[kwlug-disc] Website hosting

[Paul Nijjar]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 02:57:51PM -0400, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
> I currently run two websites that are hosted on myhosting.com.  One is for
> a charity I help out and the other is my own blog.  Everytime I see the
> charges on my Visa bill I wonder if there's a cheaper solution. I pay for
> both my own site and the charity's, so any cost savings would be
> appreciated.
> 
> Do any of you guys use a hosting service and if so, which one and are they
> any good?
> 
> My only real requirements are Wordpress capable (i.e. both sites are
> predominantly Wordpress generated) and a few email accounts.  I don't need
> anything too fancy.

Can you give us a sense of your traffic usage per month?

We host www.theworkingcentre.org via a Linode, and it is more than
powerful enough for our needs. It is also expensive, and there is some
systems adminisration involved (usually just "drush up" for Drupal and
"aptitude safe-upgrade" for the Debian install). We have a bunch of
sites on the Linode and it works fine, but Linodes are relatively
expensive. The support is fantastic, however, and the dashboard is
pretty good too. They also have a nice habit of upgrading your plan's
specifications without increasing the monthly costs, which I have
appreciated as well. 

Cedric and Steph at CCj/Clearline do (shared) hosting as well, from
$5/month. They donate kwlug.org's website storage to us:
http://ccjclearline.com/hosting.html 

Last I checked they did offer CPanel support, which should make
administrating email easier (if you want to go this way, which you
might not for the reasons Khalid suggests. Instead, you might want to
provide your users with aliases that point to actual accounts.) 

Linode has a competitor called DigitalOcean that seems to be trendy
now. They have some really cheap VPS plans as well: 
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ . They are not as cheap as
zixiekat's suggestions, but they are still pretty cheap. 

Regardless of how you host you will need to keep up with security
updates, but I presume you are doing that with your Wordpress sites
now.


- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org