Good shared hosting

[play_]

Does not exist......but unfortunately I need one.

 

So please do suggest.

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

EXTRA

The rest of this post will show shared hosts I've tried, and my the pros and cons about them. So in case someone in the future looking for a shared host and lands here, here's my experience..

 

I've tried:

• godaddy
  
• fatcow
  
• justhost
  
• webfaction
  

 

 

 

Godaddy

--------------------------------------------------------------

Was so long ago, don't even remember why I didn't like them. I just use them to host my domains now.

 

 

 

 

FatCow

--------------------------------------------------------------

Also forgot why I didn't like them. But I do remember the control panel being bad, IMO. there was another reason, I can't remember.

 

 

 

JustHost

--------------------------------------------------------------

Am currently using. Would be perfect if things didn't break out of nowhere. And i can never tell when stuff like this happens is because of bad setup, or just regular with shared web hosting.

 

They offer shell access. Mine stopped working, haven't bothered them about it yet.

 

PDO suddenly stopped working for a certain domain...but not its subdomain. strange. I contacted them, and was told to put this in my custom php.ini

extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613"
zend_extension="/usr/local/IonCube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so"
zend_extension_ts="/usr/local/IonCube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2_ts.so"

extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_sqlite.so
extension=sqlite.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
extension=geoip.so

 

This just doesn't look right to me. Leads me to believe something over there is bad, or they don't know what they are doing. Especially because it only happened for one domain.

 

 

 

 

WebFaction

--------------------------------------------------------------

Trying it out for this month. Went with them because their infrastructure is different than you typical shared host, and also because they offer mod_wsgi.

 

When you sign up, they create a folder with your user name:

/home/<username>/webapps/

 

Basically you create an app (django, ror, php/cgi/static, pylons, etc). Say you name your app "bl0g". This will create a dir under webapps called 'bl0g':

/home/<username>/webapps/bl0g/

 

And if your application is, say a 'mod_wsgi' app, inside 'blog' dir youll get the directories apache2,  bin,  htdocs,  lib, and i would place files in htdocs

 

My PHP app didn't create any of those. I just put files in /blog/ and it gets served

 

 

This host would be great if...

 

1. PDO didn't break. I'm having really weird issues with their PDO. Also, they server nginx on top of apache. This is so if the file being requested is static, nginx will server it, if not, it will pass the request to apache and apache will load the dynamic content. So sometimes i get nginx's 502 bad gateway error. Overall seems like things are messy in their back end.

 

2. $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] returns _. So for example, with the bl0g app above, if i put a file in /blog/ and echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'], it returns

/home/<username>/webapps/_

 

to get around this, i need to create

 

Create ~/webapps/bl0g/set_document_root.php

 

and put this in it:

<?php 
  $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] = '/home/username/webapps/my_app'; 
?>

 

then in my .htaccess, i need to put

<IfModule php5_module>
    php_value auto_prepend_file "/home/username/webapps/my_app/set_document_root.php"
</IfModule>

 

And all this makes me nervous.

 

So my hunt for the perfect shared host continues...

[Philip]

http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,117475.0.html

 

I like site5, they've been pretty good for me.

[play_]

Of course i missed that thread.

Alright, thanks

 

I'll leave this open for people to mention what they dont like about their host if they'd like.

[knsito]

I use

Liquidweb.com

Costs more than the other suggested hosts, but I believe in you-get-what-you-pay-for

been with them for 5 years or so

 

Support is good. Usually respond to tickets in a few minutes. Can call in anytime and get a live person.