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:
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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)
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9CubeHosting: this one is very cheap, but I couldn't find much information about its reliability
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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
I know you can get a 1-year free VM on amazon at the lowest settings. Maybe worth a look?
But three weeks without the orx forum is no good! $300 a year is quite expensive these days.
As Sausage stated, I couldn't find any details on proper web hosting from github.io. Also I couldn't find if I could run Joomla on the free 1-year AWS hosting either.
Regarding parcom, it gets pretty expensive quickly when customizing their offer.
Here's an example:
And that's only with minimal bandwidth/disk use. Most web hosts now offer unlimited bandwidth, disk use, databases and addon/parked/sub domains on all their offers.
As for bluehost, it's 300$ for two years (actually 280$ without domain registration).
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.
no idea about costs
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
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.
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.
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.
Thanks to Sausage for the CSS lifting he did for the occasion.
If you spot any strange behavior or bug, please let us know.