Recommended Webhosts?

1

Hey all,

Interested in feedback from people who are already hosting sites.

I have a site that I’ve hosted on Yahoo! (now Aabaco) for 15 years. Always been a pretty simple site, never needed much fancy.

I’m working on a new site now (almost done) and am caching the entire site’s content in a single file and managing the content SPA style on the front end. That HTML file is currently 1MB on disk. In my local environment, which has GZIP compression enabled, it’s only 90KB of data transfer, which I feel is manageable to get the content of the entire site and allow for no-delay and instant access to all text content.

However, apparently Aabaco does not support compression (WTF?) so when I watch the network transfer it’s the full 1MB file, uncompressed. That’s just not gonna fly.

I’ve got an email in to support, but haven’t heard back yet. Google searches do not suggest I should cross my fingers. I was already considering switching hosts anyway and am now leaning even more heavily in that direction.

Can any with experience with other hosts make any recommendations?

In the vein of keeping things simple, fast, and basically no-risk if someone were to break things, the site itself will be static HTML, CSS, JS … no database or CMS is needed. I’d like to be able to at least run a simple PHP/PERL email script for a contact form. But everything else is handled in browser and working quite nicely.

So, a hosting company that provides fast delivery of static content, supports compression and simple server side CGI scripting for emails. Oh and with decent storage and bandwidth quotas. Again, the site isn’t too big or high traffic.

That doesn’t seem too demanding, does it?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Micheal

2

I use DigitalOcean, but it can require some elbow grease to get going. I’ve heard great things about HostGator.

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3

Hey Micheal,

Since you are serving static content you could just use Amazon S3 1 ( literally pennies/month for small traffic site ) or perhaps use free static hosting that surge.sh provides. For the contact form you could use something like formsubmit.io ( there are a couple of services like this, this one seems to be free ) or if you’d like a challenge you could write Amazon Lambda function that processes the form information in the way you want it and call it through API gateway 2.

Hope this helps,
Alex

1: good starting point - official guide, nice tutorial
2: read this guide to get started

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4

Thanks for the recommendations guys, I will certainly check them out. There certainly things in there I hadn’t heard of - I like the simplicity of formsubmit.io, that sounds pretty cool.

5

A suggestion, avoid any web hosting service who’s parent company is EIG.

http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/site-updates-news/the-who-what-when-of-endurance-international-group-eig/

6

Interesting reading - I’d never heard of EIG. Thanks!

7

You can host a static website in Amazon Web storage for pennies.
Also, you can use Google Forms to create all kinds of forms for free.

Hosting a Static Website on Amazon Web Services
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website-hosting-intro.html

Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html

Google Forms
https://www.google.com/forms/about/

8

I would recommend digital ocean. It has features you’ll find similar to other hosting services, low cost for minimal use, gradual increase in cost for increase in use. Reliability etc.

There are 2 things that set digital ocean apart from the rest and make it unique for someone who a current/aspiring developer (considering this site is for that purpose, ill make that leap of faith you fall into one of those)

  1. It’s documentation/walkthrough are second to none, literally walk you through step by step for just about anything you’d want to do, including security concerns on your new server.
  2. Getting familiar with setting up a server, hosting a static site or a web app and going out and getting the necessary technologies needed to run it give you an experience not many outside of AWS give you. That is valuable experience.
9

I switched from digital ocean to hosting my own servers. Way cheaper and I will forever be thankful of the learning experience!

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10

Here are a couple of good low cost VPS hosts.

Linode
VPSCheap.Net

11

How did you learn it ?

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12

Linode has some good documentation on setting up web servers and other stuff. It is geared towards Linode, but it is still usable in general.

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13

@jamesperrin
Thank you.So far, I was able to make things work with digital ocean and my domain registrar, but I’m struggling with doing the same thing on my (raspberry pi) home-based server(confused with ip, router & firewall configuration, etc. basically making my computer accessible to the internet).

14

If you want your computer accessible from the internet, you need to setup port forwarding on your home router.

Then, you need to setup a dynamic DDNS, this is due to ISPs assigning a different IP address over time.

I use NOIP.com as a DDNS service.

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15

Purchased the server and never gave up until it was running my sites. I pointed my domains to my servers ip and then nginx forwards the request to the correct virtual machine

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16

Not complicated when you figure out how to do it. I did it because VPS Host charge a lot when you get into higher RAM consumption.

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17

I would recommend the same. Own server is not a big deal and it is total freedom. Friend of mine host around 30 websites for his customers on Mac Mini!!! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: And it works way more better and faster than some of local hostings.

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18

Have you considered or looked into Github Pages?

I believe they automatically gzip pages they serve, are very fast for static content and it’s hard to beat the *price :slight_smile:

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Sure, it’s not all that hard to run your own server. I run several for my business, but they are all local and not exposed to the public except in very specific situations.

But I’m not particularly interested in becoming a host myself. Upstream speeds here aren’t particularly fast, and external services are generally going to provide much better security, reliability and speed.

Thanks for the thoughts everyone!

20

Well I got an answer back from Aabaco … They don’t support compression. Instead, they want to sell me a service that will “convert” my site into a mobile site.

Not happening.

Looks like I’ll be looking into Digital Ocean and Amazon services ASAP.

Thanks again for the tips!