I am building a website for my university. I need a shared hosting account for 2-3 months for testing the performance, so that based on that I can tell my college management on what to get but I will have to shell out the money from my pocket for the initial 2-3 months. Hence, inclined towards shared.
So these are my requirements:
10GB of space for the files, presentations, etc.
2k students downloading 500mb of data each, so around 1-2TB bandwidth.
Outgoing mail system, preferably 1-2k an hour or 5k a day.
A forum system where 2000 members actively interact.
A quiz system inbuilt in the site or along with the forums, please let me know a plugin to conduct quizzes in forums powered by phpbb.
I looked out on reviews on many sites. These are the sites I checked out. HostGator, 1and1, iPage, BlueHost, JustHost, HostMonster, BigRock, GoDaddy, etc. I found HostGator serving most of my needs if not all. But with mixed reviews all over the internet, I need some help. I did have a chat with a few of them too.
Also, I want to know how much will my expense be if I use AWS or RackSpace or Heroku. I am new to cloud and I don’t understand their fancy terms at all. I need the monthly expense estimate.
I will move to dedicated or VPS only after it goes live and when my Univ pays. But help me with going about for the next 2-3 months. Which plan do I opt for?
HostGator, iPage, BlueHost, JustHost and HostMonster are one and the same in that they are all owned by Endurance. Some of those brands (e.g. BlueHost and HostMonster) are very closely aligned to the level of having the same teams running and supporting them.
Regardless of who you choose, look for real reviews (not affiliate reviews) and you can probably find a coupon to make the first few months more cost effective.
It’s most likely due to past affiliate programs which boost fake ratings. IMHO, look for personal experience (i.e., problems vs kudos) across the Internet (as well as within this forum - SitePoint used to have a “rate your host” type of board so the posts are likely archived - just do a search on your “short list” of hosts here).
If you are just testing a site, why not just go for the cheapest option? If you must test it on a specific service, try VPS which should be very close to the university systems. This will allow you to test load times and such.
Oh, come on now! If you’re just testing your code or a new website, what’s wrong with a localhost test server (with Virtual Hosts setup)? Yes, the XAMPP sort of thing but using the individual daemons for MySQL, Apache and PHP (to match your host’s versions). You don’t need to buy anything (except a computer to work on).
