Looking for cheap web hosting
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Take a look at A Small Orange (ASO). I think I'm paying like $4.99 / mo, which covers multiple sites.
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I use MNX.io. It's $5 a month for 1 cpu, 768 Mb ram, 25 Gb SSD, and 1 TB transfer. They don't have Windows, but they do have Ubuntu 14.04, Debian 7, CentOS 6, CentOS 7, FreeBSD 10, and SmartOS. I use Drupal for everything, so I haven't used any other forum software.
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I'm using Host gator.
Watched and waited til it went on sale I paid something like $74 for 3 years.
(Single domain)So like $2/month
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A Small Orange and SiteGround are the two I hear about often when people talk about top notch shared hosting. Note: ASO is now owned by a big ol' webhost conglomerate (EIG) but apparently they're still pretty good.
I am not terribly impressed with Hostgator. No major issues so far, but when we were scanning for vulnerabilities we found they still hadn't patched the BIND vulnerability on our shared host. This happened about a week ago, so they let their servers sit around unpatched for about a month.
I do strongly recommend using Linux if you're wanting to do web hosting. Few places offer Windows hosting, and support/tutorials for IIS webservers is severely lacking compared to Apache or even Nginx. On top of that, most places offering Windows hosting does so at an increased cost as you need more powerful servers to make it do the same stuff Linux does. Even with Windows admin skills in the bag already, it's quite possible that you would end up spending more time and money learning how to effectively serve websites + forums on Windows than you would learning how to do the same thing on Linux and Apache or Nginx.
Depending on how fancy you want to get, you could really jump in headfirst and sign up somewhere like Digital Ocean for a VPS. This is almost guaranteed to be faster than what you would get with a shared hosting setup, and you have root access to the server to install software as needed. Their smallest $5/month server is more than enough for a website, even a CMS like WordPress, and it could probably run the forum software as well as long as you don't have a ton of people using it all at once.
Speaking of forum software, Vanilla Forums is a nice system with a free open source edition!
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A small orange is the best I've ever used.
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@JasonNM said:
A small orange is the best I've ever used.
We use them and their customer service is great. We do have very common site outages of a few seconds, though. Like several times a week. They are very momentary, maybe a minute at most, but happen surprisingly often.
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I have few sites hosted on digitalocean too. If you want to run WordPress sites for example, it's super easy to setup one with their one click app install.
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I use Forethought.net which is local to me and has amazing support.
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Thank you all!
Ended up on DigitalOcean
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@MattSpeller said:
Thank you all!
Ended up on DigitalOcean
And how do you like it? Make sure to check out there documentation it is great!
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@anonymous was easy as pie to setup! Performance, well, it loads my test pics of kittens nicely. I'll update once we get some traffic.
I'll checkout the documentation, thanks!
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What size VPS did you chose?
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@anonymous $10/mth to do wordpress
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Good choice. Make sure you setup cache on your VM, or MySQL will keep crashing.
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@MattSpeller said:
@anonymous $10/mth to do wordpress
Just so you know, you can definitely make a small WordPress site work well on the $5/month option. There's some stuff you will want to be able to do in Linux/WordPress before doing it on a production VPS, namely swap file management in Linux and site caching in WordPress, but once you have those down you might be able to save some money on hosting
Might be worth trying out if and when you do a test restore of your site. If you do want to test it out, keep in mind you'll have to do the restore from a WordPress-level backup and not a Digital Ocean server snapshot/backup - they don't let you restore those to a smaller-sized VPS.
With all that said, their $10/month option is what I would pick if I were planning on hosting a forum on the same server.
