UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming Web Hosting Deciding on a webhost for wwwthreads (vservers?)

Hi:
I am changing servers for a project that uses wwwthreads. I have sites hosted on pair and I am pretty pleased (except their lack of support and their restrictions on mailing lists) but I need to find another host.

I've looked at future quest: Seems ok but also has restirctions on mailing lists.
About vservers: On other forums I read both great opinions of them (and they allow the use of majordomo) and also many really bad ones (servers going down mainly).
On this forum some posts gave me the impression that the install of wwwthreads is complicated. On the other hand a lot of people seem to be using vservers, which could help localize and solve this problem. What do you think about them? Any advice will be helpful (and also if you know of other hosts, let me know. I've also read good things of site5.com)?

Thanks

I'd recommend Forsite, their support is pretty responsive, I've been with them for a year and half and haven't thought about changing ever since switching to them from Icom.

Thanks Gerrit
I sent them a question asking if they supported mailing lists and got a reply in 5 minutes (I have never seen something like that)!
Unfortunately they dont have any support for mailing lists, so I have to go on with my search (still waiting for opinions on vserver, I guess many people dont see this particular forum...)

Seems like a very good choice for people who dont need mailing lists

I've been with VServers for about three years now and I've never had any major problems with them.

Setting up WWWThreads on a VServer can be difficult at times because there are some non-standard things that you have to do (i.e. setting up paths properly) but their hosting services are excellent and the offer a competitive price for what they provide.

Simon Wolf,
Webmaster,
Access All Areas
http://www.athree.com

I'm not understanding whatyou need...Most hosts allow mailing lists...are you talking about *content* restrictions? What size lists?

And what sort of site? and bandwidth do you need?

Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]
[email protected]

rlevant
It's not a content or bandwidth problem. Basically I have a drinks recipes site (offline now as we do some heavy redesign) where users send their recipes and we select what we consider is the best one every week. Users can subscribe and receive this recipe by mail (a one way weekly newsletter). I started sending this with a custom cgi script (robmail). Once the list started growing I found that pair (my current host) has a restriction that will kill any process that sends more than 100 mails at a time, to prevent spamming. I suspect other hosts have similar restrictions.

While pair service is ok their support is very bad. I have bought my copy of wwwthreads and I was looking fior a host where their support team is a little bit more responsive, cause I might need tha,t and at the same time, offered a solution for my, now, 3000 people one way newsletter (from what I know even without the 100 mails restriction, cgi scripts as robmail wont work for lists this size and most server doesnt seem to allow their use anyway).

The only other solution that I know is free mailing lists (there may be others that I dont know) but I suspect they sell the users info and dont want to bother users with spam related to my list (I havent made any profit from this site for 3 years and I dont want others to do)

WolfUK
Thanks. Vservers seem to be the ideal solution so far, as they offer majordomo too. I think they price is high but they seem very good (I wanted to know if users think its worth the price...).

Ahh Ok here are some other options for you then..
First let me make a big generalization :

HOSTING services do not consistently give great support. The key in my experience is to be sure you have a 24 hour 800 support number..

Does Pair? have you used it? If they have one and you have not used it I would suggest you stay with pair ...(since you are happy overall...and go to www.tophosting.com and for very little money get one the their accounts which gives you majordom very very inexpensively...you can start with smaller amount of space for lists and upgrade as needed.

Be aware that anything like vservers is BETWEEN having your own server and virtual hosting.

Its better in that it gives you more options and control...
its Not if you dont need those otions and/or have trouble administering your own server.

What I do with my reselling of cihost stuff..is augment customer service (and as a reseller prices are of course higher than if you go to the main page of cihost)
and those add support for stuff people who do community sites seem to need
We do have majordomo...
You would NOT have the level of control you have at Vservers..
or for that matter..iservers

Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]
[email protected]

I wholeheartedly recommend FutureQuest! Honestly, I don't know about the mailing list thing, but you mentioned in a reply below that you want a responsive support team -- it doesn't get any better than FutureQuest. Renee said that hosting services do not consistently give great support -- FutureQuest does. Without fail. Their support forums are open to the public (I have yet to see another host that does that), so you can see for yourself. They are fast, up front, open, honest, and good!

Personally, being painfully aware of the other options out there (we went through four hosts in a year and a half before finding FutureQuest -- and the last three were within four months), I would advise you to find a work-around to your mailing list problem (or even to ask the people at FutureQuest for advice) rather than pass up FutureQuest.

And no, I don't work for them. You can see me posting in their forums as Nemesis, with the status of site owner. []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

FutureQuest: http://www.futurequest.net/
FutureQuest forums: http://www.aota.net/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi

Ok, thanks everybody. The option to host the list in one server and use pair or futurequest seems interesting. I also like the fact that vservers is something in between a host and a dedicated server. I contacted several hosts and hopefully that'll help me decide.

