I got the dreaded EOL notice from my host and I'll soon need to be moving about a dozen domains. So I'm looking around to see what's out there for cheaper hosting.
The traffic is low enough that I can't justify a big spend.
Any recommendations? What questions should I be asking?
I'm using Siteground and they have been okay.
I would second Siteground. I only manage a single site (actually single account, two sites, one on Drupal, one on Wordpress) at Siteground, but they've been good.
I used to be a fan of Webfaction, but would now go for Siteground. It's more standard components. I would call both developer friendly (e.g. have git and other basic dev tools even on the cheapest shared accounts).
And I'm still a Linode fan if you want roll your own VPS.
Quote from: buckworks on July 09, 2019, 09:28:53 PM
I got the dreaded EOL notice from my host and I'll soon need to be moving about a dozen domains. So I'm looking around to see what's out there for cheaper hosting.
The traffic is low enough that I can't justify a big spend.
Any recommendations? What questions should I be asking?
Knownhost?
Digital Ocean
They're UK based, but I moved to krystal last year and wish I did it sooner
Knownhost has been the best hosting company I've ever used, and that's saying a lot. (Probably 40-45 hosts over 20+ years.) If you need a managed server or vps, I wouldn't go elsewhere.
Quote from: ukgimp on July 10, 2019, 07:54:11 AM
Digital Ocean
Same as Linode (or OVH) - great choice if you want to run your own VPS, but not if you want someone who will manage the server for you.
PAC web hosting, UK, lightspeed hosting, fast, cheap, great uptime.
Last year I was spammed by many bots from Linode IP addys.
Hasn't happened lately.
I don't doubt that they had some bots running on their system. They sell server space after all. You can put anything you want on their machines, including bots and vulnerable software.
Linode was also targeted for some big DDOS attacks.
QuoteStarting Christmas Day 2015 and continuing until January 10th, Linode was hit by large and frequent DDoS attacks, which were being caused by a "bad actor" purchasing large amounts of botnet capacity in an attempt to significantly damage Linode's business.[22] Linode was the victim of another severe DDoS attack over the 2016 Labor Day weekend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode
I think that in general they have responded well to these incidents (e.g enforcing two-factor auth after a compromise in 2013).
Quote from: Brad on July 09, 2019, 10:07:13 PM
I'm using Siteground and they have been okay.
I'm taking back my recommendation of SiteGround. They are ditching c-panel and replacing it with their own, in house, management panel. I just looked at the demo: just a small number of auto-install scripts (and of course not the one I want/need) compared to Softalicious in c-panel. Plus many of the bigger scripts now cost $50 to install whereas before they were free.
Quoteditching c-panel and replacing it
Seems lots of hosts will be doing this as cpanel have drastically changed their pricing structure. Noticed it on even cheaper hosts, their hosting pricing structure is simply unsustainable when offering cpanel at their new pricing.
I do have a PHP backend for cpanel automation, without the hassle of logging in. Pretty trivial and you can see how easily it'd work using the browser console in cpanel, as they pretty much have API-like endpoint s anyways.
DirectAdmin has a similar layout and I see a lot of lower budget hosts aiming to use them now.
Softalicious is decent enough packaged within cpanel but it can be replaced easy enough bash script by bash script with whatever software is needed.
Think cpanel really grabbed the market by the chuckies knowing it's less than trivial for hosts to change without significant hassle on their part + ~20 years of customers growing familiar with it as part of their setup and expecting it.
BoL: If they were offering the same basic features as cpanel and softalicious I'd be okay with it. Right now they are only offering autoinstall on a few popular warhorse scripts and some of those have a hidden extra charge.
I feel like it was a bait and switch. I specifically looked for a cpanel host when I chose SG. Now I'm getting about 20% of the scripts and hidden costs, and the script I specifically wanted is no longer there. Unfortunately I just renewed for a year. Oh well.
Interesting. I only manage one site on Siteground and since setting it up two years, I've only logged into the bash shell. So I honestly wouldn't know.
I was helping a friend with a site on Webfaction, which has their own dashboard and it is beyond confusing. Major hassle just to get a Let's Encrypt cert on there that would work with the www to non-www redirect.
My personal stuff is all on a VPS where I installed Webmin/Virtualmin. For me it's as good or better than CPanel, but I've never used Sofatlicious (you mean Softaculus?). I used a similar thing way, way back and it had a habit of installing things in ways that I didn't like, so I stopped using those installers and never tried again to see if they had gotten better. I've probably wasted a lot of time doing things manually, but I don't launch new sites very often, so it's not a pain point.
>BoL: If they were offering the same basic features as cpanel and softalicious I'd be okay with it.
Seems like providers can be terribly slow to adapt, the unmanaged offerings especially - and definitely a gap in the market for the other panels for the point and click situations that people are accustomed to.
cpanel were bought out 12 months ago iirc so the money men have probably decided that it's OK to bleed everyone who can't take an alternate choice, or basically forcing the hosting providers to pass on the cost - across a large chunk of the market.
It's not a hugely sophisticated bit of software either, for anyone who had to deal with mundane processes before this automation. There's 00,000s of hosts that offer cpanel, some will offer "add on" domains and "parked domains" but with some basic .htaccess you can turn those parked domains into fully hosted sites.
You can also abuse the shared network on shared hosting services. I've bought some cpanel/whm hosting for $10/y and there's 100s of IPs that you can use as outgoing interfaces, often with several different /24 subnets i.e. $0.01 per IP per month. Just sharing as a point of amusement really, seems like with that kind of setup a more virtualized situation would work in the long run for everyone.
Just in case you're interested in the multi IP thing, i'll stick a post in the inner core
Familiarity with cpanel is the thing imo, but there are others out there that offer comparable functionality. Personally I find most panels to be a fudge just makes things more complicated but each to their own.
Quote from: BoL on September 18, 2019, 09:05:14 PM
Personally I find most panels to be a fudge just makes things more complicated but each to their own.
This is the thing I like about Virtualmin - it's more like a wizard that runs standard campaigns using a really nice GUI. CPanel just takes over the OS and is hard to get rid of, like a virus. For a long time you couldn't run CPanel and git on the same machine (they finally fixed that). Virtualmin helps with setup, but it does very little to change the guts of the system
I think my main bone of contention is that you can take a panel which can be more convenient than manual short-term, but it 'takes over' the configuration as you say with cpanel, sometimes the panels and their writing/expectation of layout of config files can lead to self-created problems. Basically they're an abstraction that creates their own problems.
Wouldn't argue against using a panel, just a preference.
FYI I had been waffling between KnownHost and SiteGround, but life got in the way and I didn't actually make the choice. Today, yes today, I was about to choose SG when I saw these latest posts.
So I changed my mind and have chosen KnownHost.
Thanks, everyone!
<time warp>
I'm still hosted on KnownHost and I've just completed (I hope!) a complex (for me) site migration.
The KnownHost techs helping me were absolutely stellar. Absolutely stellar.
Possibly the most fabulous tech service team in the known universe!
I hear more and more complaining about SG lately. My experience has been okay, but a friend with several sites there is always complaining.