I know the topic of 'whos the best host for Dolphin' has been done to death and always brings back a complete mix of responses...!

But, what i would like to know is -

Has anyone had a positive experience with a host who has made all the reccomended changes to speed up Dolphin as posted in the blogs recently as well as within D7.0.3

Im looking for a host for a new site, clean install as well as upgrading my existing sites but want to get the server right first. No point in doing the sites on a sluggish server, then finding the server crashes with the changes....

So, any feedback from those who've taken the speed plunge?

Even better - any hosts who offer servers with all the changes already in place for 500% speed increase! ..!

Hope for some clear answers...!

daihlo

Hi Daihlo!

Hostgator is a very good hosting company

you will get support 24/7 and live chat support you don't have to wait more then 5 mints in the live chat support and you can open tickets and get respond in 3hrs or less I have hostmonster before and is a pc sht man the support is totally bad they take for ever on the live chat and everytime when they update your site come down or give you some database errror

Bad Hosting

TMD Hosting

Hostmonters

Good Hosting

Hostgator

Godaddy

Arvixe

Good Luck man

I  recommend  GigPros. These guys rock..... great Reliability  and prompt 24/7 support.. They are the best web hosting I've ever had.

And like UFO360 said...Stay away from Hostmonster. I used them before and they suck big time! VodaHost  also sucks I don't recommend them either.

When I was shopping for hosting I came across this....  http://www.web-hosting-top.com/ You should find this helpful.

When you have a registered company you can use pier1 - whm servers. I'm testing on a shared hosting with co-location to whm servers in Canada and the site has been faster than most the others. These are the servers where you tube had it debut.

Like anything, you get what you pay for. Shared hosting will always suck unless you are building a 5 member site. VPS or dedicated will get you the best performance but costs more. I personally use HostForWeb VPS. Works well for me....

Hi,

as most of all here probably have done, we also had several hosting companies, from Arvixe to Hostgator and now to HostforWeb.

We are very pleased with HFW, but of course, we run a dedicated server; when what we requested was not available with XEON, they gave us a better machine for the same price...Support is great and always available.

As for the tunning of the server, HFW will give you exactly what you ask for, within their range of competences; so later on, to have the server as good as it could be for our site,  we did prefer to rely on a third partie, so we had Dolphinbugfix to do the server tunning (remeber hosting companies do not tune up your scripts...). All running smoothly now, do not expect to have the need to change hosting that soon :)

Regards,

Hello Daihlo,

First and foremost i must disagree with Skyforum with the statement you get what you pay for for the simple fact i paid a pretty penny to TMD hosting and ended up in a nightmare. Honestly the first month was great they helped me with the transfer and got everything up and working there was a couple of glitches however they did help me get it all worked out.. During the first month of service when ever i had tech issues ie, the server was down or something similar they always e-mail me back within 10 min however once the first month was over wow is all i can say. I was suppose to have unlimited bandwidth and traffic but when i logged into my cpanel i noticed that I had a limit i e-mail them and ask them why was it showing that i had a certain amount to use and they said there was an issue with my cpanel and they will get it resolved asap....come on now and issue with my cpanel...haha good one.

A month or two go by and i contacted them to help me install a mod. i provided all the info that they needed to do so. Well in my letter to them it went something like this....Hello I'm having trouble installing "example" mod can you please help me install it the mod is located in my NEW MOD (which is how this folder looks on my ftp I made it all caps so that i would be easier for me to locate from all the other folders read their reply below....

ello,

Thank you for contacting TMDHosting Technical Support Team.

First of all, I would like to kindly ask you to restrain from using capital letters in your correspondence with our support team, since this is considered shouting, impolite and offensive by the internet etiquette.

Your request will now be escalated to the Senior Support Team for further processing and assistance in this matter.

Thank you for your patience in the meantime.

Best Regards,

Technical Support Team
TMDHosting.com

After I received that letter stating that they were sooo offended whenever i submitted a help ticket it would take them days to get back at me to where it use to take no longer then to min or so...I was upset by this and wrote them a letter and ket them know that was unprofessional the way that they handled the situation and i switched to Host Gator....I feel not only is great hosting a must but efficient and friendly customer service goes along with it especial since we are paying for the service. So short story shorter inexpensive but GREAT 27/7 live chat tech support i'd go with HostGator!!!!

Thanks everyone, lots of varied replies as I expected!

Im currently on a shared hosting with HFW and actually theyve been very good. Couple of things had to be worked through at first but they stuck with the support and sorted things out and its all been good.

