[kwlug-disc] Evaluating webhosting

[Fernando Duran]

Hi,

My generic go-to web hosting companies are:

- Rimuhosting.com (good tech support if I may say since I worked there he)
- Rackspace (I'd say with Linode it's the standard VPS option, together with AWS but Amazon is for more advanced needs)
- and recently DigitalOcean.com which has SSD disks (a quick test revelaed a 10x faster write than regular disks), it's very cheap and they seem to be growing very fast, which can be good or bad regarding reliability (no long record).

For a small company that needs a bit/a lot of hand-holding I wouldn't know what to recommend since good human support time is expensive and small companies don't have a lot of money so requirements are kind of contradictory, perhaps a local small IT company?

In this particular case of WP and email, there are specialized WP hosting and also companies with point-and-click WP images provisioning.

Regarding email for a small company I'd suggest to outsource it (if owner doesn't mind making things just a bit easier for NSA), to Gmail or RackspaceMail for example. Basically you need uptime plus deliverability and mail servers (esp. the big ones gmail/hotmail/yahoo) tend to drop to the floor email messages from unknown mail servers.

Lastly, besides owning the domain name, it would be good in general to have a recipe (in shell script, Ansible/puppet/chef/whatever) and off-side (like Amazon's S3 etc) backups to be able to move the site quickly off to another one if we're not happy with our hosting.

Cheers,
 
---------------------
Fernando Duran
http://www.fduran.com


----- Original Message -----
> From: Paul Nijjar <paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca>
> To: kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> Cc: 
> Sent: Thursday, October 3, 2013 2:00:37 AM
> Subject: [kwlug-disc] Evaluating webhosting
> 
>T his is not really offtopic, since the desire is to do some Wordpress
> hosting, as well as some email. It may be a contentious topic, since
> there is so much choice (and I believe some people on this list offer
> webhosting services). 
> 
> Anyways, I was recently asked about webhosting for a business. The
> person in question has a simple Wordpress site and three email
> accounts. She has hosting already (with Clickhost) but is unhappy with
> them because their email went down for a week -- so reliability and
> security (whatever "security" means) are important to her. I am pretty
> sure she wants shared hosting, as opposed to colocation or a VPS. She
> just wants a website and email, not to be a sysadmin. 
> 
> I am kind of lost about what to tell her. There are so many hosting
> companies out there, and evaluating what ones are good (and what
> criteria to use in evaluating them) makes my head spin. Anecdotes and
> word of mouth are two tools for suggesting webhosts, but are there
> other ways to come to good decisions about this?
> 
> - Paul
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://pnijjar.freeshell.org
> 
> 
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