How much should hosting cost? Server statistics inside.

[leemy]

I run a forum that has quieted down a lot over the last few years. In addition, with all the decreased traffic and Adsense money, the site's generally run a net loss for the past couple years. I'm hoping I can get managed server hosting for less. Can you help me?

My current VPS package is driven by my need for disk usage. That is largely outdated attachments, but still helpful for the forum. It may be cheaper to use the AWS S3 resource, I am just a bit wary about adding complexity.

My site
Via Xenforo Statistics:
On average, fewer than 10 posts per day.
About 100 users active per day

Server level:
50 GB disk usage (this is the main driver of my VPS cost. This is largely forum attachments)
Bandwidth usage like 30 GB/month HTTP, unless I also run a full file FTP backup then it's more. This is obviously nothing, I recognize that.

Other info:
I run a few other domains (e.g. Wordpress blog) off the same VPS, but all have trivial traffic.

My current VPS package (overkill, driven by need for disk space):
5 GB RAM
80 GB SSD
Bandwidth 5 TB
$45/mo

Currently, I have a managed cPanel VPS with a support team who's been responsive when I (rarely) need to reach out, so that's good.

Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

 

[WSWD]

Your price for those features, plus cPanel (normally $10-15 for a VPS) plus management is a very good price. You aren't going to find those resources for less with cPanel and server management.

If you're looking to save money, you have a few options:

1) Go with shared hosting. Shared hosting is inherently managed (at least the server portion) and the cPanel license does not cost anything. Your site based on your statistics should have no problem running on shared hosting.

2) Drop cPanel and server management. You can easily cut your cost in half.

3) Go with HDD instead of SSD for the disk space. While SSD has gotten cheaper and is more less becoming the standard, it still isn't cheap compared to HDD. It should be a lot cheaper to get 80GB of HDD space vs. SSD.

 

[leemy]

Thanks, I appreciate it!

 

[leemy]

Question for the experts: If i offload attachments to S3 which should be very inexpensive, do you think I can downgrade to either a cheaper VPS or even shared hosting?

My site doesnt bring in much money at all and I'm losing money each year. It's been a community project I do but it would be great to not lose much money. Thanks for the guidance.

 

[Sam9]

Question for the experts: If i offload attachments to S3 which should be very inexpensive, do you think I can downgrade to either a cheaper VPS or even shared hosting?

My site doesnt bring in much money at all and I'm losing money each year. It's been a community project I do but it would be great to not lose much money. Thanks for the guidance.

You should be fine with decent shared hosting even without offloading the attachments to S3.

 

[leemy]

Thanks. Do you have any hosts you'd recommend? I just contacted KnownHost which is well regarded on this forum. They said a xenforo forum would need VPS, not shared. and were quoting me $60+/mo so theres no savings there.

Edit: I also spoke with Siteground, but they have a database size limit of I believe 1GB that prevents me from joining.

 

[beerForo]

Managed is always a lot more.

 

[leemy]

Brief update: A2Hosting says this is not a problem for their shared hosting. I'm confirming via an email with sales and will explore migrating my sites there. Let's see.

 

[Sam9]

If support is your primary concern, I'd recommend looking at bigscoots - https://www.bigscoots.com/shared-web-hosting/

Although their shared hosting caps out at 20GB, so you'd need to offload attachments to S3 (or S3 compatible service like wasabi which would be cheaper).

 

[Chromaniac]

I am running a forum with similar load on Digital Ocean 5 dollar droplet. For attachments you should switch to something like backblaze b2.

 

[leemy]

Thanks for the input, I'll check out these options.

 

[briansol]

move your attachments to s3.

 

[Anatoliy]

Question for the experts: If i offload attachments to S3 which should be very inexpensive, do you think I can downgrade to either a cheaper VPS or even shared hosting?

My site doesnt bring in much money at all and I'm losing money each year. It's been a community project I do but it would be great to not lose much money. Thanks for the guidance.

how many threads & how old is domain?

 

[Chromaniac]

move your attachments to s3.

For 50GB, S3 is probably going to cost more than competing services. DO Spaces cost 5 dollars for 250GB. Wasabi cost 6 dollar for 1TB. B2 should be cheaper than these... Though performance is not very good

I also found this recently... Looks like a good budget alternative.

StackPath | Edge Computing | Edge Delivery

StackPath is an edge computing platform with virtual machines, containers, CDN, WAF, and more, to let you build, accelerate, and protect your latency-sensitive workloads and applications.

www.stackpath.com

 

[leemy]

31k threads, 250k messages. Started the forum in 2008 on SMF, most of the activity was 2008-2012. I migrated to Xenforo a few years back.

 

[briansol]

s3 doesn't have a high cost for storage - it's transfer that hits the bill more. If the site isn't active as it used to be (i'm in the same boat) it's actually very cheap to use s3.

 

[Chromaniac]

that's true. my biggest charge was api access iirc. i was easily hitting the DO Spaces pricing which made me look at other alternatives. b2 has been practically free (my bill is under a dollar after two months lol) for my <10GB storage so far.