European & American Hosting Providers

When I first started out with web design back when I was a kid, I was exper­i­ment­ing with host­ing providers in Swe­den. Later being in need of bet­ter per­for­mance, I tried out a few cheap VPS alter­na­tives tem­porar­ily. In the end, I finally set­tled for Medi­aTem­ple which has kept me sat­is­fied for the past four years. So what else is out there?

Since I’m liv­ing and pro­duc­ing web sites in Ams­ter­dam these days, I’ve also been look­ing at Dutch solu­tions for my clients. It seems to me though that Dutch host­ing providers tend to over­price their ser­vices a bit. You can often get the same per­for­mance in Swe­den or the US con­sid­er­ably cheaper. Per­haps this has some­thing to do with the Nether­lands being a smaller and more niche market.

Swe­den is gen­er­ally a great place for host­ing web­sites in my opin­ion since the infra­struc­ture is well-developed through­out the coun­try. Regard­less of where in Europe you are, you should expe­ri­ence good speeds if you just pick the right Swedish host­ing provider. Then again, the same goes for the US—choose the right pack­age and your site should load fast wher­ever in the world you may be.

Below I’ve gath­ered a few of my top picks of host­ing providers in Europe and the US. I’ve mainly looked at com­pa­nies offer­ing VPS solu­tions since that’s what most of my clients are in need of.

Dutch host­ing providers

• Rack­space — Link
  
These guys are pretty well known, partly because they’re doing host­ing in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent coun­tries, includ­ing all three of the ones I’m focus­ing on here. Their web­site is push­ing their “fanat­i­cal sup­port”, which sug­gests that their sup­port is very good. This is fur­ther backed up by what I’ve heard from some of their cus­tomers. While I have not used them myself, they seem to be one of the bet­ter Dutch providers.

  

Their Man­aged Pri­vate Cloud con­fig­u­ra­tions seems to be the clos­est option to the VPS’s I’m used to work­ing with. Unfor­tu­nately we have to con­tact them to get a price which sug­gests that they could be rather expensive.

• LeaseWeb — Link

  This is another Dutch provider with many sat­is­fied cus­tomers. Their Clients and Case Stud­ies list shows a num­ber of high-profile com­pa­nies using their ser­vices. They, like many oth­ers, are run­ning Cen­tOS and right now their Ded­i­cated Servers are avail­able from the very afford­able price of €29/month.


  
From €39/month you can get a ded­i­cated server with an Intel Core Duo 2GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. They all come with 160GB of disk space and 4000 GB data traf­fic which should last you a while. If I absolutely had to go for a Dutch host­ing provider, I’d prob­a­bly go for this LeaseWeb.


• Other men­tions

  A few other providers worth men­tion­ing are Exonet, offer­ing afford­able VPS pack­ages, and Byte.nl which inter­est­ingly enough has a line of pack­ages opti­mized specif­i­cally for Magento Com­merce shops. Con­sid­er­ing the price of their Magento pack­ages, they should offer some decent per­for­mance and it would be inter­est­ing to hear from some­one that has tried it.

Swedish host­ing providers

• Ipeer — Link
  
I hear good things about Ipeer. They offer every­thing from VPS to colo­ca­tion at com­pet­i­tive prices with good sup­port. Their starter VPS pack­age fea­tur­ing 512 MB RAM and 10 GB stor­age space starts at as low as €17/month. Their web­site says that they are, through their ISP, con­nected to one of the worlds most well-developed and pow­er­ful back­bone for great­est pos­si­ble connectivity.



  The con­tract period is 3 months and right now they have a pro­mo­tion where if you sign up for a VPS pack­age, you’ll get two for the price of one for the whole first year.


• GleSYS — Link

  Another Swedish provider many peo­ple like; this one also offer­ing shared host­ing. Our focus though is on their VPS ser­vices and they are offer­ing an amaz­ingly cheap “mini” pack­age for less than €8/month. Like Ipeer, they are offer­ing an afford­able pack­age at around €17/month and from there on the price increases quite a lot. Of course, so does the per­for­mance you get and they’re still afford­able alternatives.



  They have a one week test­ing period when you don’t have to pay any­thing and from what I’ve heard, they are run­ning a rather new and eco-friendly dat­a­cen­ter in Falken­berg, Sweden.


• Other men­tions

  As for shared host­ing among the Swedish providers, Binero is an alter­na­tive with many happy cus­tomers. I’ve fol­lowed the com­pany since back in the days when it was called Ale­borg. It is run by nice peo­ple, they offer great sup­port and it’s con­stantly improv­ing. Loopia is another alter­na­tive worth mentioning—I’ve got a client using their shared host­ing plan and it’s very fast.

Amer­i­can host­ing providers


• Medi­aTem­ple — Link
  
For me per­son­ally, there’s only one alternative—MediaTemple. As men­tioned ear­lier, I’ve been with them for about four years and they’ve always kept me a happy client. Sup­port is out­stand­ing, the account cen­ter and Plesk con­trol panel are great, prices are fan­tas­tic and their soft­ware and hard­ware are just excel­lent. As a proud owner of a Grid-Service and a Dedicated-Virtual account, I’ve got only pos­i­tive things to say about them.

  

My loy­alty clearly goes to (mt). Besides, who can say no to such a gor­geous web­site? They even have an iPhone account cen­ter where you can reboot your server and do other neat stuff.


• Other men­tions

  If Medi­aTem­ple did not exist, what would we do then? Well, I’ve heard good things about Liq­uid­Web and they too offer VPS pack­ages at decent prices, run­ning Cen­tOS with cPanel. Other than that, Host­Ga­tor is a very pop­u­lar alter­na­tive for those want­ing shared host­ing or just low pricing.

Bot­tom line

Choos­ing host­ing provider is a highly indi­vid­ual deci­sion and you should ask your­self what you really need and what you are will­ing to pay for it. Does your site need to be in the same coun­try as the major­ity of your vis­i­tors? While it could be an advan­tage for high-traffic sites (or low bud­get host­ing), it shouldn’t have to. With the right pack­age and host­ing provider, your site should load fast wher­ever your vis­i­tors may be.

Pick a provider that feels good—one that you are com­fort­able with—because that is usu­ally the right choice. For me, that will always be Medi­aTem­ple. Per­haps you should try it out and join the fan club.