I am moving some business websites from a company I was using previously which provided me with a VPS.
Now I don’t know what to use. Recommendations for hosting options? All the reviews I can find look like they are planted.
I’m currently using 2.2G on disk. My visits are normally around 5k / month but have spiked as high as 17k. At an average of ~50Kb bandwidth per hit that should be about 250Mb / month. The number of visitors is growing and tends to be higher during certain seasons.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
P.S. I see that CocoaHost has a very inexpensive VPS plan, anyone have experience with them?
Your disk space and data transfer requirements are relatively small/modest so a decent shared hosting plan with a quality web host should suffice.
Are you running any intensive server side scripts at all?
What’s your monthly budget for hosting?
What country would you want the servers to be in?
What’s more important to you, price or quality?
Not all lot of intensive server scripts, just several WP blogs and a Drupal CMS.
Monthly budget ~$10.
Anywhere located in North America would probably be good
Price is important, quality doesn’t have to be seamless, but downtime could be harmful since there are paying advertisers on the site. Also, some posts get moderate “surges” of visits which might be a probably on really cheap hosting plans.
If you are running advertisements on websites, you should pay attention to the quality of hosting. Even small, but repeated downtimes can harm your revenues. Also, Drupal is known as using more system resources. For WordPress blogs, if you are choosing wrong theme, plugins, they can use more system resources too.
If you had a VPS before, do you know the configuration of that VPS? How many CPU, RAM? How about the disk array configuration? How about the highest server load?
I would have thought that was a bit low for a managed VPS. Another similar thread to this a couple of weeks ago said it costs the hosts something like $8 a month to provide cpanel.
I’m leaving the other provider because they are going out of business.
Ok that is interesting.
I have a managed VPS and I have to setup the websites, DNS and tweek the VPS settings but if I get any problems they are there to help me out. The supplier looks after the basic running of the VPS, again I can install/upgrade software but as before if I have a problem they are there to help. The setting up of websites, tweeking etc. is done through cpanel.
I assume you were with a managed VPS before and so you know what was envolved with that.
As I understand it an unmanaged VPS means you have to do everything via commands as you are unlikely to get a control panel and so you need to be good with Linux - if you are getting a Linux style server. You then need to manage the software updates which in my case a lot are automatically done by cpanel. I think you will have to spend more time looking after the server but what happens if something goes wrong while you are asleep or on holiday?
I know some people have an unmanaged server and then pay somebody to manage it but I would have thought that would be more expensive than getting a managed server.
Hope your Drupal is set up correctly, I recently migrated a site away from Drupal to a more flexible CMS, the Drupal installation created a 5gb+ database for just 150 pages of web site and regularly crashed! As others have stated you need to watch how Wordpress is set up as well.
North America - you have plenty of hosts to choose from, some dire, some truly excellent
If downtime is an important factor then you need to be looking at a better quality host, and probably upping your budget a bit. If you get traffic spikes again you need to work with a host who won’t just suspend your account if you go over quota all of a sudden, and one who’s servers can cope!
With an increasing number of visits your website should contain high amount of data which requires a better attention and security to match up your needs. So I would like to suggest you a Dedicated Server rather than a VPS or Shared hosting for your needs. A dedicated hosting will provide you with more security to your website data, more disk space and greater memory to access your traffic flow with ease. It will also ensure you a dedicated support service for managing your website technical issue.
A dedicated server is not secured more than a VPS in most of the time. And unless you are using high-end vendors such as Rackspace, Datapipe, you won’t have dedicated support. Don’t mess up with “dedicated” please.
A ten dollar a month budget for web hosting pretty much narrows the field to shared hosting. I recommend choosing a host that offers cPanel hosting with the shared account because it is designed to take care of almost all of the task you need to perform for a site such as yours. As your traffic and advertising grows you might want to consider increasing your budget just a bit so that you could obtain a managed VPS hosting plan. A plan such as that will offer you the support you need along with added security and an environment that is less susceptible to your neighbors usage and practices.
I say it depends what sites you will have and if you can afford it, I am actually thinking of getting VPS so let me know if you find a good and stable one
They are very competitively priced but did you read their “terms of service”. They have restrictions for everything under the sun. Not just the standard “don’t be a bad person” stuff.
Kiwiheretic makes a very important point here when he says to read the TOS. If a web hosting offer seems too good to be true then a good read of the Terms of Service may be in order. It is easy to just agree and move along but when you are moving your data which overall involves time and thus money you want to be sure that you truly know what you are getting.