Media Temple, Midphase, DreamHost, Name.com standard hosting, HostGator, etc. Any input appreciated!
Once you switch you'll never go back. Having your site operating at the whim of some resource checking script will seem ridiculous. The idea of paying for "10 domains" or "20 mailboxes" or "100 subdomains" will make you laugh since you now realize these things are nothing more than few lines of text in a configuration file -- not actual scarce resources to be portioned out at different fees. The idea of not being able to upgrade your language versions or install your own packages will seem appalling. It's worth the couple extra dollars a month.
The problem with me is my app will have subdomains for each user. For example, `john.myapp.com`. These subdomains are each going to be password-protected areas with healthy amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared hosting I currently have.
You've both recommended VPS. Any input on that?
What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/ ?
The videos are embedded from Vimeo, so the concern for me is just having good uptime and reliability and not having to worry too much about running out of "disk space" and bandwidth.
Sounds pretty straightforward. Wildcard DNS entry, wildcard vhost -- two lines of text that say "point all DNS queries to the IP of my VPS, point all HTTP requests to this document root (your app)", then your app has some code that looks at the hostname in the request to decide which site to show. Subdomains are not 'things' that take up any resources.
> These subdomains are each going to be password-protected areas with healthy amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared hosting I currently have.
If all the videos are embedded offsite, then they really have no impact on your choice of hosting solution. You don't have to handle the bandwidth or storage or even the HTTP requests for the videos. A shared host wouldn't know or care if you put a million videos on each webpage -- it would have no impact on their server. It'll have no impact on yours either.
> What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/ ?
Considering it's an unmanaged service, I don't see why you'd pay them $30/month when Linode is only $20/month and has a perfect review record among HN hackers.
I agree with dangrossman that going from one shared host to another isn't going to go well most likely. Of course, that depends on the bottleneck. I've got a shared host running SSDs, if my bottleneck was disk i/o it might work on that while failing on shared hosts using something slower.
If you really are pushing a lot of traffic and having trouble with shared hosting though, it's time to upgrade. VPS/Dedicated/Cloud are the options I would be looking at. Also possibly a CDN depending on what the bottleneck is of course.