[GTALUG] Web hosting questions

Mon Oct 30 12:04:44 EDT 2017

Many awesome tips posted to this thread !!

The one about the two-phase TTL change (not included in this reply) has been added to my DNS bag of tricks.

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My personal experience -- you can go through a lot of pain and anguish on the way to finding good Internet hosting service providers. I used to say the Internet is a jungle, but really, it's more like a sewer.

One observation: web hosting services can very significantly in the market they are addressing. For example, I currently maintain accounts with two (2) hosting providers:

www.siteground.com (SG) -- For general email and website hosting and website building tools (I'm NOT a power website builder), I use SG for hosting: 1. my email (POP3 inbox, and SMTP), 2. a few (home brewed) web pages, and 3. a few FTP accounts for exchanging files. I pay SG annually US $323.40 (no tax collected). May strike some people as expensive, but for me, rock-solid reliability (especially for email hosting !!) and excellent technical support are prime. SG does have less expensive plans. Any hosting service can have an outage, but so far SG has been great for reliability. Also I love cPanel for admin work.

www.elastichosts.com (EH) -- For working more closely to the "metal" of hosting service hardware, I use EH QEMU / KVM virtual machines. I can run more VMs, but presently I have two (2) VMs: 1. stock debian Linux for hosting a home brew website with transactions and a database, currently under development (not yet online), 2. cool DragonFlyBSD (dfly) flavour of Unix, with its native HAMMER1 (soon to go to HAMMER2) filesystem. The idea is to eventually migrate the website (not yet online) from the Linux VM to the more performant (in theory:) dfly VM, to squeeze more value from hosting fees. I pay EH annually US $541.60 (plus 13% tax collected) (discounted @ 12 months hosting for the price of 10). Again, may strike some people as expensive, but for me, rock-solid reliability and excellent technical support are prime. Haven't done much work with the EH VMs lately, but every time I check in, they just start and run. EH has many server sites, my stuff runs on EH servers in Toronto.

Steve 

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Don Tai via talk 
  To: o1bigtenor 
  Cc: GTALUG Talk 
  Sent: Monday, October 30, 2017 8:18 AM
  Subject: Re: [GTALUG] Web hosting questions

  I would also council to separate your domains from your hosting provider. If you have a dispute with your hosting provider you should be able to easily switch hosts. You cannot do this if your domains and hosting are from the same source. It is like separating your email address from your internet provider. Maybe you are lucky and the host provider has farmed this out to a domain names company? Of provided a domain name for free (transfer after one year)?

  Bots will try to hack into your web site, and if you have business stuff there that is a bonus for them. A clear separation between the internet and your internal network is always a good idea.

  Whatever you can do at home you should be able to set up on your host provider in a test environment. The host should be able to provide a linux session, just like at home.

  Take nothing for granted when looking for a host provider. If it does not say backups and restores are available and free, then it is not provided. If not sure, then ask.

  Web sites are very easy to put up and maintain, depending on the package you wish to use. Of course having less money means having to learn more.

  Don

  On 30 October 2017 at 07:39, o1bigtenor <o1bigtenor at gmail.com> wrote:

    Greetings

    On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 6:27 AM, Don Tai <dontai.canada at gmail.com> wrote:

      Web hosting can be purchased on the occasional sale, such as Black Friday, so renewal costs can be much higher. I always compare renewal costs and not the initial loss leader signup cost. The 2.7 times higher hosting costs may be valid, depending on the hosting services provided. Moe importantly, what did you buy? Some hosts don't even provide on demand backup, and some hosts will charge you for a restore. Some hosts don't provide SSH. Shared services or a dedicated IP? Reputation, which is very important?

    I am getting an education out of this for sure.

    What was purchased was 2 domains and a 3 year small business hosting package at hostpapa.

    I has become quite clear that what I got was something like buying a car. 

    Didn't specify that I wanted a steering wheel - - - so I need to add this.

    The website builder program - - I didn't use it in the first year - - - its now an extra fee.

    Sorry - - - in setting up a complicated small business there are a mountain of things to be done and the website was/is on the list, its just that money is quite short and time keeps disappearing and so things get done when they do.

    Its also frustrating when you sign up for x and the renewal is quite a large increase. One would think that the hosting companies might not want you to move. 

      I would not recommend self-hosting at home. There are too many rogue bots roaming around the world, and the possibility of hacking is near certain. Yes, if you keep up with all the updates and monitor your server carefully you can be ok, but I know that my hosting provider had to purchase additional software just to deal with DDOS attacks and other intrusions. Unless you want to take on the sys admin role, for me the hosting costs are well worthwhile. If you are with the right host, your site becomes more popular and you run out of ram it should be easy to upgrade.

      Personally I'd rather concentrate on the web site, SEO and social media than futz with Apache settings, so would rather be on a host provider. The hosting costs can be pretty small, depending on what you purchase.

    That was the idea.

    My server here is for managing my business - - - not for managing my website - - - that's what I wanted hosting for.

    The problem is that I want to experiment on the server here (set up various services at very least) and somehow I can't use these domains that I have paid for.

    Likely its a case of me wanting too much and not knowing enough.

    I can change the not knowing enough but haven't been able to find information. 

    My hosting company is quite good at offering a lot of information with much of it being 'non-useful'.

    Thanking you for your consideration!!

    Dee 

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