Should I change my current Hosting requirements or even a change of host?
- Thread starter Jon12345
- Start date
Forsaken
Well-known member
Hivelocity is known for overselling VPS/shared, and their dedicated are only cheaper the first month compared to Knownhost; after which Knownhost is much cheaper than Hivelocity for similar machines.
Support wise, KnownHost are active here and actively reach out to their customers to provide help
. On the opposite end I hear horror stories about support from people who work/worked at Hivelocity.Saying one host is better is subjective unless there are objective facts to point out why they are better. His issue actually was not with KnownHost, but advice on any changes he can make; KnownHost has even reached out to work with him here, again a good example of their support.
quimerics
Member
It's digitalocean?
I don't get why people have so much bad opinions about Namecheap? I've been with them on both shared and VPS since I started doing things online back in like 2010, with few exeptions to try OVH and Leaseweb. I've never had any issues that could point towards they overselling their capacity, their support are 10/10 every single time I've needed them, instant support over chat or wait 30min for mail reply and I'm not even paying extra for it, prices are good. I have honestly nothing to complain about.
HotRodCarts
Well-known member
Todo10 has been great. I've been with them for several years now and have no complaints.
Muddy Boots
Well-known member
Agree - A friend was with Namecheap shared (WP site) for a few years, he had no problems, whilst I have never used those services I have always (for years) kept all my domains there and also use there privateemail service, nothing bad to say, and support is top notch.......
Suzanne O
Well-known member
This.
I believe that some people don't like cheap things. Sometimes the cheapest is the best.
Especially when you don't want to be overcharged by some others.
I have experienced that with AWS Amazon. They are the worst company because they scam you.
Jon12345
Well-known member
KnownHost have caused no problems and their service has been excellent. The only reason for me looking around is to cut costs.
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Muddy Boots
Well-known member
@Jon12345
Late to the party again but as per my previous reply
VPS (cheapest option) or Dedicated server at Hetzner - depending on your traffic and use
Centminmod set up on Almalinux
emails done via MX route
For the VPS option and emails you will be paying around 300 euros a year
That would be for MXRoutes $99 try-annualy deal 50GB storage and Hetzners CPX31 8GB Ram, 160GB HDD 20TB Bandwidth (Cost euros 15.72 per month plus snapshots and backups)
Its a no brainer to be honest
Let me know if you need help setting it up if you want to go that route
Take a look over at CentminMod forums as @eva2000 gives great support on fantastic LEMP Stack
Jon12345
Well-known member
Thanks for the response. I'm late to the party too, even though its my own post! Other priorities took over. Some things come to mind regarding the Hetzner setup.
1. I am confused by it! Are these still their own servers, but they just have so many? And if so, auctioning their own hosting space? Seems odd!
2. Centminmod set up on Almalinux - I've read about Centiminmod being fast, at least I think with eva2000 giving advice on what config to use on his forum. I worry it might be overload for me. I am not a linux expert, although I am a techie who does programming in JavaScript and React.
3. I cannot believe how cheap the packages seem to be compared to my existing provider! My current config is in my first post. I presume these packages are also faster and more up-to-date than my current setup?
4. I like things that are no brainer!
5. My current setup is using 120gb of storage. My forum has 1.6M posts, about 200K page views per month and I probably get 2.5x this level of traffic on a weekday, if that is relevant to needs. Today, on Saturday, I have 13 members and 472 guests on the site. Does this influence my needs a little?
6. Do you mean eva2000 provides a paid service for configuration?
7. How the hell do I migrate all my sites!!
8. I'm used to WHM and CPanel. What sort of interface would I use with Hetzner?
9. Are Hetzner an established well-known company?
Sorry for all the questions. Any answers to any of them are greatly appreciated. I'm just worried about messing up my whole site.
BikeGremlin
Member
Hetzner is a well-established and trustworthy company.
Note that they are able to offer such low prices thanks to having a huge infrastructure (and scale), and by cutting on man-hour costs. I.e, for the cheap stuff you don't get tech. support handholding. Just a running VPS, and it's up to you to install and configure (and secure) stuff.
They do offer managed servers too, but the prices are a lot higher for those.
If you need WHM+cPanel (or DirectAdmin for that matter), you'd need to install that yourself (and pay for the licence, though AFAIK Hetzner sells WHM+CP licences too).
The same goes for LiteSpeed.
Relja
Rhody
Well-known member
It also depends what your needs are.
I'm paying $20-$22 per month for a CloudLinux setup at mddhosting, which includes support, whm, cpanel, litespeed, reseller support, etc. The support is absolutely amazing any time we have needed help. I have several websites on the same account, including two Xenforo forums. One of them is from 1997 and about the same size as yours. (1.2 million posts, 12600 members, ~70 users max online daytime, several different software products previously used) Performance and reliability have been fine and I have been with them for years. They provide backups, but I do my own 2x daily anyways. I use their email server for all of our needs, with no issues. They handle updates and security.
However, this setup has one limitation. I don't have root access and can't run Elasticsearch. I really need to look into a way to do that, unless 2.3 is going to be able to work around that with the new google engine? (or handle searches better natively, without the need for an external program, due to the new indexing method?)
I know that Knownhost is fantastic, but pricey.
Hetzner is HUGE and is in Germany. (they have smaller data centers in Finland and Oregon, too) I have seem some videos showing their data centers, which have hundreds of thousands of servers and 400-500 employees. Quite impressive! Our forum gets frequent registration bots from their server, and I have some of their ip ranges blocked.
