Recommended hosters

When I chose Dolphin 7, I discovered that my host (one.com) would not permit me to be able to run it with the required settings. They had a policy that makes it impossible to run Dolphin 7(amongst other apps).

So I changed to Gigahost.dk. They turned out to be absolutely excellent and accommodated fully to my needs.

What I was thinking was to make a helpful thread(this one), where people could mention good hosters for Dolphin and the "bad" ones.

I think this is an excellent idea. I am currently looking for a new host as my current one, 1and1.com, is very glitchy and I am not at all happy with them. I am considering jumping to TMDHosting or hostforweb. Can anyone provide feedback for these hosts? Thanks in advance.

Arvixe.com has done a great job with hosting my site. Any issue comes up they work with me through it. They get 2 thumbs up from me ;)

Terabyte Hosting Solutions

I use HostV (Cirtex) for my VPS.  Great support and easy to use interface.

DosDawg's hosting was always good for me. I have since moved to my own server but from experience his shared plans for Dolphin were A1.

DosDawg of Terabyte Hosting Solutions.

i'm going to have to go with DolphinInstalls.com

Arvixe I give a big THUMBS DOWN ON!

If and when I make a change it will be to:

DosDawg of Terabyte Hosting Solutions.

He goes out of his way to help people and is very knowledgeable about hosting and offers cloud solutions which is very powerful stuff......

This saves me the trouble of typing. Oh, wait...

Personally, I use Media Temple for my web hosting needs. Still, I prefer to send Dolphin users to DosDawgs's company. Why? So they have a working installation out-of-the-box, which, at the end of the day, cuts down on support requests.

Yes, I'm that kind of a person.

 Arvixe?  Goes to show one person's meat is another's poison.  After a year of headaches I moved to Terabyte-Hosting.  'Nuff Said!

Arvixe's proven to be a God-send for some, a demon for most others. I suggest those wishing to do business with this web hosting company to search the forums before-hand. I have personally contributed to numerous topics on the subject.

Arvixe is a nickel host, and the web hosting packages they advertise for Dolphin may be able to run it, but cannot support an actual community, as the amount of server resources they allocate you is far too low. Many Arvixe customers have reported being suspended just for having as little as five members on their web site at the same time. This is standard with nickel hosts. They will offer you enticing features with their web hosting packages, such as unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Although they deliver on this, they will limit you through some other ways, such as allocating your server resources, such as processor usage, to very low levels, so much, that Dolphin cannot fully operate without going over the limit.

It is in my opinion, that web hosting packages which cost the standard price of a meal at McDonalds are not a good choice for anything.

A number of people on Arvixe shared hosting, past and present, have said that on D7, Arvixe requires them to upgrade to VPS, as some of their processes are maxing out the server CPU at 100% and affecting the other clients on the server (your website might have only 1 or 2 users on it but that is academic apparently. It is still maxing out the server). Once they have upgraded your to VPS the following might happen. The VPS also starts maxing out with the same number of users (probably one or two), which effects the other websites on the same server despite it being VPS. The last resort is that the D7 website needs to sit on a Dedicated server, which Arvixe will offer to you ($$$). This is where you take their offer for a dedicated server. It get implemented and you pay them required amount. Your dedicated server starts maxing out at 100% CPU. My response would be it is a script issue. Ask Arvixe. They may blame boonex. Either way. A healthy profit has been made somewhere. Sad thing is that I am talking to users and it is happening.

One vote for myself.  I try and provide my clients with the best Dolphin Installs, Hosting, and RMS experience possible. I keep my prices cheap and the quality of my service high. Give me a try! You'll be glad you did!

Dolphin Installs, Hosting, & RMS

Eh, sorry, jctwebsites. I kind of forgot about you.

It's all good :D

You can't forget about JCT and Dolphin Installs.  I went through 2 Host with dolphin and just testing it out trying to figure out if its really the option I wanted to go with. I actually almost Canned Dolphin until Dolphin Installs came through..

