what hosts do people use?

[dgkulick]

Bluehost has no one who knows anything but Wordpress. I have the DNS, it's pointing to the folder my site is in, and they cannot tell me why I (and they) get the error "This page isn’t working right now". Ok, why isn't it working? Can I run it locally on the server? No one knows. Actually this is great progress but I'm at a dead end.

So, I'll cancel that and try another host, maybe one that knows something about phpBB.

Or, do I wipe the thing clean and install their phpBB software and see where that goes?

[Mick]

We cannot really recommend a host, but we do recommend that you visit WebHostingTalk.

[thecoalman]

Just create a text file with "test" in it, upload as test.html to the root of the domain and point your browser at it. If it fails to load thenyou know for certain it's server related.

Or, do I wipe the thing clean and install their phpBB software and see where that goes?

We advise against that because in the past the installation has been changed and supporting it is problematic.

[Kailey]

Bluehost

Bluehost, for some time I believe, is owned by EIG. You can Google them and read the horror stories for yourself. There is also a list of EIG hosts here as well as other lists.

That, along with Mick's advice, should help you get a good start if you are serious about switching.

[dgkulick]

I did something like that yesterday or so, the days have all been flowing together. I wrote a little hello world index.html, and it worked then but other stuff was broken.

i just moved it to the root and it worked. Hello World. Ok, the DNS is pointing to the right place. So it should start index.php? I don't know if that's built in but it should work if I run rbforum.org/index.php but I get the error. On IIS there's a way to configure error handling so it passes the error back. I have no idea how to do that on Bluehost but getting a 500 error doesn't really help much. Hmm. Something about htaccess file. I don't see where.

Ok, any pointers would be good.

[thecoalman]

In the hosting control panel and/or FTP you should have access to the error logs. Note that 500 errors are not always logged to the account log, instead they are logged to Apache error log which you would not have access to on shared hosting. .

[JLA]

If you can - always better to self-host. At one point or another, relying on others to host a board you put alot of work into can end up being problamatic unless you are always on top of things.

[danieltj]

Digital Ocean are good if you’re confident managing a server yourself. However for most people any generic managed hosting from the like of GoDaddy, NameCheap etc are fine.

It mainly comes down to personal preferences as you’re bound to have some kind of issue that gives you a negative experience. All hosts have something wrong. They all make mistakes.

[dgkulick]

I should update this. I got someone on BlueHost who found that the database user name had to have the prefix of the server. I had done that for the database name but just used the database user without a prefix. Then it all started working. So I take back all the bad things I said about BlueHost. it's been working well once I got past that. But still. there should have been an error somewhere about being unable to connect to the database. That's pretty basic.

Nah, I don't want to host the server. I know some Microsoft server stuff and IIS but almost nothing about Linux or Apache. I'll spend the $200 or so for three years and let them worry about patches and such.

[JLA]

PHPBB2 (with WinCache) runs perfect on IIS/Windows.