Feedback: cb-atelier-ebeniste.fr (part 2)

This feedback section is dedicated to hosting the cb-atelier-ebeniste.fr website. My first hosting experience.

Hosting provider: Ikoula, chosen because they were a sponsor at the Drupal Camp Paris 2013 and their site is in Drupal, so it should be off to a good start for a Drupal site to work perfectly on their servers.

The package chosen is a shared hosting package. Once the domain name and package have been activated, Ikoula provides access to a control panel (Plesk), which lets you manage everything.

Access to this panel is quite difficult, you have to go to the customer area, which is a different site to the showcase site, and which serves as an extranet. From there, once logged in, there is a link in a drop-down menu marked "Control Panel". It's a bit long to get to the administration interface for your subscription, but once you're in the control panel, I found this interface to be quite impressive and very comprehensive. Among other things, it allows you to:

• explore its provided disk space,
• edit files,
• configure automatic backups,
• obtain statistics,
• manage your databases + access phpMyAdmin,
• install web applications in a few clicks: Drupal, Wordpress, Typo3, Joomla, a wiki, in 2 clicks in their latest version,

This is therefore very practical for putting the site online:

• create a blank Drupal from the interface,
• with ftp access provided (way I preferred), sent the modules, themes, site files,
• overwrite the provided db with the db of the site developed locally,
• check UNIX permissions via the interface,
• adjust the settings.php,
• that's it.

Starting from a Drupal created via the interface, gets rid of all the database creation, settings.php configuration, Vhost, DNS, etc.

And there’s no need to worry about the mail server either; everything’s already set up.

I haven’t looked into managing subdomains or SSL, which is ready to use – you just need an SSL certificate.

Conclusion

For my first experience with a hosting provider, I’m satisfied. I think that when it comes to scalability and so on, shared hosting is sufficient for a site of this scale.

Admittedly, shared hosting doesn’t offer as much freedom as a virtual machine or a dedicated server, but at least it’s enough to meet most people’s needs and, above all, it doesn’t really require any prior knowledge.

See part 1 of this review.