Godaddy Ultimate hosting for Dolphin?

I need a reliable web server. I prefer a major company like Godaddy.

I thought about using the ultimate package for hosting dolphin since it traffic and activity might grow and the amount of data stored.

http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/web-hosting.aspx

Any advice? Can I use this offer from GoDaddy?

One big problem would be just 1000 emails a day limit from godaddy...

Well I see but as far as file sharing, avatars, file size, performance , traffic, bandwidth I dont have to worry right?

I read that many dont recommend godaddy because it lacks a CPanel.

I need users to be able to upload their own music and really need a modern hoster where I can without worries (and without tranfering my godaddy domain) work without the server going down or the hoster closing my site because of a limit.

Godaddy suck with Dolphin..... and their customer service is frickin attrocious.....

 As a happy PAYING customer, check out zarconia.net

Right now I am still developing (I need an artist!), but I have no complaints from their hosting package. 

It was rough getting it up and running transferring from my own server at my house, but, they worked with me and it's been up and running for a couple months and I have zero complaints.

I have not gotten to the point to need a dedicated machine yet, but, they offer that as well.

I have my main site and my dev site hosted on it and it works flawlessly.  Even RMS!

Avoid Godaddy, especially if you suspect you'll ever be in a situation where you need to lean on support - for anything. 

I have been happy with Hostgator's VPS. It's not very expensive and I am pleased with the performance on my production dolphin sites. This approach requires a little more technical ability though. 

The next avenue I'm approaching is a true cloud based model with rackspace.com. The ability to scale as needed & load balance has piqued my interest. So far so good, but all you get is a vanilla OS with them (requires a lot of configuration). 

Zarconia is probably an excellent choice, considering they are geared for Dolphin. My only reservation is that they are relatively new, and could risk going belly up/vanishing like terabyte did.

 Yes, I must agree Zarconia is an excellent solution. I also like the people running it. If things do not work for them though, I am sure these guys have the integrity to not repeat the terabyte experience. I have been with them a few months now, and everything is great. No complaints here.

Is hostgator very reliable? How old is the company and can I host my website WITHOUT transfering my domain? Any hidden and dirty tricks /costs?

Hostgator has been reliable, so far 100% up-time for my VPS container in the past 18 months. Of the issues i've had, it's been something running astray inside my VPS container, usually just requiring a service restart.

They've been around since 2003: http://blog.hostgator.com/tag/history/

You will not need to transfer your domain to them. Instead, set up your VPS to act as your own nameservers & assign them to be used within your domain control panel. 

One of the production sites I run on this VPS is moderately active, with 2k+ real members now & 10k unique visits per month. No performance complaints and I'm not even close to burning up the bandwidth they allocated my VPS. This is all on their Level 2 plan (800Mhz/576MB RAM) @ $29.99/month. If you bump up to Level 3, it becomes managed with parallels panel, of which there is an awesome droid/iphone app for realtime monitoring and alerts. 

The setup process can be a bit intimidating, but once you get through that portion it's a solid hosting solution.

I think they are a little expensive.

This is my hoster and what they offer: http://www.df-webhosting.de/lin_server.shtml

Also my question is: "is it safe to use Beta 2 now? and upgrade later? Is the upgrade safe? Im asking this because my project is going to be huge and will set a new standard for music artists. I am in collaboration with a few major social networks now who were impressed (Soundcloud), so I will probably have alot of people active at once.

up

If you need a managed server, where you can get things installed for you and issues resolved for you, then it will be more expensive because you are paying for the technical support.  If you are skilled at using Linux and the command line and SSHing into the server to do things, then you can save a lot of money by just renting the server without the support.  I did have my box pulled and the OS reloaded for me as part of my monthly leasing fee; hardware upgrades and such are included as part of the lease.

Now, if you are going to have a site with lots of members online at the same time doing lots of stuff at the same time; do not, I repeat, DO NOT, go with a VPS; you have no real way of knowing how many others are on that same box and you are sharing resources.  You want to rent a DEDICATED box where all the resources you are leasing goes solely for your site.  Get as much ram as you can afford and as many CPU cores as you can afford and get as much storage as you can afford for your members.  If you can, go with a company that will offers you a server CPU (some cheaper hosts will use non server cpus; you want opteron or xeon or other server class cpus).  It is also nice to have server class storage devices as well.

