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Geek Culture / Looking for new web hosting

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Phaelax
DBPro Master
20
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 16th Apr 2003
Location: Metropia
Posted: 9th Jan 2017 18:09
My current host expired today, so I just renewed for 3 months (shortest I could do) so I have time to copy my sites. Their prices have doubled since I started using them years ago and I'm just not going to pay $15-18/mo for it. And so the hunt for a new host begins. Any suggestions? Lots of cheap promotional pricing or require 3 years paid at once to get the cheaper rates. I would prefer to keep the standard monthly rate under $10. Any recommendations?

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
BatVink
Moderator
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 4th Apr 2003
Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 9th Jan 2017 18:51 Edited at: 9th Jan 2017 18:53
One that I would NOT recommend is LunarPages. They used to be OK but now they just repeatedly open support tickets on your behalf, tell you that you are overusing shared resources and that you need to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

How do I know that it is unjustified?
I installed WordPress from their software library with no plugins, edited the existing sample post and they sent me an over-usage mail...I was the only user!

I asked them to explain this on 6 Jan. I have had no response but they have sent me 2 more over-usage emails on the same support ticket, telling me to use their $39.95 a month Managed service and to upgrade my webspace.
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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
TutCity is being rebuilt
Seppuku Arts
Moderator
19
Years of Service
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Joined: 18th Aug 2004
Location: Cambridgeshire, England
Posted: 9th Jan 2017 19:57
A couple of options I've tried.

I used to like GoDaddy, but heard some questionable things and ended up switch to Heart Internet, however, Heart are a UK company, but I shouldn't think it matters? I found them to be reliable and their customer services responsive with a few useful tools, I used to use it for hosting something I was trying in ASP.NET. But you're looking at a starting price of £2.49 per month (or $3). Their plans are here: https://www.heartinternet.uk/web-hosting

But at the moment I am using Heroku, which is good depending on what you need as it is designed around hosting web applications. I don't pay them anything at the moment as there is a free hosting service, which you can hook up with a domain name. But it works in a similar way to Microsoft Azure, you just pay for what you need and you have some flexibility to it. Also, Azure's pricing is much more reasonable too, if you are running any Azure applications, like an ASP.NET site.

If it's useful to your site, I do heavily recommend Heroku. My site uses Ruby on Rails and I can pretty much update my site through a git push and access from my Windows console, necessary server commands for my site, such doing tasks like installing Ruby Gems, running database migrations and debugging. Heroku makes things convenient. The free options are substantial enough for your site to be fully functional, versus Azure's free option, I can have a Postgre SQL database for free, but Azure charges for the most basic Microsoft SQL service (though not a lot, mind you). Their site: https://www.heroku.com/
Ortu
DBPro Master
16
Years of Service
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Joined: 21st Nov 2007
Location: Austin, TX
Posted: 9th Jan 2017 20:56
Networksolutions is pretty good, I've used them in the past though I dont know what thier current pricing is like.

Digitalocean is also very cheap, I pay about $5 a month, but it is a VPS so you need to take a more direct hand in setup and management (can be a good thing) than with managed hosting services.
http://games.joshkirklin.com/sulium

A single player RPG featuring a branching, player driven storyline of meaningful choices and multiple endings alongside challenging active combat and intelligent AI.
BatVink
Moderator
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 4th Apr 2003
Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 9th Jan 2017 21:03
@Seppuku, I couldn't work out how much Heroku would cost me.
If I run a Wordpress site, how many Dynos would I be using per month? Is it designed for web sites or web apps only?
What would I get with a free account?
What is a Process type?
Is it only active when somebody requests a page? What if 10 people request a page at the same time? Can a Dyno exceed 1.0 per month for a single site?
Their pricing makes no sense and they expect you to understand the technobabble
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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
TutCity is being rebuilt
Seppuku Arts
Moderator
19
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 18th Aug 2004
Location: Cambridgeshire, England
Posted: 10th Jan 2017 00:09 Edited at: 10th Jan 2017 01:57
Quote: "@Seppuku, I couldn't work out how much Heroku would cost me.
If I run a Wordpress site, how many Dynos would I be using per month? Is it designed for web sites or web apps only?
What would I get with a free account?
What is a Process type?
Is it only active when somebody requests a page? What if 10 people request a page at the same time? Can a Dyno exceed 1.0 per month for a single site?
Their pricing makes no sense and they expect you to understand the technobabble"


