My Question on Support site for LampCMS project
Hello everybody.Sometimes people ask me to recommend a good hosting options to host Lampcms.
Just want to share my personal experience with the iweb.com hosting.
About 7 months ago I switched from softlayer to iweb.com because iweb had a much better deal on a dedicated server. I got a dedicated server for $89.00 a month. It has 8Gigs ram and 2 hard drivers about 300 gigs each.
This is enough to a very high traffic Q&A site including having MongoDB installed and Nginx or Lighttpd or Apache server. Since support.lampcms.com gets very low traffic, I can also host other sites on the same server. I actually let my son host minecraft server on it too, so he does not have to pay for any minecraft hosting.
Anyway, I was skeptical at first about iweb, the reviews were mixed - some good, some bad. But now after 7 months of continues uptime I can honestly say that iweb is a pretty good host.
Recently I had an issue where I could not get extra ip addresses to work on the server. I mean they gave me 1 primary and 4 additional addresses when I signed up. I only was using one, but when I tried to start using other ips they were just now working. So I opened a support ticket and turns out they gave me wrong ip address blocks. After some investigation they just gave me different ips and they work.
I was surprised when I was a charge of $18 for their 15 minutes of support time. I thought I did not have to pay for this since the issue was entirely their fault.
So I emailed them and they replied the next day saying that they are agreeing with me and credited my account.
I think they did the right thing.
So now I can feel good about recommending iweb as a good choice for hosting lampcms sites. You get dedicated server, you have to install everything yourself - it only comes with CentOS linux. Make sure you get 64 bit Linux. Then use YUM installer to quickly install MongoDB, Lighttpd.
Then use yum to install libxml and any other library you may need to build your php. Then download the php source and build it yourself using the usual configure, make, make install.
The bottom line is you can get a really nice server for under $100/month. They are running specials from time to time so you can get a server for like $59/month
It is cheaper that Amazon cloud EC2
By the way, the www.lampcms.com is hosted on Google App Engine and it written in JSP and some custom Java Servlet that I wrote. The reason for that is because App Engine is free for small low-traffic sites and it case I have to move supportl.lampcms.com to another server again at least I will not have to move the www.lampcms.com site - it sits comfortably on GAE.
The small custom servlet I wrote just reads the contents of the lampcms.zip file and reads the version file to figure out what is the latest release date and release version to show on download pages.
Another servlet is for streaming the phptest.php so it is downloaded by browser as a file and not just show the source code in the browser.
The rest of the pages are just basic JSP pages, basically just html, no dynamic logic there at all.
PS. I plan to try to install Lampcms on AWS EC2 (the free version of cause), and also I like the OpenShift cloud options, they have a free version of small instance that I think will be enough for hosting a small Q&A site. I'll share my experience with these after I make Lampcms site to run on these cloud hosts.
What about you? Do you have any hosting company that you can recommend for inexpensive dedicated server that can be used for hosting LampCMS site?
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