Status notes go out on all three. The middle one is read by nobody.

The best place to host the thing you have started calling a company.

Shared accounts, virtual servers, and as of this year a cloud. The cloud is a room. It has a door, and somebody who works here has the key to that door.

5.3 on request

Shared hosting

  • PHP 5.2.10 as standard, 5.3.0 on request, for namespaces and closures
  • MySQL 5.1, and PostgreSQL 8.4 on the same account
  • cPanel 11.25 and WHM, or Plesk 9.5 or DirectAdmin if you ask
  • Apache 2.2, with nginx 0.8 in front answering for everything static

Softaculous went on the panels in the autumn and installs the same four things Fantastico installs, in a third of the clicks. Fantastico De Luxe is still there; people have bookmarks.

Root

Virtual servers

  • Your own kernel, and your own reboot at half past two
  • CentOS 5.3, Debian 5.0 or Ubuntu Server 9.04
  • Ruby 1.8.7 or 1.9.1, Rails 2.3 under Passenger 2.2
  • MySQL 5.1, or MariaDB if you would rather not wait

corvus was virtualised in March. The disk image is 2.1 GB and boots in eleven seconds, which is faster than it ever managed as furniture.

  • New this quarter: PHP 5.3.0, on request
  • New this quarter: MariaDB, on the virtual servers
  • New this quarter: Softaculous, on the panels
  • New this quarter: nginx 0.8, in front of the static

From the status blog

  • 7 December PHP 5.3.0 is on the shared machines for anybody who asks. It is not the default. Half of what people install still prints a deprecation notice across the top of the page, and you should meet that on purpose.
  • 20 October MariaDB has gone on the virtual servers. We are not making a prediction about who ends up owning the other one. We are making a second option available.
  • 14 September Somebody sent us an invitation to a collaboration product, in exchange for one of ours. We have opened it twice. It is very fast.

@slophost

    What the cloud is here

    Two rooms. Machines in the second one are copies of machines in the first, and the copying is the part we actually sell. The header of this page has weather on it because that is the convention this year.

    What actually goes wrong

    Power, disks and people, in that order, and the third is not the smallest. Two employees of a pizza company did more with a camera in April than any disk here ever has, and the company spent December on camera apologising for its own pizza. We have written something down about cameras.

    Enterprise

    Dedicated machines, a second rack for the copies, and named people on the account. The SOAP and WSDL endpoints published for last year's enterprise pilot are still up and still answer. Two accounts call them, and we know which two.

    What is on the machines

    Shared

    • PHP 5.2.10, or 5.3.0 if you ask
    • MySQL 5.1 and PostgreSQL 8.4
    • cPanel 11.25, with Softaculous
    • Apache 2.2 behind nginx 0.8
    • No shell. It has not been missed

    Reseller

    • WHM, and the panel in your name
    • Fantastico De Luxe, still
    • Perl 5.10 and Python 2.6
    • Your own two nameservers
    • We never write to your accounts
    Most accounts

    Virtual server

    • Root, and your own kernel
    • CentOS 5.3, Debian 5.0, Ubuntu 9.04
    • Rails 2.3 on Passenger 2.2
    • Django 1.1, out in July
    • MySQL 5.1, or MariaDB

    Dedicated

    • A machine, and its number
    • Plesk 9.5 or DirectAdmin
    • Two feeds and a tested generator
    • A second rack for the copies
    • Console, for accounts from before 2000

    Every one of these has Perl 5.10 on it and will keep it. The third column is drawn a tenth larger because most accounts end up in it, which is a fact about the accounts rather than about the column.

    How we compare

      SlopHost GeoCities Ning, free tier Vox
    Your own domain on it YesNot on the free oneYesYes
    A shell on the machine On a virtual serverNoNoNo
    Take the files off whenever you like FTP, SSH or rsyncThere was a fortnight Not statedAn export, of a kind
    Answers to a parent company NoYes, since 1999NoYes
    Taking new accounts in December YesClosed on 26 OctoberYes, freeYes

    Compiled from published material on 7 December. GeoCities is left in because our first page was written to look like one and is still on this server. Sun Microsystems, which bought MySQL AB, was itself bought in April, and Brussels has spent the autumn thinking about the database.