Recommend a website hosting service.
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So just hedging my bets in case I have to move away from A Small Orange due to India.
I don't have too many requirements. ASO is basically LAMP - Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP. They offer e-mail and allow multiple domains. Plan I'm on now is 1TB/150GB space/transfer but I don't know when it ballooned like that. I started on a 400MB plan and bumped up to 25GB years ago (and haven't even approached that limit). Being able to use a thick client to download e-mail would be a huge plus.
I'd actually prefer Windows (IIS and SQL Server) if it's an option because that's paid my bills for 20 years but I'm not sure how much of a fight copying my e-mail over would be. Also, smaller company with local (not in India) support would be nice but is probably asking for too much in this day and age.
Anybody have any suggestions?
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@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
So just hedging my bets in case I have to move away from A Small Orange due to India.
I don't have too many requirements. ASO is basically LAMP - Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP. They offer e-mail and allow multiple domains. Plan I'm on now is 1TB/150GB space/transfer but I don't know when it ballooned like that. I started on a 400MB plan and bumped up to 25GB years ago (and haven't even approached that limit). Being able to use a thick client to download e-mail would be a huge plus.
I'd actually prefer Windows (IIS and SQL Server) if it's an option because that's paid my bills for 20 years but I'm not sure how much of a fight copying my e-mail over would be. Also, smaller company with local (not in India) support would be nice but is probably asking for too much in this day and age.
Anybody have any suggestions?
I bought a minipc to toy with hosting stuff, and I think it was a better deal than paying for cloud. Digital ocean and vultr had a good cost/benefit ratio last time I checked
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@sockpuppet7 I'd also be open to self-hosting but I don't look forward to the million hoops that I'd have to jump through to get a static IP.
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@Zenith if you put it behind cloudflare it's relatively simple
if I was hosting something important I would have some regrets to be honest, there was some outages because of blackouts, wrong ufw configuration after restart and etc. but on cost it was definitely cheaper
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@sockpuppet7 The only cost that I need to minimize is my blood pressure doubling because of a random bungled change and tripling again when I read "Kindly hello I am being Rajesh and you are being helping today what is your IP and SSN" when I put in a ticket for said random bungled change.
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@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
I'd actually prefer Windows (IIS and SQL Server) if it's an option because that's paid my bills for 20 years but I'm not sure how much of a fight copying my e-mail over would be.
How much e-mail do you have currently? Is that email checked solely by web-mail, or can you / do you use an IMAP/POP compatible client to retrieve it (the Googles suggest that POP3/IMAP might be possible)? What's your approximate budget?
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@izzion said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
I'd actually prefer Windows (IIS and SQL Server) if it's an option because that's paid my bills for 20 years but I'm not sure how much of a fight copying my e-mail over would be.
How much e-mail do you have currently? Is that email checked solely by web-mail, or can you / do you use an IMAP/POP compatible client to retrieve it (the Googles suggest that POP3/IMAP might be possible)? What's your approximate budget?
I would guess less than 1GB. I use Thunderbird occasionally to pull a local copy but I'm a creature of habit and read/send with the webmail client (which was SquirrelMail until I was too lazy to fix it and started using RoundCube as a short-term workaround).
I'm currently paying $120 a year upfront (not counting domains). Pre-inflation madness I would've done $25 per month to avoid stupid problems. I don't know what that works out to now. $50 per month? Is that reasonable? Last time I looked at plans, there was a big jump from top-tier shared hosting to dedicated hosting.
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@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
@izzion said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
I'd actually prefer Windows (IIS and SQL Server) if it's an option because that's paid my bills for 20 years but I'm not sure how much of a fight copying my e-mail over would be.
How much e-mail do you have currently? Is that email checked solely by web-mail, or can you / do you use an IMAP/POP compatible client to retrieve it (the Googles suggest that POP3/IMAP might be possible)? What's your approximate budget?
I would guess less than 1GB. I use Thunderbird occasionally to pull a local copy but I'm a creature of habit and read/send with the webmail client (which was SquirrelMail until I was too lazy to fix it and started using RoundCube as a short-term workaround).
