Hurricane Electric is a good web host

I've written variations on this post a number of times over the years when various friends and acquaintances have asked for recommendations for web hosting. Someone else has asked, so I figure I'll just post it publically so everyone can see it and I can just link to it in the future, saving myself some trouble.

I like Hurricane Electric (HE) for my web hosting and co-location needs.

In late 1999 I was looking for a web host and selected HE based on a friend's recommendation. I've been with them for almost 9 years now and have been happy the entire time.

For their cheapest option, basic web hosting, you get all the usual features of a web host. Email, PHP, Perl, MySQL, CGIs, and the like. A bit more unusually, you get a full Unix shell, which is handy. They don't offer Windows hosts, but running an internet service on Windows is like hammering in nails with an 8-track tape. It works, but why waste your time on it?

When you get a host, if you want you can stick with the given installation damn near forever. From memory, I was on Slackware for a long, long time before moving to a new host in exchange for more bandwidth at a lower price. They never forced me to upgrade to a new machine, but they offered me the opportunity if I wanted it.

They also are draconian about how they run their machines. This is a feature. To keep the costs down, you share a host with other web sites. This is how every low price web host works. (You can have a dedicated server, it just costs more.) So you're sharing a machine with other web sites. What if one of those websites is poorly written and hogs the CPU or otherwise monopolizes a scarce resource? HE has the murderd, a program that watches for hogs and kills them. If you have a well behaving website you'll never run into the murderd, and I'm glad it's there to keep the machine serving my site fast even when other sites are dumb. Similarly, HE configures their Linux system with levels of security I wasn't even aware was possible. I can't even see the process information for other users. If someone does something stupid like passing secret information via a command line, I can't see it. If someone finds an attack vector that relies on finding another program's PID, they can't use their account to find my PIDs. It's a small thing, but it helps improve the security.

What does all that draconian enforcement mean in practice? As far as I can remember, in 9 years I have never had any downtime. I've had friends who bounced between other web hosts running into problem after problem. HE has never failed me.

Now this service does cost a bit more. But not a lot more. $9.95 a month can run a monstrous website. My website got about 790,000 "hits" (individual requests) in the last 35 days. That's a measly 5 GB. $9.95 gets you 125 GB of bandwidth per month. (If you're planning on hosting lots of videos or images, you'll use more. Still, you can serve about 256,000 full size digital images off a consumer camera each month for that. And if it's a real problem, consider Flickr and YouTube.)

Now, you can find cheaper hosting. Part of what you're losing in customer service. You're less likely to get 24-hour support. If you do, the support is less likely to be skilled and able to promptly help. Remember those friends who bounced between hosts I mentioned? One had web sites down for days while their tech support flailed around trying to fix it. Also, many of these sites are wildly overselling their systems. That is, they may sell CPU time, or memory, or disk, or bandwidth on the theory that your average user will only use a fraction of what they're paying for. A small amount of overselling is a good idea; it keeps costs down and in practice it works fine. But it's most profitable if you oversell so much that the systems are running right at capacity. This means that your website is constantly be slightly slowed. If there is a surge in popularity for another site on the same machine, your site will suddenly get crushed. I don't know how aggressively HE oversells, but I've never witnessed any problems. Again, I've had friends whose web sites stopped working or became unusably slow when another site on the machine became popular.

Whenever I've dealt with HE, the customer service has been solid. They're professional, friendly, and reasonably prompt. I have no complaints. A friend actually co-locates several computers with HE (Yeah, they do that to.) and my friend seems happy with them. He's reported that their on-site tech support people are surprisingly game to help him debug hardware problems on his own systems over the phone. That is, his computer is in their location, so he asks them to examine the system, one he build and configured, and they'll do it.

A number of years ago I got sloppy and used more disk space than I was paying for. Technically I was on the hook for a hundred or so dollars according to the terms I agreed to. I contacted them an apologized. They assured me that it was okay. First, they said if I could get my disk space down within a day or two, they'd waive the charges this month. They didn't have to do this, but they did. They then pointed out that if I upgraded to a new machine, I'd get much, much more disk for free. (The upgrade was free. The only reason it isn't automatic is that with the new machine comes a new installation of Linux. It's possible that some web sites would not be compatible with. I had to do some very minor tweaks, but it was easy.)

I can't promise you'll have the same experience. Indeed, it's possible they've gone downhill. They're so reliable that I haven't spoken with them in over a year. But for now I trust them and recommend them.