Webhosting, or A Cry For Help

[haggholm]

So. I'm not entirely happy with the aging hardware of Odin over at cs.ubishops.ca, and not only is money to replace and maintain it hard to come by, but let's face it, I graduated from Bishop's over a year and a half ago—eventually it seems proper to cut some of the ties. I have my own little server sitting in a closet in the form of castleblack, my old Athlon XP desktop, but desktop hardware in a closet is not the ultimate in reliability. Given how dependent I am on these things, I really ought to invest in more.

There are a few problems, though. One is, ironically, that there's so bloody much choice! Monopoly is bad, monoculture is bad, but search for webhosting and you'll find thousands of webhosts. Search for search tools to help you find webhosting, and…well, I'm just lost, dazed, and generally confused. I don't know where to start looking to find the features I need at the prices I want. And that's not even getting into what hosts are actually reliable and trustworthy!

Problem number two is that my needs are rather specialised. I need simple webhosting, yes; with PHP, SQL (preferably Postgres but I'm not picky), and CGI (at least Python). This is pretty basic. I also need email with IMAP access. Not too hard, either. However, what I'd really like to do is to replace not only my Odin account, but castleblack as well. Now, I use castleblack for a few things. I keep an IMAP-enabled mail server on it to centralise my email archives, for one. A host that offers IMAP access will do nicely, as long as they offer enough space—my archives are 327 MB and constantly growing, of course. Something I want to use castleblack for is a contact list in the form of LDAP, but OpenLDAP is, pardon my French, a bitch to configure, and setting up an SSL enabled LDAP server and getting it to work on the client side…well, no success so far. So I want a webhost that offers

• Standard webserver stuff (HTTP, PHP, CGI)
• Python CGI (not too bad but less common than perl)
• Email with IMAP access
• At least 500 MB of space right now; call it 1000 MB for a safe margin
• Configurable LDAP (give me phpldapadmin and I'm golden, just give me a properly configured openldap setup because I'm clearly incompetent to set one up myself)
• Bonus: A calendar server

Just to further complicate matters, I do use castleblack for one more rather notable thing, which is to host a subversion repository that contains my entire home directory. Although it could do with some cleaning, it presently weighs in at 1.9 GB, so I'd want no less than, say, 3 GB (again, I want plenty of room to grow!) for a grand total of 4 GB of space and subversion on top of the features I have already listed. The space is not so unrealistic—I actually found a host that offers 15,000 MB for only $4 a month or so (but not so many features). The feature list, however, especially LDAP and subversion…I don't know. I'd be all right with hosting the subversion repository on my own, though, if I could offload everything else. It's easier to back up, anyway, and I don't know what the bandwidth requirements are. I should probably look into running a bandwidth analyser on castleblack. I'd also be willing to consider other revision control systems.

I have a feeling this is asking rather a lot. On the other hand, in the enormous deluge of webhosts out there, maybe there is one that offers what I need? I don't know. I tend to lean in the direction of dedicated virtual servers or even colocation just because it's so bloody hard to find what I need, but the truth is, I'd probably be happier if I could find a proper host that could do the configuration for me. Yes, I like playing with computers, but I can do that at home. If I could offload all my important data (svn repository + email) and have someone else vouch for its safety, with regular backups and so forth, that'd give me some peace of mind (and make tinkering optional). Also it might give me LDAP that actually works. I'm not closed to these ideas, but I should consider all the options. Or, rather, at least all the major categories of options…

I don't know what the cost tradeoff would be. castleblack is free in a way since it's just old hardware I had more or less lying around, but honestly, I could probably sell it used even today and get a year's worth of hosting somewhere, and the added safety and reliability would be worth it.

So. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? HELP!