I'm currently paying $120 a year upfront. Pre-inflation I would've done $25/month to avoid stupid problems. I don't know what that works out to now. $50 a month? Is that reasonable?
At the risk of making the unpopular suggestion then, on a $50/month budget I would recommend the Microsoft stack (or G-Suite probably has an offering too, but I'm not familiar enough about their products to make a recommendation I'd stand
behindin the general vicinity of).M365 Business Basic for one user comes at $6/month and includes web versions of Outlook, Word, and Excel. You have the option to add desktop application access for another $6.50/month, but if you have multiple users I'm not sure if you can mix-and-match Basic and Standard licenses.
The website gets a little more confusing to try to place, depending on how LAMP'd your website really is and how much you want to fiddle with administrating various parts of it. I'm not as familiar here with hosting in a box services to be able to speak to good options there, but I see multiple options come up for $20/month or less for website hosting. If you wanted more full control in a VM, B-series VMs in Azure run around $15/month for 1GB of RAM (eek) or $38/month for 4GB of RAM with Windows on it, and you could self-manage IIS and SQL Server Express on that. Though there will be some additional cost for the HDD, on the order of $0.08 per GB per month for Standard SSD pricing. It'd depend a lot on what this website is used for as to whether that would really be a good option though - commodity hosting is probably going to be a better cost value, I just don't have enough experience to really make a recommendation for a good commodity host.
Edit to expand on the email hosting logic:
The best commodity hosting options I've seen (including GoDaddy's) wind up doing their email as white-labeled Microsoft Exchange Online. So for the email side, I'd rather just cut out the middle man, have my own Exchange Online server, and have my email be its own standalone service that won't be impacted by any website hosting changes I have to make.That same reasoning then extends to the domain registration - control your own domain registration through a major domain registrar, and use their DNS services to point to your email and your website hosting as necessary. You can then change any of the three services independently as needed for cost / support reasons without impacting the other two. Tying all three together through a website hosting service generally leads to more problems than the potential cost savings are worth (and often times the cost savings aren't that significant in the end if your host is whitelabeling a major email service provider, so if you're getting cost savings there it's probably because you're sacrificing email features and reliability)
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@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
Also, smaller company with local (not in India) support would be nice but is probably asking for too much in this day and age.
I've been using Sonic.net, a small company based in the SF Bay Area for 20-ish years, and I've been happy with them. Back in the day that I lived in their service area, so they were my access provider, they (optionally) didn't block any ports, so I self-hosted my email and website. That's the server that's been in my closet without having had a power cord connected in over a decade. I still use them for my email. The only reason I haven't ever set up my website on their hosting is
; I have some files available under the basic ~user, but I've never pointed my domain at their host. I was once told I might save some money by doing that. I'm paying extra for DNS and email for several domains I no longer use, and one of those would be included in the hosting plan, if I ever set that up.I haven't looked at their options for a long time, but basic LAMP. (Pretty sure they offer Postgres, too.) Static IPs are an extra $5/month in blocks of 5; that might be included in the hosting, but it was extra for self-hosting.
Their customer service is (or at least used to be; I haven't needed to use it for years) consistently rated . (At the time I started using them, they were resellers for PacBell (or whatever the RBOC was calling itself at the time) DSL, and buying from Sonic instead cost a bit more but avoided having to deal with PacBell's -rated customer service.) They have (or used to have) customer service available through local usenet support groups, as well as phone and the web, of course, and the CEO himself used to hang out in the groups.
It might or might not be what you're looking for, but I think it's close enough to be worth checking.
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@izzion said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
on a $50/month budget
FWIW: $50/month gets you a dedicated (but recycled) server at Hetzner (assuming you can stomach them with their constant advertising everywhere). Something like 32 or 64 GB of RAM, 8 cores (~Skylake), 2x500GB SSD and 1GBps uplink. There are even some options with a few TB of storage for the same price, but that's with spinning rust. Public IP included.
I looked through a few different options recently. They were high on the computer/$ scale. Ended up settling for them -- they're in Germany and their support was quick to respond to a query I had (and kinda typically German in their reply, which isn't a bad thing IMO). Let's see if I end up regretting it ... right now I'm paying marginally more than my old system (a cloud VM), but essentially have 3x as much RAM as I had storage in the old VM.
