Hi guys! I've been lurking the forums for a while to set up my ubuntu server at home but I have a pretty serious question that I need to tap into the collective knowledge of LQ for, so here's the deal:

My friend and I recently decided we've had enough of working in the corporate world and have recently started a company online. We hired a designer and developer to develop our site in Drupal, which will handle the e-commerce, with Paypal taking care of payments. Development is almost complete and we're a couple months from launch. Now the question is where to host the site.

Our company is just going to be us and a few hired hands to warehouse and ship our products, so we have absolutely no head count to hire a dedicated network administrator to manage our server. So right now my question is, what is a good managed hosting service that we can use to host our website and can manage the maintenance and make sure our website stays up.

We are a small company with funding provided from our own pockets, so costs is certainly important. But we also need a professional service that deliver fast performance and up time. We just need a simple service, maybe even just a VPS, that we can run Drupal and LAMP on. The flavor of linux is not too important.

We looked at the bigger names like Rackspace and Godaddy, but after doing some research it seems their customer service really isn't all that great. Can anyone recommend a service that they have used or worked for that can fit our needs?

Personally I've always had very good experiences with Dreamhost. you can usually get a discount coupon to get the first year for next to nothing.

Thanks acid, your replies are always appreciated!

But I'm a little skeptical about their promises of unlimited bandwidth and they don't mention anything about the speed of the processor offered or the speed of the line, even when choosing to get a dedicated server. Their prices are attractive though, but I'm also afraid it looks more like a unmanaged host than a real fully managed host.

Does anyone have any recommendations for configurations for the LAMP server too? I dont really want to be oversold by the sales people when I call them up to discuss a solution.

Something in the 2ghz-2.5ghz dual core CPU, 2gb+ ram should be good right? I've never worked with Drupal before and do not know how efficient it is with resources (although the materials that I have read point to it being not too efficient and it tends to be heavy on SQL requests). What would be I need for something, lets say, can handle ~50 page views/sec?

I've only use two hosts, but the out of the ones I've looked at, and the one I've been using since last year--Arvixe--seems to be one of the best for flexibility as a programmer and affordability combined. They have good tech support--every time I need assistance I just use their chat-support in real time. It's rare that I can't get immediate support. So far I've never had poor service. Arvixe is worth checking out.

1&1 here. Satisfactory.

When you approach any salesman, be sure that you have given some serious thought to what your needs actually are, and be sure that you can explain them clearly. Don't ask a salesman to advise you what your needs ought to be. (If necessary, hire one or more qualified consultants for that purpose.) Once you know what your needs are, then ask the salesman to give you a quote that will fill it.

Consider "the whole schmeer." Service level agreements, and so on. You want to buy a well-thought-out, soup to nuts, solution.

Thanks guys! Looks like 1&1 and Arvixe seem to be pretty good. I like how 1&1 is pretty upfront about what's included and whats not. But if the tech support from Arvixe is top notch, then I think that's going to be the decider for me.

Being a couple of guys that have zero experience managing and administrating web servers, a good team of tech support from the service provider is going to be very important for us.

One recommendation. Check them out before you commit your project. I pay $7 a month for Arvixe. Experiment for a month--if you get the support you want and have all the tools you need keep them.

Thanks bluegospel, unfortunately I dont think we will have the luxury to experiment for a month, we are expected to go live in about a month.!

And most of these service providers require at least a 1/2yr contract, but I guess down the road we can always use a cheap secondary account as a UAT server to test new developments before going live on the main site.

I'd highly recommend ICDSoft. I've been using them for years to host my Psychocats Ubuntu site and a bunch of sites for small non-profits, churches, and a school. Their customer service is top-notch (answers within minutes), and their prices are very reasonable (no false promises about "unlimited" anything).

Like almost all hosting services, they guarantee a 99.99% uptime, but there was one time when my site was down, and they actually came on the Ubuntu Forums to address the issue:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...3&postcount=11

Whichever you choose, let us know how it goes.

Wow I must say I'm very impressed with ICDSoft on that one! But too bad they don't offer a VPS or dedicated hosting service, or else I'd be all over it!

Thanks guys, I'm glad I asked or else I am pretty sure I would have never found these smaller service providers!