EngineHosting Updates Sign-Up
EngineHosting quietly relaunched their sign-up process that includes a brand new design, new plan options and the ability to purchase third party products during the sign-up process. There a two big pieces of news in this new store:
SSH Access
On Virtual Server Cluster plans (not the low cost shared hosting plans) you now have SSH access to the server access to a separate SSH server in the 4 virtual server cluster (EngineHosting got in touch and asked that I clarify how the SSH access works –Ryan). For those of us that have been wanting that for a while, this is very welcome news. The plans that include SSH access start at only $45 per month, so it’s within range of almost every project. All of the common stuff you can do at the command line is available, like MySQL, SSH tunneling and cronjob creation. You can also access your web files and get read only access to your log files (great for tailing log files to monitor for errors).
You can review all of their plans on the hosting sign-up page. The cheaper shared plans are at the bottom.
Buy Third Party Add-ons
As part of the sign-up process you can now purchase third party add-ons. Available right now are:
- Select Pixel & Tonic add-ons
- Select Solspace add-ons
- BrilliantRetail E-commerce
Purchasing ExpressionEngine during sign-up isn’t available anymore (I don’t know if it’ll return) but if you put your EE installation up on the server, EngineHosting will install the add-ons for you. The fact that you can purchase all of those add-ons while grabbing your hosting is a nice convenience.
Other Options
While purchasing any of the virtual cluster plans, you can also add Varnish (web app accelerator/caching), Memcached (“high-performance, distributed memory object caching system”), CDN services (Conent Delivery Network), and Private IP/SSL.
EngineHosting and EllisLab
While I’m on the topic of EngineHosting. Last Friday EllisLab posted a blog entry about how they were “severing ties” with Gippy’s Internet Solutions (the company behind EngineHosting). What does this mean?
The only practical change for the Community is that ExpressionEngine is now available exclusively through ExpressionEngine.com. If you previously purchased your ExpressionEngine license through Gippy’s, it will of course remain valid.
[…]
Gippy’s has always been an excellent hosting provider and upstanding contributor to the Community and we have every reason to believe that will continue far into the future.
The rest of the blog post seemed like a lot of insider baseball that is hardly relevant to the EE community at this time.
EE Insider is hosted on EngineHosting and I’m looking forward to moving to one of the new virtual cluster plans to take advantage of the SSH access and other goodies. This is a nice step forward for the community’s hosting provider!
Posted on Mar 14, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
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Jacob Russell — 16:05 on 03.14.2012
I disagree about the rest of the EL post being insider baseball - one of the big benefits of EH was the direct connection to EllisLab, knowing that your host had an inside line to the dev team. Plus the ability to buy add-ons with your hosting makes less sense now that you have to buy EE on EE.com first and install it. All that was killed off without a real explanation or much discussion in the community. That seems relevant to the EE community.
The new EngineHosting stuff is great though - lack of SSH has long been my biggest complaint with their hosting, although it’s less relevant now that I prefer deployments to ‘live’ site repos in Git. Glad to see them continuing to evolve and add new features to their hosting plans.
Nevin Lyne — 22:32 on 03.14.2012
I actually think the larger benefit from us (EngineHosting) is the experience we have for years working with both large and small dev shops to recommend and deploy solutions that fit the needs of thousands of clients, specializing in higher traffic sites, of course.
In the early years the direct connection into the dev team provided a larger benefit when development was “looser”. If we ran across an issue for a busy site Rick, then Paul and then Jones had the ability to make quick changes and deploy a new build sometimes within a few hours or even minutes in some cases. As EE 2.0 and CI became larger with more complex projects and a much much larger EE add-on development community, you ran the risk of impacting other things much more. So for the past few years, things we may have found still had to just be recorded in the bug tracker in most cases.
As things in the EE ecosystem have grown, we work more closely with the 3rd party developers and web development shops on their specific hosting needs. There are not as many EE core product stability issues to deal with server side. I think there are quite a few 3rd party add-on and site developers that would fully agree with me on this.
As far as the relevance of buying 3rd party add-ons during hosting signup, in reference to you not being able to buy EE directly really is only a small change if any for most. One thing you always needed to do was provide us a valid ExpressionEngine.com username. If you did not have one, you had to visit their site, register as a user then once the account was active come back and give us the username. This was outside the fact that many dev shops had deeper bulk discounts on ExpressionEngine.com directly so purchasing through us did not give them as good of a discount. With that said, now if a person buys add-ons during signup on any plan, they have the option to simply upload their EE zip file, we will uncompress it and place the 3rd party add-ons in the proper location and away they go. Even if it is an existing site, we will likewise still drop the new purchased add-ons into the EE install. In most cases this is a smoother process overall. For someone like you deploying from dev to production via a remote Git repository like Beanstalk or others, it is likely none of this really matters either way.
