[TYPO3-UG US] any recommendations for a dedicated hosting provider?

[Alex Heizer]

Manos Sifakis wrote:

> What you pay is definitely what you get.

Words to live by. Unless, of course you build your business using free 
software. ;)

In my 4 years of providing T3 hosting, I've seen people have problems 
with hosted T3 sites for a lot of different reasons. The good news is, 
every reason came down to the same root cause: lack of experience with 
T3. When looking to host any specialty app, it's not enough to go with 
the "biggest" hosting provider, or the most expensive and T3's no 
exception. Just having the fastest servers doesn't mean your specialty 
app will run without a lot of custom setup, and that means the person 
setting it up needs to know the software thoroughly enough to know the 
differences between GDlib 1.8.3 with GIF support and 2.0.x, or between 
ImageMagick 4.2.9 and 5.0.x, and how using each will affect your 
website. Now that Fantastico supports T3 installation, some hosting 
providers will simply offer that to their customers, regardless of the 
fact that Fantastico, by default, installs TYPO3 with the most insecure 
permissions possible.

In my opinion, look for a hosting provider that not only runs web 
servers, but one that has experience with TYPO3, including setup, 
maintenance, troubleshooting, and even experience from a website 
development point of view. That way, they know how to navigate changes 
like upgrading from version 3.6.2RC1 to 3.8.1, when the templates and 
task center don't work because they are now system extensions and there 
was no real publicity about the change. Since running a TYPO3 server 
requires more knowledge than just Apache and MySQL, sometimes just 
getting an "off the shelf" server from "the biggest dedicated server 
hosting provider" isn't the most cost-effective solution.

Cheers!
Alex