From what I understand. They are a container that perform server side requests for you. They are single threaded and will perform 1 request at a time. So how many you need will depend on the performance of your site, the server and how many users you've got. Fortunately Heroku servers are quite responsive. For your scenario, 10 people at once, if it takes 200ms to complete a request then it would take 2 seconds to complete all 10, using 1 Dyno (you get one free). You have some options as to how each dyno performs and queues tasks, but I don't see that being relevant for your scenario, I would imagine cases where there's big load that needs managing and processes to be optimised, maybe like for an e-commerce site processing lots of orders

I grabbed some server data from my site for a point of reference:



I made two GET requests. One will load a "Forum Sections" page and one will load a particular section of the forum (RolePlay). The reason I've done the forum section as it won't just request a page (or "View" as it's listed on the log), it will also make requests to the database. Given Wordpress makes good use of SQL, I figure more relevant.

In this log, you'll see each entry shows "app/web1", which is the Dyno that's performing these tasks. The "Forum Sections" page only took 68ms in total and the "RolePlay" section took 182ms. But I will also say that my site is fairly lightweight as I've coded it off my back using Ruby on Rails. Wordpress I would imagine to be more bloated. But I wouldn't know how well a Wordpress site would perform.

However, to answer another question, it is designed for scalable/dynamic web apps and has them in mind, but you can host a static website without paying any money on Heroku if you wanted. As it is aimed at being dynamic, it is why their pricing is so weird, like with Azure. I can see why it can create a headache, set pricing for storage and bandwidth is less to think about.
Dark Java Dude 64
Community Leader
13
Years of Service
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Joined: 21st Sep 2010
Location: Neither here nor there nor anywhere
Posted: 10th Jan 2017 04:50 Edited at: 10th Jan 2017 04:51
Quote: "I asked them to explain this on 6 Jan. I have had no response but they have sent me 2 more over-usage emails on the same support ticket, telling me to use their $39.95 a month Managed service and to upgrade my webspace."
See, you must have bought the plan with the 1 kilobyte per month bandwidth limit. Common mistake.
"I do quite enjoy quoting myself, and I do so often. It's very fun." - Myself
BatVink
Moderator
20
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 4th Apr 2003
Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 10th Jan 2017 08:55 Edited at: 10th Jan 2017 08:56
Quote: "See, you must have bought the plan with the 1 kilobyte per month bandwidth limit. Common mistake. "

It's even funnier than that...I have unlimited bandwidth

I think the issue is that they are trying to cram more users onto shared servers and give each one a smaller slice of the processing pie.
If I am only allowed 2% as an average and some processes take up to 6% to number-crunch, that is effectively an allowance of 0.66%.
That tells me they are putting 150 users on a server, each with unlimited bandwidth and up to 100 subdomains and 100 MySQL databases, running PHP and sites built on Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc.

And if the bandwidth is throttled by processor limits, then it's technically not unlimited
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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
TutCity is being rebuilt
Ron Erickson
Moderator
21
Years of Service
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Joined: 6th Dec 2002
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Posted: 10th Jan 2017 19:29
I was using WebHostingHub, but have been slowly moving everything over to GoDaddy. So far, I've been really happy with them.

Ron
a.k.a WOLF!
damothegreat
User Banned
Posted: 10th Jan 2017 20:19
GoDaddy
Using Tier 1 AppGameKit V2
Started coding with AMOS
Works with a Lenovo IdeaPad 700, 1TB SSD (Data), 128GB HD (System), 12GB Ram, GeForce Nvdia 950M, Windows 10, 2.3Ghz (Turbo to 3.2ghz when required)
seppgirty
FPSC Developer
14
Years of Service
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Joined: 3rd Jul 2009
Location: pittsburgh, pa.
Posted: 13th Jan 2017 19:15
I use dot easy and have never had a problem.

http://www.doteasy.com/
gamer, lover, filmmaker
Phaelax
DBPro Master
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
Location: Metropia
Posted: 16th Jan 2017 21:51
I've used FastDomain for years now, and have been fairly happy. However, I just don't want to spend $150/year for it.

