Smashing Magazine - we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

use joyent http://www.joyent.com

Man, what I would do for a good dose of the Slashdot and/or Digg effect on my blog!

Good luck with your hosting issues and keep up the good work!

I suggest domainfactory (www.df.eu) or mediatemple

you might take a look at amazon’s elastic server cloud.

I’d suggest Denness Networks, they’re not big names, but they have some serious pipe, as well as original approach to customer.

MT

I have also heard good things about MT.
Hope you find the best solution soon.

(mt) is the way to go!

you guys deserve this issue. I mean the extreme traffic! I love your great lists.

I have also heard good things about MT, but haven’t used them yet. My host has been good to me.

// phill

Why is everyone endorsing mt? I’m desperately leaving them now… though I was on the grid server. Another issue altogether.

I’m not sure what kind of budget you have for hosting, but you might look at SuperbHosting by Superb Internet They have some very good deals on hosting, ranging from shared on up to dedicated boxes, fat pipes with good throughput, and fantastic uptime. I don’t represent the company; I’m just a very satisfied customer who has tried many different hosting solutions and found them to be among the best.

Good luck!

MediaTemple would be great. The best sites are hosted there!

We switched from MT to Mosso and have been really happy. Good support, fair price and an interesting grid system.

Haha what a bunch of loosers posting their “unlimited” shitty webhosts.

Hahaha…..

lunarpages.com
Best customer service out of all of them. If you ever have a problem, sometimes being able to talk to someone who actually cares about your problem is better than fixing the problem at all. They are great and always quick to handle requests and issues.

Good luck.

I am on a mediatemple Dedicated Virtual Server.

Media Temple for sure!

DAThorn.com has been an excellent hosting provider – great service, good prices, mucho redundancy and backups available. I have been with them (in a small way, on a distributed server) for three years now. They are better than ever.

At my work we have some VPS’s through via verio. Their support is fantastic, and any issues I’ve had with the servers has been solved very quickly.

How about powweb.com. I’m a newbie, but they seem to have it together.
http://www.powweb.com/powweb/overview.bml

I’ve been very happy with inmotion hosting

i suggest http://www.liquidweb.com they have great support

Amazon S3 offers very flexible and simple storage – especially when you need more server performance just for a short period of time

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

Have a look at what the other big players are using, Techcrunch uses MediaTemple and lighttpd as a HTTP server.

Have a look at builtwith.com, it will give you all the information you need to make a choice.

Gary

Joyent or MediaTemple. Either would be appropriate, and both have proven performance against slashdotting and the digg effect.

I would absolutely and wholeheartedly recommend uk2.net. Their servers includes a 100Mbit pipe out of the server and 10TB (10,000GB) of bandwidth per month. Their service is very good.

We have had poor experiences with godaddy.com and TERRIBLE experience with 1and1.com.

I recommend XenonServer in Germany they have awesome prices and a very fast support. I never had problems with my webspace there.

I highly recommend Surftownhttp://www.surftown.com. They provide highly reliable hosting and with Smashing magazine they will be open to some kind of patnership.

You can’t really base your solution on a “company” but rather you need to base your solution on your architecture. 99.0% of all hosting companies use the same 3-4 networks. So it doesn’t really matter who you go with as long as they offer 24×7 support. Any of the aforementioned hosts will shut you down in the blink of an eye unless you’re on your own fully dedicated server.

Look for a quad-core dual processor with at least 8 GB of ram *WITH* load balancing. The solution for will cost approximately $900/mo in order to sustain 100% uptime regardless of the “effect”. You’re kidding yourselves unless you consider anything less than dual processor + 8 GB RAM with balancing.

If you’re serious about your site, then look at RackSpace.com. If you’re looking to spend money on a brand and be “cool”, then look at mediatemple.com.

Chris

I have been with Media Temple since Nov 06. I have a GRID server for our company sites and have two DV servers for client sites. I can say without reservation that if you go with Media Temple … go DV. The GRID seems to have never-ending issues, especially with email. I will also say that their tech support is second to none.

Stay away from Fasthosts anyway – always having problems with them and don’t find staff very co-operative. My site along with a few client’s sites have been down the past couple of days because they had to reset all the ftp and mysql passwords due to a security risk. They didn’t send me an email until today to explain what they had done.

Slicehost + Nginx.

I saw this article a while ago:
ThinkVitamin: Surviving the Digg Effect with Amazon Web Services

Their description of Amazon Web Services has me sold if I should find myself in a position to need it. There’s some nuances, but the author seems to cover most of the pros and cons.

Best of luck, thanks for the mag.

Hey guys, I’ve used Media Temple, Dreamhost, Bluehost, Joyent, Slicehost and a few others for serving my various applications. Out of them all, Joyent and Slicehost have been the best for me handling high traffic volumes.

Media Temple has had a lot of issues with downtime and shared servers (dreamhost, bluehost) aren’t the best way to go for something with high traffic.

Been also using MT for years, their partnership offer is great. and saved me from insane bills .Unfortunately I would not recommend their grid system.
I’m currently looking for an alternative.

I’m in charge of six major media website, and we’ve gone through our share of crappy web servers. Under no circumstances would I suggest datapipe, ever. They changed their shared hosting policy, and without any warning whatsoever, they unplugged us entirely. Over the years we spent several thousand dollars with them, and they disconnected us without even a phone call. We scrambled and were running on a new server within a day.

I suggest getting yourself a Dell 2u box, install Debian, and buy a little space at a colo.

