CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi guys,

Wanted to find out what are CiviCRM's preferred vendors, if any. Are there any best practices/recommendations for hosting?

Thanks,
Sharad.

Thanks Kurund - that was helpful.

Hi all,

Is anyone currently hosting drupal 6/civi 2.2 at mediatemple? Any feedback? esp interested in http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/

Cheers,

Tobias

I have a lot of opinions on this subject based on my experience with three installs of Drupal + CiviCRM.

Here's what I've learned.

1) The biggest sticking point of CiviCRM is CiviMail.  CiviMail uses complicated configuration that you really can't implement on anything less than a Virtual Private Server.  If you are not planning on ever using CiviMail, you can use any host that will host Drupal: Site5.com, LunarPages.com, the  list goes on.  The only think you'll need to be careful of is that the potential host has:
     a) PHP version 5.2.x (note the 2, it's a must)
     b) The ability to allocate more than 32MB of ram to PHP memory
     c) MySQL 5.0 or higher

2) If you are going to use CiviMail, in my experience, get ready to spend some money!   You are going to need at least a VPS and a skilled server admin.  If you do use a VPS and the VPS has the Cpanel/WHM suite on it you are in for some trouble.  Because of the way CiviMail is configured, if your host has a security settings for outgoing mail set to "high" you are not going to configure CiviMail to use your server for the incoming (catchall) addresses for bounces.

Recently a client of mine spent over $1000 hiring a programmer who is part of the CiviCRM core team to get around this little Cpanel VPS configuration issue.

The best way to use CiviMail is to get your own server or a VPS server that does not use Cpanel but rather just a bare bones box.  You can hire the server administrator to configure the server to properly work with CiviMail.  Have a serious and frank technical discussion with the server admin on the phone and actually PAY them to read the CiviCRM docs, and PAY the server admin to confiugre your VPS and/or private server just the way you need it.

That being said, I recommend a small boutique shop called Spiretech.  www.spiretech.com   Joe, the technical guy there will charge you for his time, but his VPS is fast, and works great with CiviCRM and CiviMail and he's done this before for me.   His prices aren't the cheapest, but you get what you pay for, and in the LONG RUN it saves you a ton of money not having a configuration issue with some other server-farm host.

Oh really?  Cool, I'll check it out.  First I've heard of it.    The guy we hired (should he remain nameless?) used GoogleMail.