Reason I ask is because I am new to PHP/Web Programing (have a strong background in C#/Java) and I originally got myself an ipage account to host my site. It was only after that that I discovered yii. Unfortunately ipage only have PHP 5.3 and they also have some limits on the number of queries you can hit the DB with (75,000 per hour - it sounds large but it depends on what the model looks like. For example, if I have time series data then I could probably knock out 75,000 queries in an hour without breaking a sweat, in fact I already managed to do it by inserting my data one line at a time because I could not get the LOAD DATA syntax right).
So I am planning to get a new web host because I want to use the latest PHP and not be restricted to 5.3. I have read that some hosts do not let you edit the PHP.ini file, but at my current level of knowledge I do not know whether that is going to turn out to be a problem for me.
In short I would like to know which hosts and plans are people who are writing actual useful live sites using? I think that IPage is not useful for yii at all because it is only PHP 5.3, but are there other things to be aware of when choosing the host besides just the version of PHP?
Why not go with a VPS or cloud account where you would have full control over the environment?
I believe this is a must for any developer, to have control over the environment and have the ability to quickly restore things.
For instance i am using https://www.digitalocean.com/ for some of my projects and first time i have installed Centos and the entire lamp stack and of course git, then created a snapshot out of it. Now every time i screw things up on the servers(i do it a lot, yesterday with elastic search daemon for example) i just restore the snapshot.
When i make upgrades to the system i create another snapshot which i can restore in future when again i’ll screw things up
Digital ocean is great for development, but when your project is ready, running it into anything other than a dedicated server is stupid(of course if your project is large enough and gets traction), so you’ll want to move at the next step, which again, is easy, you can use the digital ocean server as a dev and using git to push changes on the dedicated server which is live for example.
