People regularly ask me where to host their websites. This is pretty much what I tell everybody.
RackSpace Is The Best
Unless You Don’t Want To Pay For Managed Hosting
Or You Want Ruby on Rails Support
An entry level server at RackSpace will cost you about $500/month. If you can afford a managed, dedicated server, and your are working with PHP host with RackSpace. I have several servers with RackSpace and have been working with them now for over 5 years. The service, support, and reliability are fantastic unless you intend to host Ruby on Rails applications. RackSpace does not “officially support” Rails. When you are talking to the sales department they say they will help with Rails issues even though it’s not officially supported. My experience is that you are totally on your own with Ruby on Rails at Rackspace.
RimuHosting Is The Best For Non-Managed Servers
The Best VPS, Semi-Dedicated and Dedicated Servers
So if you want to run Rails apps or you don’t need a managed dedicated server, host with RimuHosting. This blog is hosted at RimuHosting and for the past 2 years I have had both VPS accounts and Dedicated servers there. The uptime, performance and reliability has been extremely good although not quite flawless. There was one time when one of my semi-dedicated VPS accounts was unavailable for about an hour and it was not a scheduled maintenance period. Even with that one blip in the service, my overall experience has been excellent and I highly recommend RimuHosting if you want a VPS account or a non-managed dedicated server. The support is extremely fast and helpful – albeit via email only. I prefer email though, as long as it’s attended to promptly. In your customer control panel, you can see the status of your support ticket, how long it has been since you have submitted it, whether or not anyone is working on it, etc. It really is better than phone service in my opinion.
HostICan
The Best Shared Hosting Package I’ve Ever Seen
If you just want a low cost shared hosting account, I have never seen a package that is better than the BaseHost package with HostICan. It is $6.95/month and you get 2,000 GB – yes about 2 Terabytes of data storage. You can host 2 different domain names and get a free domain name for life when you sign up. The free domain name is at least worth the cost of one month of hosting each year. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If you want a WordPress blog, the WordPress software is already there and ready to go. So this is great account to have if you want to host your own blog. You can even get SSH access but that adds a little to your monthly cost. They no longer support Ruby on Rails. But, if your building Rails apps, get a VPS account at RimuHosting.
