Hosting Question

[Devin79]

I just recently purchased Xenforo after ten years with vbulletin.

Along with this, I am looking to move host. I have a small forum of dedicated members. Really not a lot of traffic. So my question is, will a simple $4-5 a month plan through say hostgator or maybe A2 do? I dont need much, but I do have limited hosting experience and just want to make sure I have something secure and reliable.

I realize everyone will have an opinion on providers, I just was curious if a basic plan through one of these established brands was acceptable.

 

[Paul B]

For small forums, cheap shared hosting will work fine.

However, some hosts do massively oversell so you may encounter performance issues, slowdowns, etc.

 

[Devin79]

Hmmm. While I suspect it would be a long time before that were the case, I guess I should look around.

There are so many hosts its overwhelming. They all advertise the same things.

 

[Bendik0208]

Hmmm. While I suspect it would be a long time before that were the case, I guess I should look around.

There are so many hosts its overwhelming. They all advertise the same things.

(I dont know if this is allowed)

but anyways, I am owner of OWNext!
Its a new hosting company that are offring WebHosting (cPanel) and other things!
We are offering free SSL, Softaculous Installer and PhP Selector, and great support (https://www.trustpilot.com/review/ownext.com)!
I hope that you will give us a try, if you have any more question you can send me a privat message

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//
Bendik

 

[jeffatrackaid]

There are so many hosts its overwhelming. They all advertise the same things.

Well, many all sell and same thing because they are basically the same company. Take a look at:

Endurance International Group - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

All of these host (are more) are owned by EIG. Also, shared hosting is mostly a commodity service, so there is not much to differentiate companies.

I suggest you consider a $15/mo budget. This way you are in good VPS territory and at least get some level of reserved resources. You may need some initial help with server setup, but then you should have few issues.

I also recommend Cloudflare. While the forum post pages don't really benefit from caching, their crypto and DDoS services can help prevent bad bots from hammering your site.

Lastly, if funding is an issue and you have avid user, consider a fund drive on the site. I've worked with one forum owner who's ran his forum for the last 5 years via donations. He ditched ads and just runs fund drives 2x a year. He clearly states how much money he needs and takes donations via Paypal. Usually within a couple of weeks, he has his operating budget for 6 months. His donors get a special supported badge and the entire community benefits from no ads.

 

[Devin79]

Thank you for that input, that helps. I am considering a2 at the moment but I will investigate your suggestion as well. Thanks again!

 

[jeffatrackaid]

I've used Digitial Ocean, IBM/Softlayer Cloud, and Amazon's Lightsail with good results. You want to look for SSD-backed storage. Some cheap hosting vendors still use SATA RAID, which can cause database IO issues. If SSD is not explicitly listed, I would look elsewhere.

 

[MySiteGuy]

For small forums, cheap shared hosting will work fine.

However, some hosts do massively oversell so you may encounter performance issues, slowdowns, etc.

Godaddy is one I've run into issues with clients when they have their lower tier hosting, so this one to stay away from. Sure, the sites run but there's often a delay between a page request and server response, and time to first byte tends to be horrible. Constant system loads in excess of 5 are not unusual. And if you have a large number of files to transfer via FTP, take a nap during the process!

 

[Max Taxable]

Godaddy is one I've run into issues with clients when they have their lower tier hosting

And I'm one of the ones he's talking about. But look, godaddy is okay if you're never going to get big and if you don't plan on ever moving. I had GD's mid-tier hosting through a reseller for 15 years and always had good performance, good customer service and very minimal down time, in fact hardly ever had any down time - and it was inexpensive. But if you EVER plan to move to another host be ready for a major PITA for both you and whoever your new host is.

All that said, personally if I were starting over from scratch, right now today, I would still avoid GD. I'm not recommending GD but I'm not dissing it either. It just is what it is, and for me that was inexpensive, reliable shared hosting.

 

[MySiteGuy]

I agree they reliable and inexpensive, and make it very easy to get a presence online. And I can't argue with their success, you don't grow that big without doing some things right.

I guess it's like a small imperfection in the paint on a car, a car aficionado might notice it and no one else does. But then the car aficionado points out the imperfection and that's all someone sees! And here's the funny thing, I've never had a customer complain about them, they've been happy. That is until I hit a project where I feel their environment is standing in my way and slowing me down. I point out things, and suddenly that client becomes one of those people who love their car but since talking to me they can't take their eyes off the orange peel paint ripple on their car's rocker panels!

 

[Max Taxable]

I agree they reliable and inexpensive, and make it very easy to get a presence online. And I can't argue with their success, you don't grow that big without doing some things right.

I guess it's like a small imperfection in the paint on a car, a car aficionado might notice it and no one else does. But then the car aficionado points out the imperfection and that's all someone sees! And here's the funny thing, I've never had a customer complain about them, they've been happy. That is until I hit a project where I feel their environment is standing in my way and slowing me down. I point out things, and suddenly that client becomes one of those people who love their car but since talking to me they can't take their eyes off the orange peel paint ripple on their car's rocker panels!

More like, the car is fine until it needs worked on. THEN the car owner realizes how out of step the engineering is!

Again, to the OP: If you ever plan to move your xf or any other platform off GD hosting, be ready for a load of crap and a ton of extra work. The infrastructure is old and creaky.

And as someone else said, whatever you do make sure you're getting on a machine with an SSD not the outmoded physical platter drives.

 

[Devin79]

As of now I am thinking of going with A2, they appear to be well reviewed. It does say "SSD - your files, OS & database" I presume thats what you guys meant.

The forums aren't huge traffic wise, while I hope it grows - I don't forsee it ever being hundreds of thousands or millions of hits/posts. Weve been around 12 years and are just a dedicated group of fantasy sports players.

 

[WSWD]

1) Make sure your host is running cPanel. Many run their own custom panels that they try to play off as cPanel, but it's not.
2) Make sure you DO NOT transfer your domain name to your host. Keep it separate, i.e. on Namecheap or such.
3) Make your own daily backups that are off-site and not in any way related to your hosting.

If you follow the above 3 things, changing hosts is simply restoring a copy of your backup on a new host and changing the nameservers. You can literally be on a new host in a matter of minutes if things go wrong.