Hi - I'm trying to find a cheap (i.e. about £5-10/month) or free UK-based ISP that provides PHP/MySQL capabilities.

I've looked at Lycos http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/
Which offer both free accounts (with advertising) and cheap (£5 ish) accounts (without advertising), and 50-100Mb of webspace (with 5GB bandwidth limit/month). Seems quite good, but you can't do file uploads via PHP, can only have one database and there are a few other restrictions (e.g. no shell account)

As far as free PHP/MySQL ISPs go there's also http://www.freeola.com/ and http://www.uklinux.net/
Though I think in both cases (defintiely for freeola) you have to use their dial-up (charged per minute) - not good as I use NTL unlimited free time dial-up. They also have limits on File Uploads.

As far as commercial offerings go, http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/ looks very good - you can chose whether to have Windows or Linux server, you get shell access, web stats. 200Mb+ web space, no bandwidth restrictions, some shell access etc. However the cheapest packages (£8.99/month or £60 PA) doesn't offer MySQL, just PHP/Perl etc. The business package (£19.99/month or £199 PA) looks fantastic (also includes a choice of databses, SSL, password protection/authentication of parts of site etc.) , and has everything I'm looking for I think, but us just too expensive really.

Could anyone recommend a PHP/MySQL enabled UK-based ISP? Ideally for no more than £12 a month

Ideally I would like to have shell (telnet or ssh) access, ability to do file uploads via PHP, to have access to most PHP modules (GD, XML, XSLT etc.), to be able to have more than one database (though I guess I could live with one and just use lots of tables), and good customer service would be nice (not something I get from NTL!) SSL would be nice, as would the ability to run Perl and PostGres

cheers

Paul

Have just noiticed there's a company called Black Cta Networks: http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/
Who offer shell access (via SSH etc.) to their hosting service, and have PHP and MySQL for about £120 a year (+VAT) - I guess this is the sort of thing I'm after, does anyone have any experience of them or a similar company?

cheers

Paul

I'm always very careful about recommending particular ISPs.  The particular packages do vary and you sometimes find that performance (support response, availability, speed) vary wildly.  

You're looking for PHP and MySQL.  The UK seems somewhat behind the USA in its uptake of the technologies - it's there and coming, but many of the lower cost packages don't include them,or one of them (yet?) . I've just moved one of our web sites away from a very famous ISP where it's been for many years becuase PHP took the account typ we needed up from 25.00 per month to 150.00 per month and that's pounds.  "We're looking at providing it" further down they said to me when I asked, and they told me that their concern was at the support that would be required.

I do read that you ask "UK Based".   Why?  You already have your access sorted out, so you'r looking pure web hosting, aren't you?

This site is hosted in California, by Hurricane Electric, and I operate it from the UK via our broadband (1 Megabit) connection;  I can download from the server at near that speed (I got 28 MBytes in 230 seconds when I bothered to read my FTP statistics).  Facilities astonish me - PHP, MySQL yes - also SSL, FTP server,  and even unexpected gems like crontab and control over your own DNS tables. Really very happy indeed with them.

Downs?   You need to know what you're doing - their FAQ are good but a bit like man pages in that they confirm something once you already understand it rather than being tutorials, and in the very rare cases that you might need to phone it would cost.  Only one database (but as you say, lots of scope for tables).  These are minor things to us - and at $9.99 a month (25Mybyes of space) well in your budget.   That's a smaller account that we use, but I have run a site on the $9.99 a month and can assure you it works exactly the same. If you did want to look them up, http://www.he.net and if you did want to ask me any further specifics, please do.

Just adding on ...

I do look after part of someone's website on fasthosts, but have chosen not to have any of our own services there.  I may be doing them a dis-service since my customer requires "windows based" and I'm in the 'nix school so I get frustrated at things I would like to see.  I did find a couple of server cpu issues when running a heavier-than-it-should have been app, and that app wasn't a problem when running under test on my own ISP.

on 10/31/02 at 03:20:44, Graham Ellis wrote:

I do read that you ask "UK Based".   Why?  You already have your access sorted out, so you'r looking pure web hosting, aren't you? This site is hosted in California, by Hurricane Electric, and I operate it from the UK via our broadband (1 Megabit) connection;  I can download from the server at near that speed (I got 28 MBytes in 230 seconds when I bothered to read my FTP statistics).

So you think a web server in the US will be just as fast to access as one in the UK? Okay, well that gives me many more options

Quote:

Facilities astonish me - PHP, MySQL yes - also SSL, FTP server,  and even unexpected gems like crontab and control over your own DNS tables. Really very happy indeed with them. Downs?   You need to know what you're doing - their FAQ are good but a bit like man pages in that they confirm something once you already understand it rather than being tutorials,

As well as shell access, do they provide a Web control panel for common tasks, viewing your web stats etc.? This would make things easier.

Quote:

and in the very rare cases that you might need to phone it would cost.  Only one database (but as you say, lots of scope for tables).  These are minor things to us - and at $9.99 a month (25Mybyes of space) well in your budget.   That's a smaller account that we use, but I have run a site on the $9.99 a month and can assure you it works exactly the same. If you did want to look them up, http://www.he.net and if you did want to ask me any further specifics, please do.

Do you know if they have imagemagick installed? What about SSL? Is the customer service good (e.g. email reply response times, willing to add new PHP modules if required etc.)?

BTW another US based ISP I've been looking at, which seems to offer good value full-featured packages is:
http://www.tinyhosts.com/
Bandwidth/month is a bit more restrictive, but I don't think I will need that much. Do you think they appear to offer a reasonable service?

cheers

Paul




cheers

Paul

Quick answers:

1. Yes, Access is just as quick as to the UK based sites that we look after, and faster than to the ones we have hosted in Germany.

2. You get a raw access log - you can run "analog" or anything you wish on the data file that it generates.  We have our account set up via crontab to email us the log file regularly.  Note that it's a full log file, including referer and browser information, so you can see where people came from.

3. Don't know about ImageMagick - would be suprised (but then I've been suprised in the past!).  SSL, yes.

4. They do respond to emails, but it's usually there in summary in the FAQs; you do need to know what you're doing to use the service and at the price you're talking about you can't expect them to spend a lot of their resorces on copious answers, nor on adding modules to an already excellent package.

[Later addition .. have just quickly checked Hurricane for graphics libraries and it appears that they have GD available - both the PHP extension functions, and also the GD.pm module in Perl.  The Image Magick commands don't seem to be there though.]

Have a look at

http://easily.co.uk/index.php3?exe=comptable

I have not used them for anything other than purchasing domain names, but they do appear to offer what you are asking about.

- Garrie

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