Looking for a new web host

edited July 2015 in Website
Hey all,

It's time for me to renew orx's site hosting. However, my current host, BlueHost, is getting quite expensive and I can't really afford it any longer.
To give an idea, it's ~300 USD for a 2 years period, and gets proportionally more expensive if I renew it for a shorter period.

I've been looking at alternatives and found a few that looked promising, but I wanted to know your opinion before making any decision:

- HostMetro: using a coupon I found online, the first 3 years are only ~66 USD and the renewal rates are frozen for ever (2.5-4.5 USD / month depending on the length)

- 9CubeHosting: this one is very cheap, but I couldn't find much information about its reliability

- Romarg: this one was mentioned by Enobayram and looks also promising.

Any suggestion? I have to do this before next month or the website will go offline for a while as I'll be on vacation for 3 weeks.

Cheers!

Comments

  • edited July 2015
    Have you considered github io? It is free as far as I know, but I am not sure if they have a forum service.

    I know you can get a 1-year free VM on amazon at the lowest settings. Maybe worth a look?
  • edited July 2015
    I don't think github provides proper hosting services?? I'd go with someone who hosts as their specialty. parcom.net (http://www.parcomweb.com/) is a crowd I have used for years, though I am slightly less impressed with them since they sold the business a few months ago.

    But three weeks without the orx forum is no good! $300 a year is quite expensive these days.
  • edited July 2015
    Thanks to both of you for your suggestions.

    As Sausage stated, I couldn't find any details on proper web hosting from github.io. Also I couldn't find if I could run Joomla on the free 1-year AWS hosting either.

    Regarding parcom, it gets pretty expensive quickly when customizing their offer.

    Here's an example:
    Custom Cloud - West Coast USA Datacenter (orx-project.org)
    » Disk Space: 2 GB (FAST CLOUD DRIVES) $12.00 (USD)
    » Bandwidth: 2 GB $2.40 (USD)
    » Email Accounts: 1 Email Account (Free)
    » FTP Accounts: Unlimited FTP Accounts $8.00 (USD)
    » MySQL Databases: 4 SQL Databases $3.00 (USD)
    » Subdomains: Unlimited Subdomains (sub.domain.com) $8.00 (USD)
    » Parked Domains: 2 Parked Domains (domain1=domain2) $2.00 (USD)
    » Addon Domains: 2 Addon Domains (Domain1 + Domain2) $5.00 (USD)
    [Edit Configuration] [Remove] $87.80 (USD) + $0.95 (USD) Setup Fee

    And that's only with minimal bandwidth/disk use. Most web hosts now offer unlimited bandwidth, disk use, databases and addon/parked/sub domains on all their offers.

    As for bluehost, it's 300$ for two years (actually 280$ without domain registration).
  • edited July 2015
    Actually yeah, high bandwidth will be needed for the traffic.

    Hmm ok, the other host I have some experience with is Arvixe: http://www.arvixe.com/linux_web_hosting
    (unlimited disk space and bandwidth)

    I'll see what else I can dig up.
  • edited July 2015
  • edited July 2015
    The free tier of AWS should easily be able to run the site as I've seen much larger running on it and we ran our entire game server on it during heavy testing.

    With both GitHub and S3 (the Amazon CDN) you can only host static pages. For example our company and game site just completely killed off all the old CMS stuff and we're using Jekyll to produce static content that we can host on S3 (about $1.50 / month with DNS, Cloudfront, multiple CDN) and for dynamic stuff we use REST services from elsewhere.

    Mind you for our forums we're looking at both Digital Ocean (you could easily host all of Orx here for $10/mo) and Heroku ($7/mo for Orx) as alternatives to using EC2. Either of those VPS hosts will give you cheaper prices and much better performance across the board compared to most others. Although we'll most likely be using EC2/EBS for our dynamic stuff in the end to be honest, just checking out other offerings as well :)
  • edited July 2015
    AFAIK the service is for a linux based VM with an static IP.

    I rent one for some tests (as well as VPN/proxy) from digital ocean for 5 USD/mo. It is a pretty weak spec (1 core, 512 MB of ram, 20 GB SSD), it has a lot of transfer band for my needs (1 TB/mo) and the speed is OK (it has a 100 MB for the real machine, so you share it with all the other VMS hosted in the real machine, but has never been a problem for me).

    I am pretty sure the 1 year free machine offered by amazon has the same setup, so you would have to set everything up yourself.
  • edited July 2015
    Knolan wrote:
    I am pretty sure the 1 year free machine offered by amazon has the same setup, so you would have to set everything up yourself.
    Well with Amazon you could always just grab the Bitnami Joomla AMI (or whatever CMS, etc you're using) and use a 1-click instance which would launch it immediately... you can then ssh and tweak whatever you want. Also the AMIs provided by Bitnami put all the data on an EBS store rather than the ephemeral EC2 instances so you can have snapshot backups to S3 or any other source.
  • edited July 2015
    joew wrote:
    Knolan wrote:
    I am pretty sure the 1 year free machine offered by amazon has the same setup, so you would have to set everything up yourself.
    Well with Amazon you could always just grab the Bitnami Joomla AMI (or whatever CMS, etc you're using) and use a 1-click instance which would launch it immediately... you can then ssh and tweak whatever you want. Also the AMIs provided by Bitnami put all the data on an EBS store rather than the ephemeral EC2 instances so you can have snapshot backups to S3 or any other source.

    Cool, I am not an expert on how AMS works, but I have a friend that used to have a digital ocean VM for proxy/VPN services (in my country ISPs are the legal obrigation to log every single access you make) and he changed for amazon for a free year.
  • edited August 2015
    Thanks all for your suggestion.

    I'm looking for something with minimal work, so it needs to run some kind of administrative tool akin to cpanel and have a bunch of things pre-installed, such as php, phpmyadmin, etc...

    I think I'll go with enobayram's suggestion of romarg.com. It's slightly more expansive than hostmetro.com, but at least I can test it for a single month at first before committing for a longer stretch.
  • edited August 2015
    Well, actually, after chatting directly with exhz, they offer a custom plan that is both very affordable (the cheapest one I found, actually) and should cover all the needs for the website (only disk use and bandwidth are capped at something that's about 3-5 times more than our current needs).
  • edited August 2015
    Excellent news. At least now we won't be tossed out into the street.

    ;)
  • edited August 2015
    Just a quick post to let you know that the migration went well and that the site you're seeing is now hosted by exhz.

    Thanks to Sausage for the CSS lifting he did for the occasion.

    If you spot any strange behavior or bug, please let us know.
  • edited August 2015
    aha I knew you must have changed it over as soon as I saw the new header :)
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