Where do I find GOOD Mac OS X Web Hosting?
 

I looking for a data center to host a site for a friend of mine, and I found these guys:

http://www.itsamac.com/index.shtml

I've never heard of them, but they're prices are good as long as you don't need a ton of bandwidth. Which I don't for this particular site. I'd like to host it on Mac OS X if possbile. Anyone have any input? Thanks.

Digital Forest does some hosting on Macs, the site MacSlash is hosted there on an XServe. This place offers collocation of Mac Minis for $29/month; you can also rent a Mini.

There's also MacServe.

Thanks for the quick responses guys, I appreciate it.

Does anyone have experience with any of these hosting providers? I've hosted through Dreamhost (linux) and NetSol (linux). I've had good luck with them, but I really want to start using a Mac-based host. I guess I'm just curious to see who is using one and what they think.

Is there some reason for this desire other than just emotional?

I took a stab at putting together an OS X web server, and it sucked. I tried Webmin/Virtualmin, and compared to Linux-standard packages like CPanel it really sucked. I admin Windows and Linux web servers, and won't bother with OS X again, unless it's a single-site server.

CAlvarez:

I was thinking the exact same thing but never got around to writing.

The real benefit of OS X Server is having a nice GUI instead of wading through a slew of text configuration files; when you're SSH'ed into the machine from 1000 miles away it kind of doesn't matter though. In fact, it just becomes more confusing because of some of OS X's oddities.

Linux and BSD do what they do well. There's a reason the old iMac I have in my apartment as a server isn't running OS X, but Debian.

Unless you're trying to do something that cannot be accomplished with anything except OS X, I'm just not seeing the point. Bragging rights? Heh, until the XServes came out I believe even Apple's site was running Solaris . . .

Very well put. And yeah, OS X "peculiarities" made it very hard to configure and manage a multi-site server.

It's a Mac communinity site, and he wants it hosted on Mac OS X Server. I'm pretty sure he's not going to give on this. I think Itsamac is looking like the lowest cost alternative, but I was just curious if anyone has used them. I always hate to be the guys that recommends a crappy host. :)

I realize that Mac OS X Server has it's limitations, but this site is pretty basic. No flash, no SQL, no SSL, no ASP, no Java or web apps, just simple html pages, so I don't think it will be difficult to host on any OS.

BTW, Bedouin, you are correct. Apple still hosts a percentage of their stuff on Solaris, but it is now largely OS X Server based. I read an article about this several months back, but I lost the link.

I have been looking recently myself. Itsamac looks like the best quality and very reasonably priced. Macdock is pricy.

Note many of us are also technical peeople but the original question was not wether it was easy/sane/feasible to set up ones own web server with OSX, but for a good OSX based Web hosting service.

The nice thing about a service is they do all the hard work and have the expertise to help and advise you. Itsamac I see starts @ a little under @$5 dollars a month including your first year of domain reg. Of course like all hosting services you have to choose the package that has the features that meets ones needs.

It seems logical to choose a Mac based company with the expertise to help one navigate the need to be cross platform and that could advice what one can and can not achieve via a mac. I was tempted to set up my own too since X includes from the get go tools for hosting with the OS, of course their are always third party tools. But then I had switched to owning only Powerbooks, no standing desktops. And then the thought of dedicating any machine when one can pay to host virtually anything for $50 to $150 a year made it seem almost silly to do.

It seems illogical to choose a company based on a trivial and technically disadvantageous preference. Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should, and saying that it's someone else's problem overlooks the fact that any issues will become YOUR problem when they take down your site.

Are you saying from your expertise there is no advantages to having
the authoring platform and the serving platform be the same?

Also "when they take down your site"? Why would a hosting company take down your site? Are you saying that All Mac Based hosting companies are less reliable, their expertise poor, that they can not be trusted. Do you mean to say that one can not rely on the expertise of a hosting company for anything?

While the Analogy I am about to make is probably poor. Are you saying that there is no advantage to taking a Honda to a Honda Dealer for repair?

I understand that several posters with Web serving expereince feel that Mac Hardware and OS are not suited/best of breed in their experience. But I always leave open the possabilty when I have expertise in an area that some may have a way to make somthing work well even if that has not been my experience.

OS X server is not designed for heavy-duty web-hosting, has no mail-toaster solution and the overall performance under load sucks. You get to compile your own net-exposed daemons anyway as Apple hopelessly lags patching them and I'm just getting started...

Nobody in his right mind would run professional hosting based on anything but either Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD or if security is way more important than performance, OpenBSD. Some pointer on performance here:
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/

Faith in the RDF is not something you'd want to base serious technical decisions on.

Correct. If you're publishing to standards, and you should be unless you expect only fellow Mac users to view the site, then it doesn't matter. What benefit could there be to having matched operating systems? FTP is FTP.