I looked at Hostgator but the big thing with them was the price, they are managed servers with cPanel (which comes with a licence you must pay even if they say it is included for FREE, it is not for free, the price of the licence is just rolled into the lease amount; it is marketing hype).  Do you really need cPanel?  I know this, never ever put PLESK on your server; it is why I had to have the server pulled and reloaded. 

I ended up going with a company that provided a nice blade server with a decent configuration.  What I am not going to do is to hawk the company I went with as people usually do on here.  So far I have been pleased with their service and the price is good; however, it is an unmanaged server and I do everything and what I don't know how to do I search the net or beg on here; plus I have been with them less than a month now.  They have online chat for sales and support, or you can put in a support ticket, plus telephone numbers posted on their site; I saw some sites without contact info and those are a no-no as far as I am concern.  If you want to know the company and they do offer managed servers with a control panel (just don't go with PLESK!) and with LAMP stack preinstalled, send me a PM. 

I would like to thank the great comments regarding Zarconia web hosting. Since I cannot technically 'promote' a company I am affiliated with, I can tell you that it is nothing like Terabyte nor will it ever be.

OK, that again tells me you need to rent a dedicated server!  Do not go with a VPS; by the time you upgrade the VPS, you will be paying dedicated prices.  Plus, get a big data bandwidth; you can get 10TB and up packages; you will be moving a lot of data in and out of your server with music files.

Is that Zarconia.net?  I was looking at the dedicated servers with AMD Opertron CPUs; eight cores.  Can one get a 1Gbs connection to the box instead of the 100 meg?  What does unmetered bandwidth really mean?  Is there a limit where the site is throttled, or a limit where one starts to pay extra?

 Yes it is Zarconia.net. As for your questions:

- We do not offer 1GB connections as of yet. We have not seen any latency with 100MB connections and customers have not had any complaints with these speeds. 

- Unmetered bandwidth is just that. If you purchase a dedicated severs, it's yours. We do not 'throttle' anything on dedicated servers. You can push it as far as the server will take it.

I need a company capable of giving me a startup help. I cant afford over 50 dollars right now a month so im using my german reseller with 15 GB for 24 dollars which I pay once a year (Cpanel and everything preinstalled, plus phone service). I truly need a good startup because this is going to be extremely serious. I think for now what I have will be ok, if I noticed things are becoming tight I can also get a dedicated one or how do you guys see things?

Your reseller account may be OK for getting the site started for testing purposes.  However, if you start to put users on your reseller account, you may risk termination due to the huge resource load that Dolphin has; you might want to consult with your reseller provider to let them know your plans.  My reseller account would not even let me test Dolphin.

You can lease a dedicated server at $50.00 (is that US dollars?) a month; starting out small and then when the site grows and you have revenue coming in you can then move the site to a better server.  I recommend you go with CentOS; which is based on Red Hat Enterprise source code; very stable OS.  The problem is the managed part at that price.  You will just have to talk with the providers and see what they are willing to do for you.  If you need a control panel, go with cPanel and advoid PLESK as you will find it very difficult to do something as simple as setting up a vHost.  There is an open source control panel much like cPanel; which I have not used, zPanel.  It needs to be installed at the time you installed the OS and LAMP stack.  cPanel has a licence while zPanel doesn't.  Maybe your provider will install zPanel for you so you can avoid the cPanel licence fee.  Again, I have no idea how easy zPanel is to use; you can search for it on the net.

I wouldn't completely discredit the thought of a VPS, especially compared to a dedicated box. What you need to be careful of, is making sure your resources are dedicated to that VPS & not shared or throttled in a resource pool. 

I would absolutely AVOID purchasing a lease on dedicated physical equipment. Hardware can and will fail at the most in-opportune moment. You want something on cloud infrastructure, that will scale, and high-availability is guaranteed across a cluster of high-performance resources.

