Need new host ASAP - Please Help!

Hi,

I've been running vbulletin forums for over 3 years now. Our community has started to pick up some momentum these last 8 months. Unfortunately, our database keeps going down and we have to wait for our host to reset it, which sometimes takes a few hours (on the weekends, quite a bit longer). We've contacted our host numerous times on this, but there isn't much they can do. Their core competency is eCommerce (which is what we use them mostly for) and are a stricly Windows based host, and they were really just doing us a favor by installing MySQL and running vBulletin on their server for us.

So, I'm currently looking for a new host. We've been running vbulletin on Windows, which I think is a lot of our problem, and would like to move to a Linux based server running Apache. Any comments on this are more than welcome

What I'm looking for is:

a) It's a reliable company with 0% downtime and FAST servers
b) they're experience with vbulletin and Wordpress Blogs hosting (vb more importantly)
c) they have 24-7 phone tech support
c) we can pay them extra to do the move for us

I'm thinking either a Shared or VPS server. Thoughts? I'm not really that experienced in this area so I can use all the help I can get.

I saw the following thread:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21342

But with currently 356 posts ranging from 2001 - 2008, it's a bit difficult to tell which ones are the ones to look into.


We have a decent amount of traffic. No where near a big board though. I'd like to have a host that has plans that allow me plenty of room of expansion because we're a steadily growing community. I'm not sure if this matters, but we currently use Plesk.


So far, for the month of March, there was 10.37 GB of traffic. For the month of Feb., there was 9.13GB. Looking through all of my previous months, it looks like we're growing by an average of between .5 - .8 GB a month. I'd let you know all of my stats on my forums, but my board is down (and has been since about 10am CST yesterday).

[Brandon Sheley]

I've been with www.fluidhosting.com for a year and they are the best host I've ever had.

You might check at www.webhostingtalk.com, it's a hosting forum and has tons of information.

cheers
-Brandon

What's your budget?

I've been using http://www.powervps.com for just over two years now, and they've been great. Bandwidth is never an issue, as you can see - my site does a LOT of transfer.

[sweeps78]

Thanks! That's the second recommendation now that I've had for PowerVPS.

I wasn't really thinking VPS was right for us at first, but 39.95 isn't really an issue (http://www.powervps.com/linux-vps.php). I'll have to look into this a little more in detail for all of their packages starting at 39.95. Any suggestions I'd appreciate because I don't have much experience here.

--------------- Added [DATE]1205770172[/DATE] at [TIME]1205770172[/TIME] ---------------

What's your experience with Tech Support with PowerVPS? Phone? Tickets? Documentation?

Do you know if they'd move all of our files over for us?

[Dabbi]

IME there is no such thing as "no downtime" but you can get pretty darn close and if you're lucky get a web host that makes it up to you if/when it does happen.

Anyway, after doing some research we finally went with Crissic.com. They're still pretty new but I'm super pleased with them so far.

They have fantastic customer service and excellent prices. For the same price I was paying at HostICan for a VPS I now have a dedicated server with even more memory, storage, etc. The owner knows his stuff and has fantastic staff as well... they even gladly moved my site from the old host to them and did so without a hitch. As someone who's new to this admin stuff the Crissic folks have also been extremely patient and helpful.

[Lpspider]

Most VPS's take a few days to set up.

If you're looking for shared hosting, I'd go with www.asmallorange.com. If you're going with a VPS, however, I'd recommend www.liquidweb.com. I don't know if either would do the move for you.

[IronMountain]

Originally Posted by sweeps78

a) It's a reliable company with 0% downtime and FAST servers
b) they're experience with vbulletin and Wordpress Blogs hosting (vb more importantly)
c) they have 24-7 phone tech support
c) we can pay them extra to do the move for us

I have some little tidbits on your requirements:

1) 0% downtime is impossible, there will always be some downtime. Typically good uptime would be about 99.95% or better.

2) 24-7 phone tech support is often not offered by the best companies. Most of the companies that do offer 24/7 tech support use outsourced help in non-native English speaking countries. In addition, 24/7 tech support is usually handled by Level 1 techs. Instead, you should be considering companies with good support 24/7 via email or support tickets. By requiring 24/7 phone support, you are limiting yourself mostly to large corporations who consider your account to be just another number.

3) Most good companies will do the move for you free.

If you don't know how to manage a VPS, it may be better to go with quality shared hosting or semi-dedicated service.

Good luck in your search.

[sweeps78]

thank you everyone for your replies.

I wanted to go with PowerVPS, but decided against it because I couldn't get ahold of them. I called, left a message and no one got back to me. Their loss.

Anyways, I called a few companies and one that I really liked was knownhost. They have a lot of vbulletin customers, and have 99.979% uptime & good tech support (from what others have told me). Unfortunately, they, along with all of the other VPS companies I contacted will not do the migration for me, even if I pay them extra $$. Does anybody have anything good/bad to say about them?

So, I was recommended to check out websitemovers. I heard a lot of good things about them around the net (along with one guy two years ago that insisted to cover the Net with the same bad review). Has anyone had any recent experience with websitemovers?

[sweeps78]

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I went with knownhost and am having websitemovers do the migration. So far the experience has been incredible! I thought this was going to be a huge PITA, but it's looking like just the opposite.

Anyways, I wanted to mention this so that no one wastes any time with suggestions to me.

thank you for all of your help!

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Originally Posted by sweeps78

Anyways, I called a few companies and one that I really liked was knownhost. They have a lot of vbulletin customers, and have 99.979% uptime & good tech support (from what others have told me). Unfortunately, they, along with all of the other VPS companies I contacted will not do the migration for me, even if I pay them extra $$. Does anybody have anything good/bad to say about them?

They only do the migration if you have Cpanel on your previous account. Glad to know you have moved to them, I have been hosting my sites on their reseller plan for over a year now and its been mostly good.