I mean if they are unable to fix a server issue because they are using a cobbled-up tool. Example: A client recently asked a normally Linux-based hosting company to host a Windows server for him. They agreed, but every time he had a problem, they were unable to fix it without a lot of time and effort. In the case of Mac hosting they MIGHT have it nailed down, and it might be perfect. Or maybe not. But really, they're trying to use a lesser tool to do a job being done very well by hundreds of thousands of Linux servers.

I'm saying that when you buy gasoline for your Honda, you don't go to the Honda dealer, you go to the gasoline dealer. When you buy hosting you go to a reputable host using industry-standard tools.

By all means take your Mac to Apple for repair and your Civic to Honda for repair, but this isn't close to being the same thing.

Voldenuit nailed it down succinctly and accurately.

Thank you both for the more illuminative rationale
 

Thank you both for the more illuminative rationales.

I was aware that some testing done on web servers and OS's had previously shown OSX to lag in certain areas, in particular web serving, with many many simultaneous hits. No idea if that is improving in the last few releases of X since I last read any testing.

I thought it interesting that a number of the recommended alternatives were BSD basesd when OSX is also BSD based. Almost as if Apple muffed the parts of BSD that are related to heavy duty web hosting.

Well we can only hope thier has been some positive changes.

BSD isn't a great choice for hosting either from what I hear, but I have no direct experience with it.

Looked over link provided by voldenuit
 

It seems FreeBSD is pretty good but 2.6 Ver of Linux is truly superior. I hope that Apple is able to improve on this area. I remember reading somewhere. Think it was AnandTech or Arts Technica that the problem is how Apple handles all the competing threads. And effected anything with many many threads.

It's a matter of target market. Windows sucks for hosting too, and they're not really fixing it either. Why waste effort improving things that maybe .01% of buyers will benefit from?

If the ridicule of not even having real swapping (on a filesystemless, dedicated partition) hadn't tipped you off already, it's the "let's add another abstraction layer" mantra that completely kills the performance on OS X:

"Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads."
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=8

"The server performance of the Apple platform is, however, catastrophic.
...
The whole "multi-threaded Mach microkernel trapped inside a monolithic FreeBSD cocoon with several threading wrappers and coarse-grained threading access to the kernel", with a "backwards compatibility" millstone around its neck sounds like a bad fusion recipe for performance."
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=9

Hopefully, now that Avie has left Apple, the one in charge now will fix the kernel so it's no longer a laughing matter among unix.geeks.
Preferably without completely changing lots of calls in so doing.

Yeah those were some of the articles
 

Yeah those were some of the Articles...

Course its been over a year. Not to mention We have new CPUs if we have gone shopping recently.

Wonder if there has been any Benefit 10.4x or Perhaps in 10.5?

Differing Opinions and tests.....

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?ne...9&threshold=-1

Indeed, benchmarking is complex and there are lots of ways to skew them one way or the other.

But never mind why MySQL crawls on OS X, that's just one reason why OS X server stinks when you try to do professional hosting with it.

Everytime you need to implement, say a mail toaster or some other necessary custom install, you get one step further in the direction of a plain Linux or BSD system, and can no longer use the GUI tools to admin the whole thing, but you're still without the benefits of apt-get/ports (ok, you could use fink and darwinports).
Instead, every single system or security update may very well mangle carefully finagled files in /etc or elsewhere and break your carefully crafted and perfectly working custom install. Then you get to figure out a way to hack yourself out of that. Very productive.

So why bother to run some tortuous MACH-FreeBSD bastardization that escaped from academia into the Real World for reasons passing understanding, pay a license, have lousy performance and constant admin headaches ?
Run a decent version of Unix in the first place, with timely security patches and a working package management and be a happy camper. If you like the way it looks, you may even buy a Mac Pro, just don't run OS X on it...

Don't get me wrong: OS X is great for desktops, OS X server has its place when used within the limits of what the GUI-admin-tools allow you to do and is a pretty cool solution in LANs to provide services to other Macs (even though nobody in his right mind runs the first couple of dot revisions of OS X server on production machines, the QA is a lot worse than on client and quirks are rarely documented by Apple).

A great Mac OS X host
 

I have been using www.serverlogistics.com - an LA based hosting service with a bunch of XServes in a secure environment. I've been a user on a shared host for over a year and have been very satisfied. They also offer dedicated servers and colocations. Pricing is clear and on the home page.

Technical questions are usually answered within a few hours.

I'm not affiliated with the hosting company, just a satisifed user. Check them out if you're considering a Mac OS X based host.

Well despite the cautions against from some against going with A Mac based service, I just went with ItsaMac. So far customer service has been great. I fished around sample web sites ands and they seemed quick and stable.

I will post further on my experiences.

I just have a simple question.

Does anyone make a web hosting control panel that works on Mac OS X Leopard Server.

I read the theard but I would like to look in to it. We run 100's of FreeBSD servers and 100's of windows servers with over 200,000 clients but I am a huge mac fan and would like to at least try I have searched google and checked out a few sites that are hosting sites using macs but they seem to be using a CP they built.

To anyone that can point to one that is "good" I will give a free hosting account to for free on Windows, FreeBSD or the mac if we get it working.

Thanks
Brad