Best actinic Host?

[cbarling]

Fair comment Jo.

Chris

[Sean Williams]

An update from us ...
last autumn we began to notice an increase in lag on our sites (shared server with UKFast), which gradually became more pronounced over a couple of months, so that at times I would say our site responses were slow, not fast.
I spoke to UKFast and reading inbetween the guff I got the message they were steering away from shared hosting and concentrating on dedicated.
Not a good excuse for permitting deterioration of their shared offering bearing in mind they market their service on speed, but there we are.
The dedicated server we now have with them has been perfect, as has the 100% uptime and support.
Not sure if I'd want to be in the same server centre as Tesco, NHS, ITV et al - what about DOS attacks?

[cbarling]

Not sure if I'd want to be in the same server centre as Tesco, NHS, ITV et al - what about DOS attacks?

Massive datacentres have a big advantage when there's a DOS attack. The bandwidth connection to the core Internet is so large that the DOS attack doesn't have much impact on it. If your connection to the core Internet backbone is narrower, the DOS attack can take all of the bandwidth and whatever you do within the datacentre doesn't help.

I speak from real life experience. We had a customer a few months ago that insisted that they needed to be set up fast. We did as they requested and it turned out they were already under a DDOS attack. So as soon as they went live they were impacted, but so were other users on that server.

Because the total DDOS attack while huge wasn't able to compromise the datacentre connectivity to the Internet, we installed a massive firewall and started throwing away the packets coming from the offending IP addresses. While I wouldn't say there was no impact, it was contained and eventually the attackers moved on to their next target. More importantly, none of the customers on all of our other servers felt any impact at all. It wouldn't have been such a happy ending if we weren't in the same datacentre as all of these big boys.

Chris

[Sean Williams]

A good point Chris - thanks for the detail.
I have now reversed my position!

I should be a politician

[pinbrook]

inbetween the guff I got the message they were steering away from shared hosting and concentrating on dedicated.

This a good way to cherry pick your clients too. Raise your game and bring good people with you.

[janeread]

I have recently changed to Host-It and taken out their pinbrook 3 hosting package.

They have been fantastic. I was very nervous about moving my site from another company where my Actinic site (for distant historical reasons) was on a Windows server) to them on a Linux server.

They held my hand the whole way; breaking what i needed to do down into manageable chunks for me. Once I'd done a chunk I'd let them know and then they gave me the next bit to do. Absolutey brilliant and my site is much much faster too.

Now they've helped me sort out a problem with Paypal payments going into Pending Payment Provider tab rather than Pending.

This is such a contrast to my old hosting company - when i asked them about moving from Windows to Linux I got the reply "I would not know. We don't deal with the Actinic configuration."

I'd really recommend this company, particularly if you're like me and not very confident about changing hosting companies/ setting up emails etc.

[Jan]

Hi Jane,

We moved from windows to linux a couple of years ago, one thing to watch out for is filenames, linux is case sensitive and windows isn't, we ended up with quite a few missing links because of that - it won't affect any Actinic generated files because they should upload with the correct case but if you have any additional files them double check them.

Regards,

[janeread]

i didn't know that so that's useful info for the future, Jan, thanks.

I actually ran a broken link report once we were on Linux and it was fine.