Ultimate Hosting Review: Site5
Posted by hardwarehank, Sun Jan 21 13:59:09 UTC 2007
So, I am currently hosting this blog on Site5’s $5 Deal. I paid $120 for 2 years of hosting with 55GB HD Space and 5TB/month transfer allowance. So far, I am very happy with it, and I’m going to share some gory details with you.
The deal on the site looked to good to be true, and I thought it might be. So far, I haven’t noticed any deviances or misconceptions at all though.
Here’s what it looks like when you log into the Backstage application. This lets you manage your billing, domains, and contact info, and acts as a gateway into your site management systems. Very Nice!
Then, you can go to each site just by clicking its name. Each site has its own SiteAdmin interface which gives you pretty amazing abilities.
You can manage MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin, see all the Ruby and Perl libraries they have installed, mess around with FTP junk, automatically create about 30 applications, manage files, and lots lots more.
Also, there’s a little tool called FlashBack that I get to beta test for them. It auto-saves the state of your directory so if you delete files or whatnot you can restore them easily. Pretty awesome.
Shell access is enabled by default, so you don’t have to mess around with support on that one. I transferred my domain name to them, and they have a flat rate of $8.88/year for domain name registration. That’s fine with me. Also, if you need SSL, even if you can generate your own certificate like I can (CACert), it still costs $15 to install it on the server. Personally, I don’t want to pay for it, so I’m SSL-less right now. Oh well, I don’t need it anyway.
All in all, these guys blow away Dreamhost, which I had for the past year. Dreamhost cost me twice as much, and their server had very slow network performance for me. The fastest I ever saw was 100K/sec, and usually it was around 40K/sec. Unacceptable. Also, as far as I can tell with ps, this shared host is not as overloaded with people as Dreamhost’s. Dreamhost’s MySQL setup is lame (you have to create a ton of subdomains for no apparent reason), whereas Site5 you always use localhost, speeding installations along. I managed to transfer my entire old SVN checkout of Typo over here, and the only trouble I had was trying to remember to cross my T’s and dot my I’s on the FastCGI/Apache environment. It’s too bad I can’t just run mongrel instances and do Apache forwarding like I used to, but as long as it runs, whatever.
Score: 9/10
Site5 has done a wonderful job so far, and I don’t see it going downhill soon. They make a wonderful Rails host, and I’m proud to be a customer.
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