[pmwiki-users] web hosting questions / offtopic

[The Editor]

On 1/28/07, Russ Fink <russfink at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My sincere apologies for going off-topic, but in order to provide the
> superior interactive user experience as compared to "flash sites" or flat
> pages, the PmWiki software has some requirements that other software might
> not, and so I would like to solicit your experiences.
>
> This past week, my wife purchased a business and premiered a website at the
> same time on one of these lower cost (not bargain) hosting providers.  I
> signed up because the site looked good, it had guarantees, live chat
> support, a ticket system, and offered high bandwidth.
>
> Since then, the site has been down - an outage in excess of 15 minutes per
> incident - on at least 3 occasions in the past 3 days.  Not very good when
> you're trying to build wiki content.  Yesterday, for instance, the techs
> said that they were going through a data center migration, and that all the
> work was done - but then at noon, the site was down again for a half hour.
> When it hasn't been down, it's been slow.  This causes things like the
> PmWiki default skin, which uses tables, to pop up the sidebar full-width
> until the main page loads in, causing at best user confusion.
>
> The site I'm running is informational, and it's low bandwidth.  I'm using
> the CMS-like, AuthUser, and google maps recipies, and I'm highly pleased
> with the results; I have certain users as editors, they get to see certain
> screens that the normal visitors do not need to see, edits are properly
> locked down, and even RSS feeds (though the owner doesn't want this) are
> properly constrained.
>
> Can someone please point me to a reputable provider that offers the kinds of
> things PmWiki needs - I'm still tweaking the CSS and would like to have SSH
> access, and also I'm using some rewrite recipe so I'd like .htaccess as
> well.  I don't want to resort to virtual servers.  (I read Patrick's thread
> from 2005 when he went to apollo hosting, but the lower end plans from
> apollo are somewhat spartan.)
>
> Also, for performance, am I better off seeking providers that offer low
> bandwidth as opposed to those that offer high bandwidth?  I'm wondering if
> I'm co-hosted with high bandwidth sites, is that causing me a performance
> problem?
>
> If there's a mailing list for this kind of thing, can someone please point
> me to that?
>
> Thanks,
> Russ
>
> PS: I tried Google.  One of the annoying things is that there must be a
> consortium of hosting providers that stands up puppet sites with names like
> "the-worlds-best-hosting-providers.com", and pay bazillions in adwords,
> which then only seem to point you to a select group of 5 providers, probably
> all managed by the same parent company.  There was even one site that you
> could click on providers by state - but all states pointed back to the same
> 4 or 5 providers - and the provider I'm unhappy about is, ... guess what...
> one of those 5.  If anyone cares to see my site, it's
> www.finalscoreohio.com.


About a year back I did quite a bit of research into various ISP's and
settled on BlueHost primarily because it seemed to have first rate
customer support.  I have not been disappointed in the least.  I'd
recommend looking there, though there are probably others that are
also good, and you will likely get a barage of other suggestions from
the list...

Cheers,
Dan