Posted under Hosting
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Tags Hardware, Hosting, Tip
See this post of mine on PCG technical about what I am after, with links to a number of hosters of interest.
More recently Rapidswitch were recommended, also on PCG. They are Maidenhead based, on the cordwallis estate. They offer dedicated servers starting at £45 pm – a better option than a virtualised one. Iomart Hosting are their parent company who also host under their own name.
Here is a copy of my PCG post, the link needs a login or it won’t show:-
I’m also looking for Java hosting. I’ll need to host Glassfish V3 and MySQL (might get away with just Tomcat and MySQL at a pinch, but Glassfish preferred).
I’ve seen companies such as this JSPZone and [DE]Systems Engineering who offer this starting at roughly £25-£30pm, but not sure they are any good. 2020media might be a possible but they are Tomcat only hosting. JSPZone is also hosted in NZ which is perhaps not the most net bandwidth friendly solution for a uk project.
I would prefer having a VPS running Ubuntu or similar that I could install what I like on – quite often I’ll need to install a particular patch release of some or other component in the software stack, and want complete freedom to be able to do this, along with the ability to bounce it all at will. I can also freely add anything else I fancy. Whilst this means more work in terms of building the server image etc. and maintaining it, I feel the extra freedom would be worth it. I’m assuming I’ve understood VPS hosting correctly here and that I can run whatever I like that runs on the target Linux version – please correct me if any caveats here!
For a VPS solution, I’ve seen companies such as Switchlink, UKHost4U and BOD Host offer this for a tad more (of order £35pm) but I have no idea if they are any good.
As well as particular hosting recommendations, I would be very interested if the panel experts know of a good review site that could help. I saw WebHostingStuff here, but was somewhat dismayed to see that 2 of the companies that our good friend Openstrike was rather less than complimentary about actually got reasonable reviews here and here. Obviously I am only interested in review sites whose opinion is, well, worth taking notice of.
I do get the feeling that finding a good hosting provider is about as easy as finding a good plumber or roofer 
I won’t need this for a while yet, just planning ideas well ahead of time. Until I am a lot further down the road I won’t have any figures for bandwidth and space requirements. I presume I can move up from VPS hosting to dedicated server hosting, and also presume that a cloud solution like Amazon EC2 would allow me scaling on demand if I need it (albeit at a premium price). Again, any comments welcomed.
TIA
Steve