As to our new benefits, even for you deploying via Git, there is the ability to setup your own cron jobs, including for things like PHP cli to trigger longer running data imports as an example. For some SSH tunnel or cli MySQL functions were important, still others still have the work flow that wants to SSH in and trigger a git/svn pull, rather than pushing to a destination from their repo. All in all there are of course a lot of benefits, and in these new setups everything you do on the shell server is separated from your RAM/CPU/etc. of your two web servers or your separate database server. Again, running something php cli and consume heavy CPU/RAM usage, you are not impacting your site in the process. The varnish and memcached add-on options use a similar concept as they are totally separate virtual servers with their own CPU/RAM resources.
Finally unlike VPS servers from other hosting providers, all of this lives on top of multiple physical server clusters, and large central storage systems. All of this is powered by VMware’s advanced functions like live moving of virtual machines around on physical systems, with no downtime, using technology like Distributed Resource Scheduler (Dynamic Resource Balancing) and High Availability, in the end all features to keep things humming along under load, during scheduled server maintenance or unscheduled events.
Our front-end site will be touching much more clearly on a lot of these advancements in the near future. I have Solspace and Eric Miller Design working hard on many projects as we speak.
Kristen Grote — 12:17 on 03.15.2012
One thing I would really like to see from EngineHosting is a more robust control panel. I recently added a subdomain and database to my account and had to contact EH to do it for me. While their service was prompt, I would still prefer the ability to do it myself to save time.
Tom Jaeger — 12:24 on 03.15.2012
As a small dev shop that recommends a lot of clients to EngineHosting, we’re very excited to see the changes! Keep them coming!
We’re also looking forward to trying the new virtual cluster plans in the near future as well!
Nevin Lyne — 12:34 on 03.15.2012
A sub-domain ie: blog.domain.com can be done in .htaccess on your own, and on our non-shared hosting solutions you have full ability to manage database creation, deletion, etc. via command-line or ssh tunnel GUI tools like Sequel Pro.
Some things we simply will never put in place to be self-managed or managed via a central control panel. With the new Virtual Server Cluster accounts and larger a lot more things are now turned over to user managed via command-line on the shell server, if they want to.
We have two very focused groups of users, groups that want us to manage everything like their IT department, and developers that wanted to be able to do a lot of things we just gave them access to do via command-line. Of course there are some in the middle but the two mentioned are our two largest user bases.
On a side note, with recent (and past) security issues with control panel systems like Plesk have shown, I would rather keep providing a mix of managed services + direct self-management via command-line on a shell box. This keeps everything for each client (in non-shared hosting) in a private, secure network setup, and we don’t have to poke unneeded holes everywhere hoping a web based control panel is not something that can be compromised.
Richard — 14:01 on 03.15.2012
So is Engine Hosting *actually* better in terms of site performance for EE sites than something like LiquidWeb SmartServers or really any other host?
Mitchell Kimbrough — 15:35 on 03.15.2012
For years now I have flat out refused to host an EE site anywhere other than EH. When I have a client who wants to run EE somewhere else or internally, they really have to convince me that they are ready and understand what they are committing to. When put under heavy load, on an improperly configured server or cluster, an unoptimized EE site can crash frequently. When it crashes, most sys admins point the finger at the software instead of looking at their own PHP and MySQL config work. EH is always willing to help you troubleshoot a problem EE install. But the way they set things up to run EE, you rarely have an issue in the first place.
mk
Andry Gross — 03:04 on 03.16.2012
“So is Engine Hosting *actually* better in terms” - as person who used enginehost for half year before, I can’t say that EE hosting is better than other with performance. The benefit can be the hosting personals who know expressionengine, but for 99% of project it doesn’t matter if you have a good developers.
So for most cases possible to keep your money and choose another hosting with better cost/options balance.
Richard — 08:53 on 03.16.2012
Thank you Andry.
That’s sort of what I’d assumed but was interested for some actual comments from EH users.
Thanks.
Nevin Lyne — 13:19 on 03.16.2012
Andry, you did not specify if you were using our shared hosting type solutions or our now older load-balanced VPS accounts. As this article points out our virtual server cluster options are much different than our previous price point/service offerings. There is a 30 day money back offer on our hosting, so I honestly tell people to try/judge for themselves.
Anna Brown @MediaGirl — 16:23 on 03.16.2012
EngineHosting servers are absolutely better for high traffic EE websites. I’ve moved several large projects to their servers and have been thankful to have Nevin’s expertise and support when problems have come up.
Anna