[pmwiki-users] web hosting questions / offtopic

Russ Fink russfink at hotmail.com
Sun Jan 28 09:26:54 CST 2007


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.

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