Topic: Any recommendations for a good hosting company?

[micah]

This may have been brought up here before but I didn't see it with a simple search.

My personal site is up for renewal and, honestly, I’m not really happy with the company I’ve been using for the last 7 years.

They’ve up’d their prices again, reduced their affiliate program’s payout by 95% and recently, when I submitted a simple support ticket request, it took 23 hours to get a response.

I am currently hosting on a “Virtual Dedicated Server” plan, which is still just a shared server but the accounts on it are “partitioned” and you get root access; can configure apache and php; and have your own mysql server (albeit all a little restricted)

As much as I like that feature, I realize I really don’t need a VDS/VPS for my personal site (and the few clients I host on it) and could probably switch to a regular old virtual setup, providing if I can cut costs and still get:
A dedicated IP Address,
ability to host at least 5 domains,
POP3/SMTP,
PHP 5 and MySQL

Any reliable and affordable recommendations?

[ober]

www.ace-host.net

That's who I host through (this site is sitting on it right now).  I'm basically on a shared plan, but I think they've done away with that now.  You might have to ask.  I have never found better support or options.

[hans]

Hey ober, you host multiple domains on with ace-host right?

Do you have multiple accounts or just one that everything's dumped in?

I'm looking to move my website out of my house along with my dad's and also add my brother's. They all have different domains so I'd like to be able to do something like this:

mydomain.com -> /public_html (main account)
dadsdomain.com -> /public_html/dadsdomain
brosdomain.com -> /public_html/brosdomain

I've been watching the videos on cpanel and it looks like if I do the domain parking they all dump into the main account and if I do an addon domain then I get stuck with an ugly subdomain.

So how do have esink setup?

Ideally, I'm looking to mimic apache host aliasing. Would I need to get the host to do that or can I do that through cpanel?

[ober]

I have one main account that everything is dumped into.  And I use "addon" domains for my clients and esink.

my main site: www.whproductions.com sits on /doc_root/public_html/
esink: /doc_root/public_html/esink

Same with all of my other sites (I'm hosting about 10 right now).  I can get to everything through one Cpanel and I can even limit it down to certain parts if I want to give other people logins.

I host all of my domains through www.active-domain.com and I point the domains to the same DNS servers and then the addon domain portion in Cpanel handles the redirection.  I'm pretty sure all of that is done with Apache.  I can do subdomains on addon domains too.  (members.entropysink.com points to /public_html/esink/members).

It's really a sweet setup.  It sounds like it's exactly what you're after.

[hans]

So do you point your domains to use the act-host dns management or do you do your dns though active-domain?
My boss has a hostgator account he's going to let me try and play with. I assume it's the same as long as it's cpanel.

[hans]

Never mind. I got it all figured out, just had to edit my a-record with 1and1 and point it to the ip address. Wait for the DNS to update and voila. Now time to setup and account and move my sites. Beautiful, got something to do for the weekend.