About CodeStore's Hosting
For the five years this site has been around it has always been hosted by Prominic.NET. This has always suited me well as service is great, support is personal and down-time almost non-existent. The best part is that a couple of years ago they stopped charging me and then, more recently, they moved me to my very own dedicated server. Their way of doing something for the community at large.
They asked me to keep quiet about the spec of the server, but let me just say that it's a beast. Can you tell? Has this site seemed faster recently?
It's probably faster if you're in North America as that's where their data center is. It's in an old Air Force base in Rantoul, Illinois. They call it "The Fortress" which makes me feel safe.
I get quite a few emails asking me who I would recommend for Domino hosting. The answer is always the same and kind of goes without saying.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank them for all they've done for this site! I'll probably see them again at LotusSphere 2005 and we'll get a re-match on the MiB ride...
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Hi Jake,
Shameless advertising there!!!
On a serious note though, i've been looking into Domino hosting recently as i'm trying to develop some commercial apps of my own, and the biggest stumbling block when developing with Domino is the cost of hosting. I can't find a genuine production hosting deal for less than $200 US per month (which is with Prominic, I think) so is this really the best deal available or am I missing something when looking at the costs and specs?
Also, a lot of hosts seem to charge you per User ID, which obviously affects the scalability of your apps. I want to use Domino because of it's in-built security, but at these kind of costs it's hard to get started on your own without having a few thousand pounds sitting in the bank...
You might want to look at dominodeveloper.net and the private address book option. If your apps a web based this gives you the option of multiple users. Not sure if Prominc do this kinda thing. But maybe worth a look.
Not really advertising Lee. They didn't ask me to do it. I did it because I wanted to "pay it forward" as I think they deserve for being so nice to this site.
Proper Domino hosting isn't cheap. As you've found. That's why I owe them a favour. What I said about their service is what *I* think.
I have to echo what Jake says. I have been with Prominic for about the same length of time. I started on one of their shared packages and I now have a dedicated server. The hosting costs are high *if* you are not making any money from your application. However, if you are trying to run a business, then the cost is very low given the really excellent service level I have always got from the guys.
(I don't work for them, I haven't married into any of their families, they don't have incriminating pictures blah blah etc :-))
Didn't mean anything by it, it was just a joke! ;)
I think my difficulty with Domino hosting prices is that I need to set up apps, run them, test them etc, and then try to sell them, which means you have to commit to the costs up front... I suppose I could consider one of the cheaper shared packages from the outset which might make it cheaper.
I've just left a job with an IBM Business Partner who rented server space, but they started out with quite a substantial amount of money and took the hit for 12 months until they started building up a base. It's good to know that Prominic have such a positive user base though.
Ditto...
I've been using them for about the same amount of time for various things, and they've been rock solid. Rarely any downtime and extremely fast service... and I'm only on a shared server paying a total of about $60/month.
I would whole heartedly recommend them as well!
I ran our commercial hosted apps from 1999 to 2003 on what was Prominic's partitioned server offering. During that period we found it to be very good for uptime (I dont recall any downtime), performance was ok and price was easily the cheapest.
The only reason we moved to running our own infrastucture was growth. Once we expanded beyond a few GBs of databases the additional costs for storage didnt really stack up. As we already had some appropriate hardware the dedicated server alternatives were a little expensive.
All in all though I would firmly recommend the Prominic folks - solid setup, great business model, solid support. Thumbs up from me.
Dominodeveloper.net has just implemented a new hosting site in the Netherlands. I've moved the web applications that my clients use from the UK to these servers and the performance difference is amazing, basic production package is $25 per month so not pricey at all. Email service they offer is awful though!
I too used Prominic from 99 to 2001 and they were excellent. I am simply a cheap SOB, and decided that PHP hosting at $8/mon for 3Gb and unlimited bandwidth would at least force me to learn a new skillset.
If I had to host a Domino solution though, I would definitley go back to Prominic.
I have been using Dominodeveloper.net for about 3 years now. During that time I cannot remember an outage - everything works perfectly. I have 3, very small, sites running for 25 $ p/m which seems ok.
Just my 2 cents ;o)
Does that last paragraph about the rematch mean that you'll be at Lotusphere again in January?
I use Prominic for my person client web sites and convinced the company to select them as our public host site a few years back. Easy to work with and no drama.
I'm hosting three sites with DDN - until recently they've been fantastic (and cheap). However, after a name change request a week and a half ago, two of my three sites are down and I've been waiting for a response to my help request since Saturday evening. Its almost like they're only working part time or something? I'm only on a development server but its still odd and disappointing.
Gotta say - the bill buchan hosted servers have been in Prominic's care since their inception.
Good guys, solid service. They know their stuff.
And I've heard very good things about DDN.
Want a cheaper dedicated server ? Buy your own domino license. I heard one chap purchased his licenses off eBay...
:-)
Seriously, prominic are good. Well recommended.
---* Bill
This is one of the reasons why I do my own hosting.
At the time (about 8 years back) nobody was doing hosting properly. So I went out and got my own server setup. I now run a whole shed load of websites off my own box.
I charge people £150/year for hosting (blatent plug).
I've looked into Prominic and DominoDeveloper and both have certainly improved over the past years, but in their early years there were too many restrictions on what could be done. Although there is still a huge hole in the market for cheap personal hosting (blogs?) rather than corporate hosting. Which is fine by me, since it's the personal service I offer.
From memory DDN (DominoDeveloper.net) will host Blogs for free
I used Prominic for my site as well, small though it is. I would probably still be using them if I'd not changed technologies. I liked them as well.
I too have been using the services of Prominic.net for the last five years and I can not speak highly enough of their customer support and service - some of my customers call them directly to get problems resloved. Although I'm not quite as luckly as Jake in that I'm still being charge, their fees are quite less that other providers I looked into.
I'm in Jake's court on this one and would recommend these guys for Domino or Notes hosting any day of the week.
For my part, if I had more than a handful of customers who I was hosting sites for, the economics of moving from DDN to Prominic would make sense. With just a few sites, shared production space with DDN is currently cheapest, and the production server response time is adequate.
@ Collin, I had a similar experience to yours. One of the reasons DDN is cheap is that they have structured their services as "do it yourself" through the (recently improved) "control panel". As such, I don't believe they are set up for rapid response on support requests. There isn't a way to directly contact them, for example. Everything must go through the online ticket system.
So, if like me (and Jeff apparrently) you're a cheap SOB and don't mind flying solo on a lot of stuff, DDN is a good choice. If you have customers with critical applications and big enough pockets, Prominic sounds like the winner.
I've been using DDN on a shared production server for a few months. Whenever I've had an email support issue, they've taken at least 20 hours to get back to me.
To asnwer Julian's question - Yes. More than likely I will be there.
I have been hosting my site with DDN for about a year now and I have had reliability problems from the start.
They are the cheapest, but there is no personal support, support tickets don't get answered promptly, and downtime is a serious issue. As a matter of fact, DDN is down currently. (10/15/07 2:36 PM EST)
I just got off the phone with Prominic, and I believe that I will be moving there shortly. Just have to work out the address book service and some redirects.
Like many before me, we used Dominodeveloper.net and it ws not bad. But the responses to tickets were late (1 or 2 days). But recently it`s a horror. Last year down for 10 hours and today all their servers are down already 14 hours! They can`t be reached by phone, and because the ticket service don`t work, there is no way how to reach them! Like somebody here wrote, it seems like they`re working part time or so.....