VPS Hunt
I’ve been looking into VPS hosting a bit more and found a few well-recommended providers:
- ServInt
- LiquidWeb
- Zone.net
- PowerVPS
- Hostmaven
- MediaTemple’s Grid-Service and Dedicated Virtual services.
- RimuHosting
ServInt especially seems to get a lot of kudos, but I know MediaTemple is very popular with the designer crowd. And by looking at my site you know I’m a developer not a designer. 😉 A designer friend of mine uses and likes RimuHosting a lot.
GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Server
Personally, I have months of hands-on experience with GoDaddy’s VPS offering, which is pretty inexpensive, and clients have heard of them (or at least seen their SuperBowl commercials). Price is good, performance is ok (not great), but it’s a very no-frills offering, and you have to be prepared to administer the server and manage backups yourself. Most of their VPSes are Linux, so you’ll be using the shell a lot, but they also offer a Windows 2003 VPS with 10GB of space starting around $40/mo, so you can Remote Desktop into that.
You can pay for better control panels, managed backup, etc., but then the price starts to get into the $60-$100+/mo range, at which point you may want to look at one of the above VPS providers instead.
I also don’t know whether they offer any kind of quick upgrade path, in case your site suddenly gets popular and you need to move your VPS to a big dedicated box pronto. I kinda doubt it.
Rolling Stones Gather No … Mosso?
Other than VPSes, I was also intrigued by Mosso‘s offering — hybrid hosting allowing you to run PHP and ASP/ASP.NET sites in the same set of files. However, I don’t really care so much about running PHP & ASP side-by-side, since if I really have that kind of blend I might just get two VPSes (one LAMP, one Windows). I was more interested in their focus on making it easier for development companies to provide turnkey hosting and 24×7 tech support services for their clients.
However, they don’t support ASP.NET 2.0, which for me is a dealbreaker — I’d be doing my clients a disservice if I didn’t give them the opportunity to upgrade ASP.NET 1.1 sites to 2.0 — development is faster & easier, features are better, and performance is greater. Plus I have several .NET 2.0 sites already.
