Is It Time to Migrate to Web Hosting
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So thinking about advice that I give to customers regularly and looking to eat some of my own dogfood (from an advice standpoint, at least.) NTG hosts a lot of websites internally, most are pretty low utilization, but a few are pretty huge. We have used Rackspace web hosting in the past but could not justify the intense price tag that it required and got better performance moving to our own servers. But running our own web servers seems silly, which is why we tried Rackspace long ago.
So I am thinking that it is time to look at another option. The thread yesterday got me thinking and I think it is time to consider other options. Hosting our own web servers simply is not what we should be spending our time doing.
So I am looking for ideas, feedback, reviews, etc. We mostly host WordPress sites, but not exclusively. I'm not opposed to paying more than the base amount for a service. Not opposed to considering using more than one service. Would love to have everything under one umbrella, but that isn't a requirement and maybe it is not even desired (less lock in.)
I have been looking at DreamHost as a likely candidate. A Small Orange is newer, but looks very interesting too.
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Here is the basic pricing for DreamHost:
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This is something that we really need off of our plate so as not to deal worry about it. I know that a few people recently have mentioned Hostgator but really don't know a ton about them.
HELP we need some ideas!
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But as we do tons of WordPress, including some very high traffic sites like SMBITJournal and NTG.co and SheepGuardingLlama, we could use something more. Here is DreamHost's WordPress special offering...
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Here is what that WordPress special offering includes. As far as I can tell, this remains an "unlimited" use machine, as in you get as many sites as you want, but it isn't completely clear.
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Here is what A Small Orange offers.
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Dreamhost or Hostgator would be my to recommendations. I've never had an issue with either besides Dreamhost went down a couple times for less than 2 hrs.
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watching :shipit:
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Not being a web guy at all. Let me ask you this, What do most websites need for bandwidth?
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I was actually thinking about moving off from hostgator to Digital Ocean, but then on second thought I think providers like hostgator is much better, where you get the cPanel license with that to manage most of your installation and setup with:
But that price is only for the first invoice, for eg: the baby plan for monthly plan is $9.95 after the first discounted bill of $7.96
Hostgator had some downtimes previously, but now seems to be pretty stable. They have one click wordpress installer via quick install in cPanel. If you want to less worry about maintaining the server and concentrate more on the website, I would say go with provider like hostgator.
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@IRJ said:
Not being a web guy at all. Let me ask you this, What do most websites need for bandwidth?
Not much. Plus we use CloudFlare that offloads a bit of that for us. None of our sites are even showing images or anything. It is nearly all text, so bandwidth is tiny, database hits are heavy. I don't know the numbers offhand but I do know that nothing we do touches the bandwidth of any of these offerings. I can see CF's report on that from time to time and we use maybe 1-2 GB.
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@IRJ said:
Not being a web guy at all. Let me ask you this, What do most websites need for bandwidth?
Solely depends on the traffic a website sees. a lot of host do unlimited or next to unlimited anymore. But for small sites you don't need much at all.
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I like the idea of DreamHost's high end WordPress option. Anyone have any thoughts or experience on that?
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@scottalanmiller said:
I like the idea of DreamHost's high end WordPress option. Anyone have any thoughts or experience on that?
I've used wordpress on them but, never their specific wordpress hosting. When using it on their standard hosting packages even with caching it's slow.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I've used wordpress on them but, never there specific wordpress hosting. When using it on there standard hosting packages even with caching it's slow.
That's what I'm worried about. Rackspace was the same. It's not caching that is the issue, it is database performance that gets us.
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The Varnish cache, I hope, and the dedicated MySQL servers would make the difference. But who knows.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I've used wordpress on them but, never there specific wordpress hosting. When using it on there standard hosting packages even with caching it's slow.
That's what I'm worried about. Rackspace was the same. It's not caching that is the issue, it is database performance that gets us.
Yeah. That was my main reason I had switch to hostgator wordpress works fine in their standard package and is cheaper.
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ASO looks very interesting...
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@scottalanmiller They had few recent outages based on Facebook and twitter. Plus this yesterday http://forums.asmallorange.com/topic/18550-closed-dallas-cloud-partial-outage/
Some more http://forums.asmallorange.com/forum/2-hosting-status/