Physical servers are obsolete, restricting yourself to a single resource like that is not a wise business choice. 

If I had a potentially large community project that needed the ability to start small (cheap $$) and scale on a moments notice, it would be a virtual machine. 

I completely understand your position of not being able to pay more than $50. In fact, i think it's silly to over-purchase on resources that you're not going to need up front. My dedicated 800Mhz of CPU has been more than plenty to run a community, and when it's time to upgrade it's a quick reboot. 

Here's the solution I'm currently pursuing/doing proof of concept, at a base price of $17/month it allows me to start a community without breaking the bank, and gradually increase the performance/$$ as I need it. Your resources are DEDICATED, and you're not locked into a single physical host or prone to an outage because of failure. 

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/servers/pricing/

Mmm, so cloud servers or VPS servers are not sitting on physical hardware?

I put my site on a VPS with 2 gigs of Ram and 1 core and it choked; the mySQL server kept shutting down.  It is currently sitting on a VPS with a bit better config, 2 gigs and 2 cores, while I get the dedicated server going; currently the dedicated server has a clone of the VPS site and I have test users seeing how well it will handled the load.  The current VPS chokes if we get around 30 users on it, it becomes unusable.  Dolphin is a resource hungry app; you need to give it a dedicated box with plenty of power.  By the way, cloud and VPS sits on a dedicated box which can fail; it is true that any hardware can fail.  It is why I have the hard drives in a RAID 1 config; if the server dies, it can be pulled, the hard drives installed in the new blade server, and I am back on line.  It is about money; the better your config and hardware, the more it will cost you.  The best thing would be for you to talk to some of the providers, including Zarconia, and see what they can offer you to help get you started.

Do you think that I can start with Beta 2 now? I mean with the current speed the final version might be out in 3-6 months.

I just dont know how safe the upgrading is until the final version.

http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/roadmap

I decided to go with 7.1; started with 7.0.9 but that buggy tinyMCE toolbar on the comment section could not be fixed; I needed the correct toolbar to load in each time.  I have heard that the B2 is quite bug free although some are reporting issues.  It is something you have to decide in the end; normally one is advised to not go with beta for a production site but you can certainly install it and see how it goes since you are just starting.  You can always pull it down and install 7.0.9 if you have issues without answers.  I had issues without answers with 7.0.9

 I put my site on a VPS with 2 gigs of Ram and 1 core and it choked; the mySQL server kept shutting down.  It is currently sitting on a VPS with a bit better config, 2 gigs and 2 cores, while I get the dedicated server going; currently the dedicated server has a clone of the VPS site and I have test users seeing how well it will handled the load.  The current VPS chokes if we get around 30 users on it, it becomes unusable.  Dolphin is a resource hungry app; you need to give it a dedicated box with plenty of power.  By the way, cloud and VPS sits on a dedicated box which can fail; it is true that any hardware can fail.  It is why I have the hard drives in a RAID 1 config; if the server dies, it can be pulled, the hard drives installed in the new blade server, and I am back on line.  It is about money; the better your config and hardware, the more it will cost you.  The best thing would be for you to talk to some of the providers, including Zarconia, and see what they can offer you to help get you started.

 A properly tuned mysql instance should not choke like that. 512MB of ram should be more than enough to handle 30+ users. If you just let it fly with no enhanced configuration, it's going to consume every available resource and ask for more. 

A true cloud server does not sit on a dedicated piece of physical hardware. They are in an HA or High-Availability cluster with minimum N+1 failover capacity and block level network storage/SAN. If one node in the cluster fails, your server container is simply hot migrated to another host, sometimes not even losing a ping response. With technologies like Distributed Resource Scheduling, your cloud server is guaranteed to get the resources it's been allocated. 

The tricky part to choosing a cloud provider is making sure they are utilizing the HA & DRS technologies that you need. If you're not careful, you'll end up with someone advertising cloud servers when everything is really sitting on one box. 

This site could really use a wiki article on Shared vs Dedicated vs VPS vs Cloud vs Physical servers, as it seems there is a lot of confusion and misconceptions.