He didn't have to pay me too much to say this either ;)

Arvixe was a nightmare for me and didn't really offer support like I thought a hosting company should.

I have business class through arvixe for 30 bucks a month and i sometimes have up to 60 people online at same time and it has stayed OK. yes we have had our problems but they work though it with you. Yes they are quick to suggest to upgrade but you dont have to. If your script is taking 100% with 2 people its probly due to something faulty in the script.

One.com has some problems with dolphin that is true. I tried myself to install it there and couldnt.

Still, I would prefer that there was a place here were we had the recommended hosts. I see you mention

here Gigahost.dk or something, and to me that looks like one man business, and if you surf their site,

there is one thing that is very well hidden and it is their prices.

I remember some years ago have seen a page here with recommended hosts. If any of the seniors

remember please link it here, cos all the hosters I see in this thread are not ones I have hear of.

My problem is that the hosts here in the US are not validated in denmark through dk-hostsmasters.dk

at least hostgator wasnt and therefore they couldnt host my dk domain.

Rgds

Andre

What about the companies that are being mentioned on the Dolphin website?

http://www.boonex.com/hosting/

I'm trying to get away from my root server since my traffic doesn't really warrant the cost, but I do have a few domains that have nothing to do with Dolphin or other community sites. I'd need to find something cheaper than what I'm paying right now. Currently I'm paying for a root server that's in Germany, with quad core processors, 16 GB of RAM, and two 1.5 TB drives. I'm only paying around 90.00 USD per month with full ssh/root access but my disk space & bandwidth usage is so ridiculously low that it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep paying that kind of money ... even though that's admittedly dirt cheap.

There are those on that list that can be considered reputable and others which should not. I recommend you read the reviews around the forums about both certified and other hosting providers.

What about comparsion Terrabyte vs JCTwebsites ? Can somebody post here a pros and cons of those two prolly best hosts for dolphin ?

DosDawg: man when u gonna change your website .... nothing against you ...u are big contributor here and I would say dolphin expert but your hosting homepage looks really strange - I feel like it was made like 15 years ago :-) ....

He recently overhauled it with Dolphin 7 and a new template from Gorpus. I don't know how a homepage design says anything (unless you're using Comic Sans).

Hello Magnus, well webdesign definitely says something - its part of marketing. I mean its proven that people trust more websites with nice webdesign and are more "flashy" than websites with ugly webdesign. I agree it often doesnt say anything about actual quality of service or product but the thing that nice looking websites sells much more products or services than ugly designed websites is fact :-) and dosdowg website really looks like 15 year old :-) .....anyway his services definitely looks like one of best here ....

aaah I see dosdowg changed his website to dolphin with gorpus design as you said magnus - I had cached the old one - .... I meant his old website was like 15 years old ...this one is using dolphin and gorpus design is nice .... just dont know if dolphin is right choice to have for use for webhosting company purpose....

I don't care about looks, but the quality of the service. But there are people out there who judge entirely by flashy graphics and the like, so I know what you're talking about. His old site did look outdated (and sore on the eyes) and I had asked him to consider redesigning it before, but he's only made an effort recently along with overhauling some other parts of his business. He only uses Dolphin for the front-end, while everything from billing to control panels use another set of software.

I am setting up a site which is going to rely heavily on video chat (i'm thinking possible approx. 600+ users at peak times), with profiles with photos (max 30 images per profile possible 2000+ profiles), so bandwidth will be a major factor along with storage capacity.

Can someone advise me on which set up is best for this..... VPS or dedicated

Looking through various posts it looks like most people seem to perfer terrabyte hosting.... can anyone recommend any other hosts.

Thanks in advance

With those expectations, go dedicated...

We have changed hosting company around 3 times...all were good until they were bad and we needed to move, so, no advice here...

Thanks again Francisa, think i will go with terrabyte and dedicated.

You should look at Happy Hosting (http://www.happy-hosting.com). We are using them for many years. They are the one suggested us to use dolphin before few years (Dolphin was very young(v 5.6)).

