Any fast/cheap hosting ideas out there?

M

Myler

the horror.
Apr 25, 2009
532
6
0
G16
I'm about to setup a site that will not be interesting to large audiences. It's a sort of a narrow niche thing, specific industry related, so the traffic will be low and steady, can't really fathom why would it ever have any traffic spikes...it's not about anything of popular interest.

But one thing I do need is site speed. Even if the visitor per day numbers will be low, I need the videos to load quickly (I'll probably host them on vimeo...) big PDF's to load quickly, image galleries to load quickly, regardless of visitor's location.

I thought about shared hosting but I have bad experience with Hostgator's shared hosting, it literally takes 10+ seconds to load my personal portfolio site there, and it consists of 5 icon png's that link to my works + gradient background. The whole folder of my website doesn't take more than 500 kb and it really looks pathetic when you wait 10 seconds for it to load...

So even tho I wont have big traffic, I don't want shared hosting. I don't want to experiment with it again.

What I need is something dedicated but with a budget. Let's say I'll start my cheapskate bid low, let's say I would like to find something decent for $ 20-30 / month ... are there any recommendations in this price bracket?

First thing that came to my mind was WPEngine, but then again I would like to have full control over my FTP and have cpanel...
 


With a dedicated solution you'll need to install your own LAMP stack (linux apache mysql php) and WHM/cPanel.

I think what you're looking for is actually regular shared hosting minus the "slow" factor :)

Try mddhosting.com. I hear good things about them.
 
10 seconds load time?
You are doing something extremely wrong there.

::emp::
 
emp said:
10 seconds load time?
You are doing something extremely wrong there.

::emp::
Click to expand...

Without going into too much offtopic, I think the whole load fiasco on my hostgator shared is due to WP installation. I have inactive WP install on that hosting, you can't access it, but it's there, so maybe it slows the whole site down. Anyway, it's painstakingly slow.

I just tried it, 5 seconds, still I think it's way too slow for 5 pngs and 1 gradient png background...but I don't care about that now, I'll switch my site somewhere else...


On topic, I know my requirements are low and it does look like shared might be the best solution but I really don't want to go that way, is there some low level VPS or cloud with cpanel that could be arranged for 20-30 $ a month, I would be at ease with that solution :D
 
OFF:

An unused WP install shouldn't add even 1ms to load time.
You should check your site with YSlow for Firefox or "Page speed" app for Chrome.
These two will identify your bottleneck.

Tip: Minify your PNGs with TinyPNG. It's awesome.

------

ON:

As far as VPS goes it looks like you need a managed SSD VPS.
In that case I'd recommend Knownhost.

They're legit and also pretty active on WHT. Pricing is $5 over your budget though :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: BabyGotBacklink
DigitalOcean is the shit and cheap - $5 per month for 512MB RAM, 20GB SSD and 1TB Xfer. You do need some experience in server admin I suppose, but truth be told I don't and I followed their tutorials on a LEMP stack and the server's the best I've ever run. I'd also use MaxCDN and/or CloudFlare.
 
I'm looking into MaxCDN now, so if I put my site on, for example, Knownhost, I only put html files there and hotlink all possible multimedia content on MaxCDN, correct?

MaxCDN seems like ultraquick solution but it kinda breaks my cheap budget...I'll see if I can squeeze it all in...

Are there real speed differences if I put my multimedia files on CDN vs. having them on the hosting site?

What about video hosting, do they allow for it or does it require additional $?
 
Depends on how much traffic you'll be generating. I'd contact Knownhost and ask them what are their soft or hard limits.

Based on your above description of the "low traffic" site I think you're not going to need any other CDN and/or media hosting.

Though, for video - wouldn't YouTube or Vimeo suffice?
 
duimstra said:
Yup, DO rox.

But to the starting $5 you need to add $15 right away for cPanel VPS license @Mlyer needs.
Click to expand...

cPanel is half the problem in my opinion. The sooner you can get away from it the better. One server I have uses less resources at full chat, than my old cPanel server did doing nothing.