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@izzion said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
The website gets a little more confusing to try to place, depending on how LAMP'd your website really is
Not very. I basically ported my C#/ASP/T-SQL to PHP/mySQL and fought Apache's weird syntax in
.htaccessto do stuff that was far easier in IIS (error pages, redirects, etc). LAMP is always so backwards compared to the Windows stack from my POV.I do have Windows hosting over at a place called DailyRazor (yeah, dumb name) but their web SQL interface was so crazy slow that I never moved anything besides my defunct GeoCities site.
I'm honestly not sure what's a fair price for hosting now. I started with ASO back in college, paying $5/month for not much more than ISPs and places like GeoCities used to give you for free. At this point it's really just handling my e-mail and a landing page for my sales business.
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@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
@sockpuppet7 I'd also be open to self-hosting but I don't look forward to the million hoops that I'd have to jump through to get a static IP.
Do you really need a static IP, or that DNS always redirect people typing your website name to your machine?
Years ago (when ADSL was still cutting edge!), I used DynDNS to give my computer a name that could be reached from outside, whatever IP got assigned to me by my ISP (it changed every 24 hours which meant a restart of the DynDNS service was needed but that's another story and things have changed since then). I just checked that DynDNS still exists (for $50/year apparently), but I'm sure there must be other ones? The main drawback (but again, that was 20 years ago) was that the name I got was in the
dyndns.orgdomain.So that might make self-hosting viable for you?
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@remi just FYI DynDNS is now owned by Oracle and their service took a noticeable nosedive after the acquisition, I don’t know if it recovered in the years since but I doubt it.
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@izzion said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
Microsoft stack […] I'm not as familiar here with hosting in a box services to be able to speak to good options there
Nobody I know ever tried their PHP runtime, but some colleagues use the .NET one with ASP.NET app.
Quick look in the calculator shows they have some free tier running on shared server with 1GB memory and 1GB storage quotas, but if you go higher, it's getting … well, Linux isn't that expensive (1 core, 1.75GB mem and 10GB storage starts around $13 depending on which datacentre you chose), but Windows is four times more expensive.
@izzion said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
self-manage IIS and SQL Server Express on that
I wouldn't do that. You can have low power MS SQL database (it is mostly, but not completely compatible to stand-alone SQL server) for … well, the S0 tier for under $15/M (including 250GB storage) and that's plenty powerful for testing, so depends on what the load of the app would be.
But overall there are cheaper clouds than Azure. The VMs in OVH are like ⅓ of the price in Azure (at least without commitment, you get around 60% discount if you 3 years). Except you probably won't get hosted MSSQL anywhere else, only PostgreSQL or mySQL/MariaDB.
@Zenith said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
I basically ported my C#/ASP/T-SQL to PHP/mySQL
Per above, Windows hosting is quite a bit more expensive, but C# runs just fine on Linux these days, so it might be time to return to it if it's more comfortable for you. And you can probably do with Kestrel alone for web server to avoid fighting with Apache. I wouldn't recommend Apache for anything these days, and wouldn't have for quite a while now.
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@Bulb True you can have a "free tier" website in Azure, but...
- When you want to use your own domain, you have to pay for a higher tier (at least "Basic B1" at $12 per month which is still cheap).
- When your äpp is really used by several people, the free amount of CPU will be used up, and then it just stalls till the next day (60 minutes/day free).
- When you need tons of data to be stored, you have to pay for storage (1 GB free).
- When you transfer lots of data from Azure, you'll have to pay for that, too (15 GB per month)
- When you need automatic scaling, you need at least a "Standard S1" tier, $69 per month.
- When you need a database, it comes at an extra price. Of course, there is also a "free tier", but see my rants about it in
Azure Bites. Would your users be willing to wait a whole minute for the database to wake up (i.e. if it does wake up at all, in contrast to just this very moment...) - Etc.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Recommend a website hosting service.:
When you need automatic scaling, you need at least a "Standard S1" tier, $69 per month.
And surprisingly, the difference between Linux and Windows is fairly small in Standard unlike the ~4× in Basic. But it's Expensive™. You can have a much more decent VM in other clouds for that money.