I am pretty sure that during those time, the only dolphin hosts I am aware of where Happy Hosting and HostforWeb. During those times, HostforWeb was recommended by boonex.

We are using Happy Hosting since we started using dolphin. Now, they have some separate Dolphin Hosting as well.

Check them out. They can help you a lot with their experience.

I use Arvixe and until I upgraded to 7.0.5 everything was fine. I only had a few members but i got hit with a virus and after trying to clean the site I decided it was time to upgrade. I went from 7.0.2 to 7.0.5 and all hell broke loose.

Right now I've got two tickets open with them and they are having a heck of a time trying to resolve. One I'm maxing out my allocated CPU which is causing problem with other things installed on that domain. That I think is just 7.0.5 it just needs more.

The other ticket is for another install on a different domain, but its an Add-On Domain and that may be the problem, but Arvixe says it shouldn't be. They are still trying to find a solution.

Is anyone else running Dolphin on an Add-On Domain? If yes, have you had any problems?

As for Arvixe. I've used different Hosts for years from Free Hosting account to 30 dollars per month, and Arvixe is the Hands Down Winner.

For me life doesn't start and end with Dolphin. I've got 3 Domains, two Autoresponders installed and working, JV Manager, Two Blogs (each has about 30 plugins), a online store with 1500 items (going up to 5000), Dolphin 7.0.5 (2 copies), and Social Engine 3.0 Trial all installed on two account and all but Dolphine is working just great.

All together the cost is less than $15 per month. Does anyone know of a Hosting company that can accommodate all the above, if so please let me know.

I can fix the problems I'm having with Dolphin by going back to 7.0.2, but I'd rather not if I don't have to

Thanks,

Gary

I have been using Arvixe now for a while and whenever I had a issue (which was few) they always took care of it right away. But I will say this if ever I should change my host, I would go with Dosdawg. But let me say this, every host is different and with that all of them will have problems. There is no one host greater than the next to a certain extinct. I've over 50 people on at once and still ran fine, websites will always be problematic. Take for example, I work at an advertising company and we have some of the best servers but there have been times when the site was down because of server issues. So everyone will have an issue with there host.

As you can see from my earlier post I’m an Arvixe supporter, but I really have to take away some points for the handling of this latest problem.

I don’t think Arvixe can handle 7.0.5 as well as a “Recommended” host should. The latest problem was not being able to upload videos.

The problem started when I upgraded to 7.0.5 and started hitting 100% cpu usage.

I had another domain I wasn’t using so I setup an add-on domain on another Server and did a fresh install. All worked well except uploading videos.

That was Feb. 23rd and today more than a month later the final word from Arvixe is that it must be Dolphin. That’s just wrong because there were too many un-answered questions to make that judgment.

- There was always an error when trying to upload a video
- I never got an email from the cron job for Dolphin, but got the emails from the other cron jobs installed.
- The Admin ID and Password was requested, but no one from Arvixe every signed in with it.

I still think they have great hosting for the price, and I had no problems with Dolphin 7.0.2, but I can not recommend Arvixe for Dolphin installs above that version. Not that they won’t work, but if you have a problem I don’t feel they will do everything they can to fix the problem.

Just my two cents.

Gary

ha ha ha, 15 years ago. nope, not 15 years ago, not even 15 months ago. but i can tell you this much, i try to keep my site updated, though my dolphin site is only a front to the hosting services, and has no real relevance. are there any other service providers for hosting who use Dolphin? i dont think so. yes my site said i was updating it for some time, because my focus goes on my clients and keeping their sites running, so my personal work ends up on the back burner at times.

however, i have recently taken the time to correct many of the To-Do list tasks, and the aesthetics have improved greatly, though, no bearing on the level of service provided.

thank you for your generous words and kind concerns.

 Hey Dawg..I use dolphin for hosting hehehe http://adulthostingonly.com  Adult Dolphin Hosting

**BAD ONE**

TMD Hosting (tmdhosting.com)

http://www.boonex.com/forums/#topic/Moving-far-away-from-TMD-.htm

My opinion :)