I'm thinking about DreamHost. $9.95/mo (though I need to call them to see if that's a standard rate or promotional). They support Lets Encrypt, the free SSL cert. Again, I'll need to contact them to ensure it's a private cert and not a shared one. Unlimited everything. I mainly use PHP but ASP or JSP would be a bonus but not required (and rare to find it included with most packages). So they're the ones I'm leaning towards right now. But I'm looking at the other suggestions you guys have said. But with Dreamhost supporting the free cert that's a big sway in my decision right now.

Heroku's pricing and packages just confuse me too much. What's a dyno?

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
Phaelax
DBPro Master
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
Location: Metropia
Posted: 17th Jan 2017 16:40
Stumbled upon one I've never heard of before, Brontobytes. They have decent prices and when I asked about the certificates they said it's a dedicated cert for each domain I have (and free). I emailed them yesterday afternoon towards the end of the work day. Got a response back this morning, first apologizing for the late reply. I'm like, that's what you consider a late email to a non-customer? Sounds pretty stellar to me. They've been in business for over 10 years, so not a brand new company which would cause me concern for the future.

https://www.brontobytes.com/

I just emailed Dreamhost a little bit ago, so I haven't received confirmation about their certificates yet.


Actually, as I'm writing this I don't think I need to wait for dreamhost to respond. With Bronto's current deal of 5.99/mo (36mo ), that's only $215 for 3 years of unlimited hosting.

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
Ortu
DBPro Master
16
Years of Service
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Joined: 21st Nov 2007
Location: Austin, TX
Posted: 17th Jan 2017 19:08
That does look pretty good, it's a shame that their VPS pricing isn't nearly as competitive as their managed hosting though
http://games.joshkirklin.com/sulium

A single player RPG featuring a branching, player driven storyline of meaningful choices and multiple endings alongside challenging active combat and intelligent AI.
Ortu
DBPro Master
16
Years of Service
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Joined: 21st Nov 2007
Location: Austin, TX
Posted: 18th Jan 2017 03:48 Edited at: 18th Jan 2017 03:49
Wrong thread
http://games.joshkirklin.com/sulium

A single player RPG featuring a branching, player driven storyline of meaningful choices and multiple endings alongside challenging active combat and intelligent AI.
Phaelax
DBPro Master
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
Location: Metropia
Posted: 18th Jan 2017 12:47
I bought the Bronto service. Just waiting for them to set up my account, guess it's not automated.

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
Lucas Tiridath
AGK Developer
15
Years of Service
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Joined: 28th Sep 2008
Location: Kings Langley, UK
Posted: 21st Jan 2017 17:09
Let us know if the Bronto service turns out to be any good. I've been using 123-reg for a few years and they seem like a pretty typical "cheap and cheerful" option. The control panel, up-time, and other basics have all been good. The customer service is so-so. The pricing seems very reasonable but unfortunately, their website is pretty misleading as it omits things like VAT and setup charges, which are also actually quite reasonable, but can give you a nasty shock if you're not expecting them.
Phaelax
DBPro Master
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
Location: Metropia
Posted: 21st Jan 2017 21:50
I thought their servers went down the day after I bought my service. Turns out my IP was banned after too many failed cpanel login attempts. That's both good to know and annoying at the same time.

If you use Bronto to host your domains, private registration is only an extra $5/yr. Which is worth it to me as I've always hated having my name and home address just thrown out there online like that. They said it takes about 7 days to transfer domains, I haven't done that yet. I just updated my name servers though and in the process of transferring my data over. It'll take a minute as I'll have to update a few php scripts because the sql databases have different names.

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
Jeku
Moderator
20
Years of Service
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Joined: 4th Jul 2003
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Posted: 27th Jan 2017 06:47
Hmm.... Dreamhost gives free private registration
Senior Software Engineer - RotoGrinders

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