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General Discussion

Posted by Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points

Web Host

Hi,

Anyone got any experience with ipage or justhost? need a host for my portfolio, and also for hosting/testing wordpress.

Thanks

6 Answers

Andres Altuve
Andres Altuve
16,274 Points
Andres Altuve
Andres Altuve
16,274 Points

Hey tom I´ve been using Hostgator for the last 2 years, great service so far.

Dustin Matlock
Dustin Matlock
33,856 Points
Dustin Matlock
Dustin Matlock
33,856 Points

I generally don't recommend EIG companies since they're known for overselling their resources.

Here are a few that I've tried and recommend.

Really nowadays I prefer a service like DigitalOcean. It's very low cost for the amount of resources you get and you get some experience with managing a Linux server. They have one-click installs which pretty much takes the complexity out of it. There are others such as Ramnode and Linode, but those aren't as simplified as DigitalOcean.

You might also check over at Web Hosting Talk. Here's also an article on low-cost web hosts.

Another cool place to run benchmarks is ServerBear.

Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points
Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points

I might give digital ocean a go, can you host multiple domain names?

Want to send me your referral link Dustin? (think you get some free credit then if i sign up)

Dustin Matlock
Dustin Matlock
33,856 Points

Yes, you can actually. It's fairly simple and personally I prefer Nginx. Here's my link, thanks! Glad I could help.

Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points
Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points

not sure what Nginx is but seems it is something i can install on DigitalOcean?

Not looking to get into anything complex with this, its just for a portfolio and a little testing, very low traffic and I just want something simple and ready to go, that was mainly the reason I was looking at justhost.

Are these cloud hosting servers going to be much of a learning curve? i got enough to learn with Jquery and CSS right now haha

Dustin Matlock
Dustin Matlock
33,856 Points

You might want to stick with shared hosting. DO is fairly simple, however, it's unmanaged which means you have to handle your own security issues and of course updates. For me it's not a huge issue since you can easily backup a simple static website. Even backing up Wordpress is fairly simple. They have one-click installs for Wordpress sites by the way.

Nginx is basically a HTTP server which some might prefer over Apache because it's somewhat more efficient and faster. They have tutorials on how to setup a LEMP stack as well as LAMP (Apache).

If you just want to get going on something and not have to worry about it, you might try something like StableHost. They are pretty well-known and my experience was good with them. But if ever you want to dabble in web servers it's fairly inexpensive and you could probably do benchmark tests to show the gain in performance over shared hosting. If I remember correctly, I was getting sometimes 2-4 second response times (sometimes higher) with shared hosting and now I can most times get under 500ms! That's pretty fast but of course my website is fairly simple with minimal images, etc.

Dustin Matlock

Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points
Tom Lawrence
Tom Lawrence
8,685 Points

Just been watching some youtube vids on DigitalOcean, it does not look that tricky.

If I get a DigialOcean one, and want to do wordpress testing, put up my portfolio and also play around with PHP / JS, what would you install then if you wanted to keep it very simple to setup and just work.

Quite like the Digital Ocean idea as long as I start simple, like you say ill learn something in the longrun.

Dustin Matlock
Dustin Matlock
33,856 Points

To be honest it's super easy. I'm literally just a beginner myself when it comes to managing a web server. It's DO's awesome tutorials and easy user interface that kept me coming back. In the long run you're right — you will learn a lot more! You'll also be saving money and make yourself more independent. Really there's nothing to lose if you're just getting started. It's mostly recommended that you test locally but you can actually do that on a DO droplet and set it to not be indexed by search engines. If you mess up, all you have to do it start over. There's no contacting support or making tickets (hardly anyways) you simply create a new droplet. Of course they charge for that but it's minimal and you can have up to 5 droplets if you wish. Another good thing is that it's scalable. Simply power off your droplet and scale it up. Another reason why I love their service!

Andres Altuve
Andres Altuve
16,274 Points
Andres Altuve
Andres Altuve
16,274 Points

Digitalocean is AWESOME i got the service two days ago! I didn´t have any idea on how to setup a VPN but thanks to the tutorials they have it was really easy.