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UK-based hosting recommendations please
After sticking with the new TextDrive grimly for the last few months, the situation is becoming untenable.
The server I am on has repeatedly been spam blacklisted this year, seemingly due to someone else’s account becoming compromised. (Someone who, frankly, should know better.)
So I am now seeking a UK-based hosting company to move a number of my clients to, partly because one of my clients is insisting on being hosted on a UK located server.
Now for the difficult bit – after years of Virtualmin and also having an account with WebFaction, I really dislike C-Panel and Plesk as control panels, so a host that avoids them would definitely be preferable!
I really like SSH access and cron support too for automated remote backups.
I’ve got around a dozen sites and email to host, mainly Textpattern but also ExpressionEngine too.
Much as I would love to be able to cope, I’m not sure I’m up to maintaining a VPS, unless someone knows of an excellent tutorial I can follow ;-)
All suggestions gratefully received.
Last edited by springworks (2013-08-04 16:04:57)
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
I use EasySpace for my hosting – have done for years. Never personally had any serious problems with them. I also have a dedicated server with them, it does have Plesk on it but that was optional extra (I stupidly opted for it but wouldn’t do that again).
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
philwareham wrote:
I use EasySpace for my hosting – have done for years. Never personally had any serious problems with them. I also have a dedicated server with them, it does have Plesk on it but that was optional extra (I stupidly opted for it but wouldn’t do that again).
Do you manage the dedicated server yourself? And if so, do you host email on it?
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
Yes I manage the server myself, and it has email accounts on it, but we don’t allow bulk emailing or anything that could risk getting the server blacklisted.
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
philwareham wrote:
Yes I manage the server myself, and it has email accounts on it, but we don’t allow bulk emailing or anything that could risk getting the server blacklisted.
Thanks for the info.
If you don’t mind me asking, how often do you find that you need to patch/update software on it?
Presumably you need to take the server offline to do that.
What email software did you install and was it straightforward to set up?
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
EasySpace configured the server when we purchased it, so it was already in a useable state.
The server runs CentOS 5.9, and I just make sure the latest official RPMs from CentOS repos are up-to-date by manually running ‘yum’ every few weeks. All updates are performed without taking the server offline (occasionally you’ll need to restart a service such as Apache after an update but that takes a matter of seconds). Apart from that the server pretty much looks after itself (I did do some mySQL and memory performance tweaks when we first set it up – and it could probably be further optimised but is fast enough for my needs).
The email software is Qmail. Because Plesk (v11.5) is on there it is easy to set up mail accounts using the GUI – my feeling is Plesk is a lot better now than it used to be.
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
But never do it on the live server. Heck, on a dedicated server you can simply run VMs on it. Do actual deployments and use something like Puppet. Spin up a VM, run updates to it — test before you change anything on the live server itself. You never know what the updates will actually do, before you test. Gets you habit of doing deployments scalable way too, or are you going to update multiple servers on by one too?
…actually, if you really do get a dedicated server, you might actually even want to just run VMs on it. Allows your websites/projects to have different configurations and requirements, and adds security by omitting access from one project to the other. At same time you can exercise ways to do deployments and updating the right, scalable way, rather than aimlessly copycatting some Linux manual on same popup ads ridden website and running commands on the live server.
Last edited by Gocom (2013-08-07 09:07:50)
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Re: UK-based hosting recommendations please
I’m closing this topic as it has been targeted by bots and spammers. I deleted 15 spammers posting here just this morning.
Yiannis
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