MediaTemple, for sure. If it’s diggs / slashdot issues that are the problem, they have this MySQL Burst Container thing that rocks the house for you, saved my butt a few times.

joyent (http://joyent.com/accelerator) and amazon s3 / ec2.

use a CDN for static content.

simplified turnkey products (Dreamhost, MediaTemple) are not likely to scale. Dreamhost PS could work for small to medium sites. http://www.dreamhostps.com/

AMAZON S3

WHY AREN’T YOU GUYS USING IT ALREADY ? I am very very angry at the moment.

Did someone mention Media Temple’s Grid Server!
Don’t bother; it’s useless; my site on Grid server was down (oofline) for more than 7 hours yesterday. Steer well clear of Media Temple–big promises, but sadly just hot air.

I’m also looking for a new host for iLT. Anything but MT.

Have you ever considered getting your own colocated server? :) Just ensure you do your research as to which facility you choose, their connectivity, and their reputation/service. I personally colocate as well as do datacenter sales in arizona, but you should choose whatever site and company best fits your needs.

If not, i recommend http://www.softlayer.com/ for managed hosting, very affordable, lots of neat features, and it was started by the people who used to own theplanet before they got bought out and bastardized.

use pair, they are excellent, and would be suited to what you need. datapipe are overpriced, their customer service is crap, I would also not recommend Cari, as they have the worst customer service I’ve ever encountered. Rackspace are another house of lies, they’ll promise the world, but very rarely deliver. I’ve had really bad experience with everyone but pair…. having said that, S3 or Elastic for your static pages and images would also free up a lot of time for your server side scripts.

I recommend (mt). that’s all.

hope you guys can fix it soon anyway..

I would recommend you to by Fast good linux server and pay for colocation. Keep only one site on it.

I would recommend to check if all these people don’t promote their own service.

Your web site host can’t help it that you guys are so awesome. :D

Keep it up!

Load slowly, really

dreamhost

I agree with TheZero. This has turned into a name drop frenzy. You will find a suitable host after doing some of your own research. Go with a reputable large company who has been around for a while because they have the experience and connections.

Are you guys located in germany? Your current host doesn’t particularly scream quality.

I recommend servint.net – By far the most professional, knowledgable and quickest hosting I’ve used. They’re more expensive than most places, but you DO get what you pay for.

Hello, I suggest http://www.amenworld.com
Is my hosting provider since 2003 and you can have your OWN machine WITHOUT limits of traffic, starting for a very low price.
Right now I’m running a dual core 1000 will 1 gb ram and 2×160gb raid, fedora+plesk for 99 euros / month.

Bye!
Valerio
digitalbook.it

Datapipe.net, layeredtech.com or exabytes.com can be considered. I have bought servers with all three of them and I am pretty much satisfied.

I suggest you name and shame your current provider – they should help you, and then get a mention for being so great.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet since I dont have the time to sift through the comments, but you should check out Wiredtree http://www.wiredtree.com

We used Media Temple for a few years at the firm I work for but we have been having a few issues lately so we are moving over to wiredtree. We have heard a lot of good things about them and done lots of research and found nothing but good things.

I recommend http://www.mediatemple.net too

we saw this webhost guide a while ago,
november coupons…
webhost coupons

We love your website btw, you guys rock :)

Any Filipinos in here?

DreamHost is my only suggestion for web hosting to anyone that asks or needs to know.

:)

I’d like to suggest you start with the obvious. You’re pages are too large. Especially the full page views as are received on the RSS feed. I downloaded the images off of top section of “Icons for your desktop” and the first 17 add up to 1.6 Mb. The rest is probably deadly. Once you add a slashdot and digg factor on that, you’re just asking for trouble. Cut down the number of images, the size, or the quality of them (Camera.png is 278kb) and it should be a good start.

I’m on Media Temple. No complaints thus far.

Try http://www.Hostingpacific.com
I use them for my business and personal website. they are fast and always answer to my questions in less than 30 min. One other peace of advice never and I say never use servage or you will have even more headache as I did

Yeah! What a great idea! Maybe they can just ditch images all together and act like every other mash-up listing site.

The high quality and sheer amount of images is one of the main things that set Smashing Magazine apart from others.

What the heck man. I know that stuff can be expensive, but come on. I need Smashing every day. It’s what I live for the first half hour of my morning. I click enough ads to make up for about 1000 hits a day.

USE THE BEST (mt) Media Temple | http://www.mediatemple.net

So you want them to work for free?

I work on a largish website (around 3million visits a month) and can tell you its a lot of work, why shouldn’t they drive traffic to the ads?

Why not host all your images and media at Amazon S3?
If your host can handle the load then Amazon S3 can handle the bandwidth :)

I’d like to throw in another recommendation for .

I have several sites with (mt) and they all have latency issues from over 6 months. Guess what you can take their support and stick it in the back, I still have 20+ seconds pageload time and they simply do nothing.

The only thing they say is “we are aware” and “we’re working hard to resolve” … pactically nothing happens .. I am gonna swotch soon and I am looking for a good VPS with rails, affordable of course and managed . Any ideas ?
Does anyone has a clue how NetworkSolutions VPS works ? But really I am trying to see what can say someone who has used it not oppinion about the guys.

Ty.

MediaTemple all the way. Kick ass customer service and very reliable.

Support is the most important thing you should research when finding a host or dedicated server. Call the company a few times at different times. Ask a lot of questions. I moved to Server Intellect because I called them 6 times in three weeks and every time someone picked up the phone to help me. It wasn’t some 6 dollar an hour phone room taking a message or opening up a support ticket, it was a live tech ready to help me. You can find a 100’s of server host, but the support is what you want to pay for when it is the zero hour and things need to be running smoothly.