the server resource.. enough to make things run smoothly all the time. Instead most hosts only offer two services... shared with hundereds for cheap.. or shared with no-one for heaps of money... nothing inbetween. I'm betting however that this will all change with the multi-core CPUs and virtualisation technology coming along fast now.
The best I came up with for people like me who want a managed service is this:
- Single/multiple hobby DNN site: Any host recommended in this thread
- Single serious DNN site: PowerDNN, but beware of the low bandwidth included
- Multiple client DNN sites: WH4L VPS
- Multiple client DNN sites plus other services (PHP etc): WH4L Advanced VPS
I'll keep an eye on Ultimahosts and will check the list again in a few months and hopefully there'll be some more movement in the market.
Regards,
Rob