Myler said:
I'm looking into MaxCDN now, so if I put my site on, for example, Knownhost, I only put html files there and hotlink all possible multimedia content on MaxCDN, correct?

MaxCDN seems like ultraquick solution but it kinda breaks my cheap budget...I'll see if I can squeeze it all in...

Are there real speed differences if I put my multimedia files on CDN vs. having them on the hosting site?

What about video hosting, do they allow for it or does it require additional $?
Click to expand...

Using MaxCDN you can set-up Zones to host videos and various files for you, but I've never used them for that, I normally just use a plugin on my Joomla sites and let it go.

There are some benefits to speed, but they're negligible in my experience. What I did find though, was that it meant the server was doing slightly less and shaves fuck loads off the bandwidth.

If you're concerned by the budget, go with CloudFlare.com. It's free and you just update your DNS and let them worry about the files depending on your settings, it's a doddle.
 
duimstra said:
Though, for video - wouldn't YouTube or Vimeo suffice?
Click to expand...

I would like to have debranded videos on site so Vimeo+ is probably the only option, I'm not a fan of other video hosting platforms, paid or free...so that's another $100 a year :)

CDN sounds super tempting, the idea of having files duplicated on multiple locations sounds great because the website will be used by customers who come from different countries across the world.

MaxCDN's $9/month sounds like a really cheap deal...



Also, since the videos will be loaded on demand, I will need both HD and non-HD versions, to make it easy for mobile users...I don't know if Vimeo can take care of that automatically?


Digging the digital ocean site...and their prices seem low...I'm the worst, I want cheap but when I see cheap I get suspicious :) I'll see what the folks at WHT say about them :)
 
I tried DO in the past and they're awesome. Their help section is cool too, like @-God- said.

But they're not managed, so you'll need to admin the VPS yourself or get someone to do that for you.
 
The notion of "managing VPS" sounds interesting, since I never used anything other than shared Filezilla FTP cpanel environment in my life :D
 
Myler said:
The notion of "managing VPS" sounds interesting, since I never used anything other than shared Filezilla FTP cpanel environment in my life :D
Click to expand...

In that case an unmanaged VPS might be a bit too technical for you unless you know your way around (unix) shell / command line.


Myler said:
By the way, can I put 2 separate web domains on VPS I sigun up to?
Click to expand...
You can put anything you like on a VPS because it's like having a whole server to yourself.

With an unmanaged VPS you only get root access to your virtual machine (username and password for command line) and from that point you can install anything you like. In your case that would be:
- some flavor of Linux, probably CentOS
- Apache, MySQl and PHP stack
- some sort of web control panel (you mentioned cPanel)


With a managed VPS you get access to some ticket system where you can open a ticket and request the admins to install (and configure, upgrade, debug, etc) all these software packages.
 
duimstra said:
With an unmanaged VPS you only get root access to your virtual machine (username and password for command line) and from that point you can install anything you like. In your case that would be:
- some flavor of Linux, probably CentOS
- Apache, MySQl and PHP stack
- some sort of web control panel (you mentioned cPanel)


With a managed VPS you get access to some ticket system where you can open a ticket and request the admins to install (and configure, upgrade, debug, etc) all these software packages.
Click to expand...

Seems to me that VPS is the bare minimum for anyone who has any kind of "serious" web online...I think I'll need to learn basic of the basics in VPS management :))
 
Myler said:
Without going into too much offtopic, I think the whole load fiasco on my hostgator shared is due to WP installation. I have inactive WP install on that hosting, you can't access it, but it's there, so maybe it slows the whole site down. Anyway, it's painstakingly slow.

I just tried it, 5 seconds, still I think it's way too slow for 5 pngs and 1 gradient png background...but I don't care about that now, I'll switch my site somewhere else...


On topic, I know my requirements are low and it does look like shared might be the best solution but I really don't want to go that way, is there some low level VPS or cloud with cpanel that could be arranged for 20-30 $ a month, I would be at ease with that solution :D
Click to expand...

WP is slow in general and not made for high traffic sites.

minify it as much as possible
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom