My once-splendid hosting service has deteriorated greatly in recent years, and about has me at wit’s end now (cough cough MacHighway cough cough.) I’d be interested in any testimonials of alternatives from satisfied users. Replies can certainly be private if the moderators would prefer.
Quality of design tools is an issue of course, and a must-have is FTP access for posting software for visitor download.
I’m a big fan of DIY with Lifeboat and Digital Ocean. Lifeboat can set up your server and host totally normal websites even though I’m always talking about it for Xojo Web apps.
✓ SFTP is included (since you can SSH)
The DIY life isn’t for everyone, but I’m always happy to answer questions!
Big fan of DigitalOcean too along with Cloudflare edge caching.
LifeBoat + AWS Lightsail
Never had a problem…Now that I said that, I’m sure AWS will go down world-wide.
You are getting a lot of good recommendations here, and I would also suggest going the DIY vps route.
I have used several and all of the top providers including Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr and others provide pretty good service.
There was a blog that I followed for a long time that did a really good job benchmarking the different providers - but unfortunately they stopped doing the benchmarking last May. The benchmarks might still give a good idea at the quality of service between the providers.
My favorite cost effective VPS was the Vultr High Frequency service. It always performed well, and over the course of the above blogs many months of benchmarks, it always ranked at the top or very close to the top month in and month out.
One thing to note, Linode was purchased by Akamai, and it seems as though they really have poured in some resources to help step up Linode’s game in their offerings.
Tim’s Lifeboat application is also highly recommended. I used to perform the setups without it - but it really is a game changer in taking some pain points out of the equation…
I have used Pair for 20 years. It works well, and issues are fixed very fast. You have access to FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SSH, etc. The link above brings you to the price list and is supposed to give a 20% discount. I use a Dedicated Server with custom memory and HD. In the past I used shared hosting.
—
Stan Busk - Software Engineer
at www.maxprog.com
Thank you to all who replied. I have lots to chew on