DerekAllard.com

There are many great webhosts… but some suck

I might be stuck using one of the crappy ones right now for a project I’m working on.  Seems that they run only IIS (I mean honestly… a professional host without a single *nix box?) and it was just explained to me by their “sales guy” that I should be grateful that they’ll even let me run PHP on one of their boxes “because they usually don’t” but “the tech guy said (I) knew a lot”, and they were an “important client”.

Uh huh. 

I should add that I won a bid wherein I explicitly laid out that I would be using a PHP framework (CI of course) and would require either a MySQL or Postgres database.  It was revealed to me after I won the bid that the fact that I planned to use open source technologies was a major strength of my bid.

The rub?  They’ll provide me with a MySQL database for the low, low price of $100 per month.

“Indeed” was all I could bring myself to say as I politely hung up the phone and told the client to switch hosts, pay these blackmailers, or find an ASP.NET programmer for their pro-opensource project.

sidebar: PHP 4 turned 7 years old recently, and PHP 5 is about to turn 3.  I hope more hosts start adopting more quickly.
sidesidebar: You’ll be shocked to read that this host is giving me PHP 4 ;)

This entry was made on and filed into Noteworthy.

Comments

Yannick wrote on

I use Dreamhost for my personal site and they have PHP 5.1.2 and linux servers, but unfortunately for another site I helped to develop, it’s on an IIS server (though they do have *nix boxes) with PHP4. When I asked if there were any plans to upgrade to PHP5 or at least give their customers a choice between the two, they told me they had no plans of upgrading anytime soon and that I could pay extra to go on a dedicated server and install the latest version of PHP myself. Sigh… that’s obviously not an option right now.

Jon wrote on

Why do you think so many hosts are hesitant to upgrade to PHP 5?

Klaus Burton wrote on

Wow, that is truly ridiculous. PHP is by far the most popular language of its kind, in fact some figures suggest that as of last year it was the 4th most popular language of any (top three were Java, C then C++).
For a webhost to not support it along with MySQL is disgusting and it doesn’t make sense they’re not already out of business

Yannick wrote on

Jon:

I think it has to do with the fact that there is a possibility clients applications may break due to some of the changes made from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

With that said, I’m not sure that’s really an excuse though as I’ve seen hosts successfully allow the user to switch between versions. Even Dreamhost allows you to do it. So if your application can’t work with PHP 5 then you can stick with PHP 4, but if you app does work then at least you have the option to switch to PHP 5.

Cliff wrote on

We want names dammit, who are these heathens who don’t have PHP installed :-)

Cliff wrote on

On second thought no names we want the guilty to remain anonymous and non litigious

Derek wrote on

As far as not offering PHP 5, I think Yannick is right on this one.  The common response I’ve heard (well ok, I’ve only heard 2) is “we don’t want to break our customers applications”.  And to that extent, I agree - there are some incompatibilities between the 2, and other scripts are relying on known bugs to behave the way they do.  In those instances a host would be negligent to just go and change the website platform like that. But its one thing to just change a server on someone, and another thing totally to no even offer it.  I’m anxious to see a faster adoption of PHP 5.

On second thought no names we want the guilty to remain anonymous and non litigious

Yeah, and not to mention that the client is somehow affiliated with the host - I don’t know how, but have you ever heard of a client hiring a programmer for a new web application, then going out and committing to hosting just days before I had a chance to give input?

Ron wrote on

Hmm… sounds similar to something Roy and I have had to deal with a lot recently… It’s like a bunch of guys who said “hey, let’s start our own web hosting business.” and they just turn on a computer in their basement…

xanders wrote on

I just switched from http://www.websitesource.com/ because they told me they had NO PLANS to ever support PHP5 because there control panel system would not support it? (Also I wanted SSH and SVN nope) What a bunch of BS… I now am with Site5 http://www.site5.com/ and they are awesome. They support PHP4+5. You can switch from the default PHP4 by adding AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php to the .htaccess file. Nice. I recommend to anyone for good cheap hosting. And no i don’t have any affiliation with them. Just a happy user

Ankur wrote on

Interesting $100 a month for a MySQL database. As for php4 wow they were going to do that much for you? I’m with a host which has different servers setup for php4 and php5 as well as different versions of SQL. I

@Ron: I know exactly what you mean there are a ton of those type of companies out there already. You have to be careful of who you choose.

I hope the client chose to stay with you and get rid of the blackmailers!

Joe Rodriguez wrote on

Why not try a self managed hosting solution…. I am with serverbeach.com cuz, it allows you to do what you want.

Derek wrote on

Update.  Turns out I’m working with them afterall… uh.

The client convinced them to include a database “as part of the package”.  Now to work around all of the other crappy Windows-server related issues I’ll uncover.

To anyone wondering, believe me if I had the ability to move hosts, I would do it in a second.  I’ve got an awesome host, and I know what it means to have people behind you who know what they’re doing!

Yannick wrote on

Engine Host definitely looks good but the only thing I didn’t quite like was that they don’t have PHP 5. :(