A friend and I are working on our first foray into the world of site owners. We've got a concept for a metasearch engine and pretty much have someone to build it for us. The problem now lies with who to host with. The person that is likely to build the site for us has suggested getting a dedicated server and we have considered virtual servers but I'm thinking shared servers may be more in our price range. A) How much hassle does that create with potential crashes and how big are the hidden risks (Google pinging us because we live in a 'bad neighborhood) B) Who would you pick as a host (I've seen hostgator mentioned a whole lot but they appear to be amongst the more expensive hosts in the quick search I did today. Any help you can give will be appreciated and please feel free to graffiti the google doc in any way that it suits you.
Not sure how exactly you are going to run the search engine (what types of scripts and such), but if they are resource intensive, you're going to get kicked off of any shared host. That is most-likely why the person has suggested a VPS or dedicated server. Completely agree that shared hosting probably isn't appropriate for this.
Hi WSWD, We were looking to host the scripts on the server and do everything remotely. I hadn't thought about the resources it would consume that's a good point.
I dont think you require a dedicated hosting plan instead you could go for VPS plan and you will easily get host of your choice at very cheap price as hostdepartment.com is offering web hosting at the price of Shared hosting.
Definitely seems like you won't be able to be on a shared environment. I'm not too sure about the specifics but search engines will be resource consuming. I would consider maybe starting off on a managed VPS with a decent amount of RAM and CPU and going from there.
VPS is the way to go for your project. When selecting a host you may want to find some reviews and read them. Base your decision on up time and support. If you are only looking at price then you may end up hopping around and wasting time once you discover that low prices on one end will cost you big when you need help. It may also help to choose a company that has live chat. This is a great option for simple, fast and easy answers.
How can you possibly say that when you have absolutely no idea what the resource usage is going to be? Care to elaborate for everyone why a VPS is the way to go?
I wоuld suggest Hostgator аѕ well fоr starting out. In fact I still use them fоr ѕеvеrаl of my small sites. Haven't hаd muÑh down-time аt all, and support is fast аnd helpful. Once I hаd onе of my sites hacked, and thеу werе аble tо fix Ñ–t Ñ–n а matter оf minutes.
I'm emailing them with a presales question at this very moment. The person building the site for us has strongly recommended hostgator too.
In your spreadsheet you have included all massively oversold hosts offering unlimited space/bandwidth. These hosts have higher restrictions on CPU usage, RAM usage, Number of processes, number of MySQL connections than a non oversold , non unlimited host. There are hosting companies cheaper than the Unlimited ones which offer better resources other than space / bandwidth. You can always start off with shared hosting, then upgrade to a VPS and then to a server / cloud. Find a company which offers all so they can help you as you grow. Ishan
So you don't spin your wheels with Hostgator and whatever other "unlimited" shared hosts out there, ask the developer what the resource usage is going to be. He should be able to tell you the amount of RAM, a general estimate of CPU, etc., that the site (and scripts) will use. From there, you can see if shared hosting is appropriate or not. If your scripts use any appreciable amount of CPU or RAM (or too many MySQL processes for that matter), you're going to be kicked off your shared host, and will be back to square one, trying to find another provider.
Selection of web hosting company is always a problem for a new site owner. There are many companies that offer web hosting services. But onlinecares is better than many of others because of its 24/7 help centers and utilities.Private Java Web hosting machine is available as an additional benefit with their hosting plan.
As WSWD has said, unlimited is just a marketing term, because whenever i hear the word unlimited i always say "have you heard of a unlimited sized harddrive before"...
Just thought I would add my 2 cents here... Since you are creating a "metasearch engine" you won't be doing any spidering of sites to build an index. This means to me your requirements will be fairly modest. Your main concern should be that your hosting has 100MB connection from the server so you can query the other search engines and get results back quickly for your visitors. Since you don't know what resources will be needed, I suspect you don't have a business plan at this point. So you really don't know what you are doing or how many things will work, such as marketing and promotion, and how to deal with search engines that block your server because you are sucking too much of their bandwidth, if you are lucky enough to become popular. That's ok, because you have your dream and should not let anyone stop you from going for it. Since you don't know where the money is going to come from, how much, or when I suggest you design your site so it can "scale" or get bigger as you need it to. A dedicated machine is great, but it will cost you and then you have a single point of failure. My approach would be to use cheap hosting to start with, and set it up so that you can add hosting accounts as you need more capacity. Spreading out the hosting will allow your users to use servers that are closer to them or that respond faster to their requests. And if a server goes down your site should still stay up because it is distributed. Are you going to cache results at all? This can help you to serve pages faster and reduce the number of times you are hitting the other search engines. My last question is have you done market research? Dogpile.com has been around for many, many years, but I don't think many people use them or even know about them. Someone must, because they keep hanging in there. I hope you have something that makes your site better than them or any of the other obscure metasearch engines. Good Luck!