I have 2 sites running, 1 launched a few weeks back, now has 300+ members. I dont seem to notice any speed issues with that but then the members are all over the world so log in at very different times to each other...

The other site Im just about to launch and will be transferring customers from another site I run which could be thousands very quickly. This is whats concerning me, I dont want to suddenly find the site crashes or takes forever to load due to being busy quickly.

My main question is though, has anyone made the speed updates as recently recommended by Boonex to the script and what difference has it all made.

Do the speed updates make a significant difference to the site being able to run with allot more customers or is this mainly down to have enough server power and bandwidth....

Thanks - daihlo

Hi,

as posted before, we did have to do a lot of server tunning, and we do run a fairly big site, so I would advise you to do whatever possible to your server.

Any one of the sites suggested by boonex works fine accept tmd hosting. A search of the internet will show that hundreds of sites get closed down because of their small band with.

Are you going to dig up every topic just to post a quick rant about TMD Hosting?

I love this topic because I have been with many hosts.  I heard a lot of good things about Hostgator but decided not to go with them after I read their presales question sheet (pasted below) which I found out was a bunch of bull crap and their way of trying to get more VPS and dedicated server sales.

Can I use Boonex Software (Ray, Dolphin & Orca) ?

This software will work on our shared servers, however you will NOT be able to use the video/audio sections of the websites, as they require ffMPEG, and other audio/video codecs.

Boonex once offered their own media, but that service is gone. Read more at boonex.com (number 8).

Note: Only older versions of Dolphin will work on shared servers. Dolphin 7 requires a VPS or dedicated server.

The worst host I have been with out of the nearly 100 hosting companies I have been with was Hostmonster.  Their tech support is terrible, they don't allow you to upload anything to their server except for wimpy HTML files.  Forget about scripts.  If you have any type of e-mail script it will not work with Hostmonster...they suck.  They also get their kicks off of shutting your web sites down if you break one of their terrible too many files or high traffic laws.

I was a big fan of Fatcow and they were very good but just so damn outdated.  They still use PHP 4.0, Dolphin requires at lease 5.0.  I am currently with Hostforweb.  So far so good.  Their tech support has been really good but my web site did have a few database issues in the beginning and apparently they fixed it.  I beleive Boonex uses Hostforweb for all their web sites.

Now I think I am going to go reply to an old post just to bring it to the top and make Magnussoft mad.

Good Luck...go with Hostforweb.

Hello,

I just want to retract my recommendation for Hostforweb.com.  I am not going to recommend them to anyone.  I just have been having way too much trouble.  I get database errors about three times a week which brings down my Dolphin site.  Currently, they have a server problem and my web site has been down for about seven hours now, this is unacceptable.  I have already decided that I will be moving to another host, so my journey to find a great host for Dolphin continues.

I personally got burned by Arvixe, they are a rip off.

Joombyte has been my new home and I pay less for 300% more faster servers, and they offer Ray Media Server Hosting!

@ jwalkguy

Why is Arvixe a rip-off

Why

go try Arvixe man

and good luck hope you don't get rip-off by the best hosting rippers

I recommend you do a quick search. You'll find many of us don't recommend them for a reason.

[Magnussoft: A link to a hosting provider with affiliation code? This will not stand; removed.]

Linode.com provides an unmanaged VPS in affordable pricing. I think shared hostings are good only for static sites and nt for community sites.

Now its more tha 6 months i m using linode and widout any problem.

Well, my search is over! Thanks for all the info everyone who posted, it was helpful in  making a choice before upgrading.

I decided after a long time looking around to stick with HostForWeb and upgrade to a dedicated server.

Made sure to get lots of pre-purchase support to get the server setup correctly and HFW were very good in making sure it was done right.

I now have a dedicated server running a number of Dolphin sites

I have to say the speed increase on all the sites is GREAT!

On shared, my sites were pretty slow to run, especially one which is video intensive, all installed within the Dolphin script rather than embeds. This site now runs as smooth as any other site out there which is great :-)

I can recommend HFW fully for their dedicated servers, pricing is good, support has been solid and performance is very good.

thanks for everyones feedback, its been very helpful.

agree TMD Hosting not good for Dolphin websites ;-)

HEY! I heard of you before!

Good choice. They do have a couple of real geeks over there and when everything else seems to fall short, they will find a way to fix it. You will do well with them, just have patience....

I'm just that guy who sites in the corner and complains about grave diggers.