Just to make this thread useful for other people:
About pair: I've used pair for almost two years and the service is good. The only problem is that support (only email. TO me, living in argentina, phone suppport is not an option, even if they had) is very slow and not very helpful. However they take very good care of their servers and the information on their site and good server setup (IMO) helps solving most problems without calling support.
I have read many forums on this topic and never saw something bad about FutureQuest so they must be really good.

And both have mailing list support. My particular problem (and a possible problem for the minority here with non-english websites) is that they require mail confirmation and you can not edit this message. So if a users subscribes to my list from a form in my site, he or she receives a cryptic (bacause it's in english) confirmation mail that they have to reply in order to subscribe....

That should be easy enough to overcome. On your subscription page, display this confirmation message and explain to them exactly what it means and what they have to do when they get it.

[]http://www.amdragon.com/images/eileensig.gif[/]

I do know of a hosting company that is really cheap and has great tech support they helped me install the wwwthreads

http://nomonthly.com/prices.html

FWIW, we used to used vservers for both NT and UNIX hosting. Website on NT, boards on UNIX. The NT server went down so much that we had to leave. The UNIX server has only been down once in the 3 months that we've been using it.
As far as paths, they didn't need any changing on my end, and phpMyAdmin comes preinstalled in the web admin tools. The setup was so easy I thought something was wrong! []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/] I highly recommend them, but just stay off my server! []/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]

You have convinced me nemesis (about FutureQuest), but:
- Is their Gold package (39.95/month, the minimum with MySQL) needed for wwwthreads?
- Are they familiarwith wwwthreads? can they install it? and if not, do you know someone who can install it for me?

thanks!

We've decided to offer some hosting on our dedicated server.

The benefits would be that the server has been set up with all the necessary modules to run WWWThreads including mySQL and PHP4.

Also, I have a fairly good knowledge of WWWThreads after running a version on the site and lots of customising.

If anyone is interested, feel free to reply or send me a private message.

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

Seems like there are a few people starting to do this. Out of curiousity, would anyone be interested in a new area of the Resource Center for offering hosting services? You could put up your listing, modify it, or remove it if you are not taking any new customers.

-------------------
Scream
WWWThreads Developer

Sounds like a good idea Scream.
If you're happy to set one up, I'm happy to add a listing to it. []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

Everybody's happy. I like that []/w3timages/icons/laugh.gif[/]

Socrates
ForumExperts

This is interesting, especially to me, since we actually have a server dedicated solely to w3t. What kind of hosting are you offering? SSH, storage space, FTP, etc?

Hi LoneVVolf

I'm not sure if you're asking about hosting on the server or looking at doing something similar on your own.

So perhaps a little more explanation by me is in order. We have a dedicated server with digitalNation which was hosting only one website. But we aren't using much of the space or bandwidth so recently added 3 more sites to the server. Depending on how much space and traffic they anticipate the sites will use determines the pricing and boundaries applied to the account. We recently purchased 6 more IP addresses and have a couple of sites lined up so there will still be a handful of sites available to be added if anyone is seeking hosting.

The server itself is set up with most of the trappings, an IP for each domain, ftp transfers, anonymous ftp, own cgi-bin, SSI, mysql, php4, perl 5, SSH, pop email accounts, forwarding, aliases etc.

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

Sounds good, except thats a heck of a long-long distance phone cal for tech support []/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]

Socrates
ForumExperts

Very true! Can I give your number instead? []/w3timages/icons/laugh.gif[/]

(By the way, tech support would be via email, that is my contact method to digitalNation as well.)

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

Just my two cents here. This is of interest to me as well.

I'm on CI Host right now, mostly because I already had a good sized space with them for some time, so I'll use it for now. They get bad press from time to time, but are pretty reliable. I do see a latency in their connections with the w3t on line.

I can vouch for FutureQuest. I've not hosted there yet, but have asked alot of very pointed questions and gotten incredibly friendly and accurate feedback. I've even recommended them several times to others. Plus, if you look at their forums, they give w3t the highest rating of any forum software...including the UBB they use now.

I'd like to see Scream work with these folks.....I know they'd like that....they are without a doubt the finest webhosting company I've ever seen.

I can also comment on the WebAxxs/OLM setups. I'm still on their mailing list. When CI Host crashed in Dec'99, they were moving OFF the OLM servers onto their own. OLM hosts alot of Resellers and if you traceroute you'll find the OLM connection often. It is true that OLM and WebAxxs are sister companies. Both have Tech Support in the Conneticut offices. I would highly recommend either, especially if your in the reseller game....excellent prices and service.

Now, who's going to host my little website for $20 a month? I need 2Gb, 8-12 Gb transfer, room for about 20-30 subdomains with FTP on each, maybe access to another 12 IPs for hosting others in our network, plus the usual goodies for CGI, cron, SSI, etc.....OK, OK, I'll give ya' $30 a month.....


" Life is hard, but it's harder when you're stupid ! "

In reply to:

---

Can I give your number instead?

---

Heck yeah! I even have a toll-free number:

(800) 555-3654

I'm lookin' forward to hearing from y'all soon []/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]

Socrates
ForumExperts