I'm paying $20-$22 per month for a CloudLinux setup at mddhosting, which includes support, whm, cpanel, litespeed, reseller support, etc. The support is absolutely amazing any time we have needed help. I have several websites on the same account, including two Xenforo forums. One of them is from 1997 and about the same size as yours. (1.2 million posts, 12600 members, ~70 users max online daytime, several different software products previously used) Performance and reliability have been fine and I have been with them for years. They provide backups, but I do my own 2x daily anyways. I use their email server for all of our needs, with no issues. They handle updates and security.
However, this setup has one limitation. I don't have root access and can't run Elasticsearch. I really need to look into a way to do that, unless 2.3 is going to be able to work around that with the new google engine? (or handle searches better natively, without the need for an external program, due to the new indexing method?)
I know that Knownhost is fantastic, but pricey.
Hetzner is HUGE and is in Germany. (they have smaller data centers in Finland and Oregon, too) I have seem some videos showing their data centers, which have hundreds of thousands of servers and 400-500 employees. Quite impressive! Our forum gets frequent registration bots from their server, and I have some of their ip ranges blocked.
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Jon12345
Well-known member
Wow, never heard of them before! It is hard for me to know how popular certain webhosts are. So, what I've been doing is looking at the number of TrustPilot reviews to get a proxy for their popularity.
I know Google factors in website speed nowadays in their ranking algo, so a nice fast webhost would be nice. Not sure how fast my current webhost setup is in Googles eyes.
I know Google factors in website speed nowadays in their ranking algo, so a nice fast webhost would be nice. Not sure how fast my current webhost setup is in Googles eyes.
D.O.A.
Well-known member
No, I'm not within their terms of service. Adult content, 372,000 members, 800-2000 online at any moment. All you need is a modern CPU (two 3.5ghz cores are enough), 8gb ram, a large page file and nvme drives and you don't have to spend a fortune to host a large website. 30 bucks is plenty. Don't use any internal mail server or web control panels (they waste resources), and use nginx. We've been up ad free since 2008 because we make it affordable.
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⭐ Alex ⭐
Well-known member
It says your forum has 1 member signed in. You can scale down.
Use a small cloud instance to run your php forum on nginx. $5 / month
Use a dedicated database instance for the database. $15 / month
Use Cloudflare R2 buckets for storing the big files. $5 / month (This free addon: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/digitalpoint-app-for-cloudflare®.8750/ )
Hide your site behind cloudflare to get the best performance.
So that's 4 times less than what you're currently paying.
Jon12345
Well-known member
At the moment, my site says 13 members signed in and 410 guests. Does it make much difference to performance requirements if they are signed in vs guests? I ask because you mentioned just the number of members signed in.
I also have 5 other sites on my KnownHost account, although they are low traffic.
Jon12345
Well-known member
For the techies on this thread, I feel like I need to know a little bit more about the server side of things. I am a JavaScript/React programmer so a techie kind of person my self, but I am not sure what YouTube videos I need to watch to learn a bit more about understanding the server side of things. For example, when I heard Centimod, I think to myself, "What the hell is that? Is it like Apache? How do I do all the CPanel stuff from the command line!"
I also wonder how you migrate across a xenforo forum from one host to another. It seems a bit daunting!
I also wonder how you migrate across a xenforo forum from one host to another. It seems a bit daunting!
Jon12345
Well-known member
I'm slowly but surely coming around to your way of thinking. I've always had a managed VPS service in the past, but I am paying about $300 per year for the privilege with it built into part of my hosting fee. So, I took a look around at some YouTube videos, showing someone setting up a WordPress site on Vultr and also on Hetzner. It didn't seem too bad! Then I looked at the server prices of Vultr vs Hetzner, and unless I am reading it wrong, Vultr seemed about twice the price. Surely it can't be that big a difference?
I'm now going through a video on MXRoutes just to understand what that is all about.
If I went the Hetzner route, I would go for a cloud setup because they have USA data centers and most of my users are over there.
The video I watched of a guy setting up WordPress used Plex, which looked nice and clean. Am I right in thinking if I went the Centmin Mod setup, it would be all command line? That might be a bit much for me if it is. I do want to dump CPanel because of their fees, and also LiteSpeed if it can be replaced with Nginx or something similar. Not fully understanding the Nginx bit yet, but figure it is something similar to LiteSpeed, since it has caching.
@motowebmaster recommended spinning up a server and getting stuck in. I might try that. I see it is easy to rescale the cloud offerings with Hetzner. The Vultr interface seems nicer to me, but also pricier.
⭐ Alex ⭐
Well-known member
Most of the guests are going to be bots, web crawlers. The point I'm trying to make is, you have a very low human count so it's not worth paying such a high price. Since you have 5 other sites you may want to opt for like a $20/month vps with some extra specs and put them all on one server.
Or use small cloud instances and have them all separate but one shared managed database server, that would be best for security so that an attack on one doesnt take down all 5 unless the attack does take down the database.
Forsaken
Well-known member
If you do end up using Plesk, you really won't need to do much yourself outside of GUI; if you do need to do anything, you can likely just hire someone for one time help.
Also, rather than looking at Hetzner or Vultr, why not reach out to KnownHost? You are already using them; have not had issues and they do offer unmanaged. They can likely recommend the best plan for you, or cater one to your website as they are also familiar with XF.
Also, rather than looking at Hetzner or Vultr, why not reach out to KnownHost? You are already using them; have not had issues and they do offer unmanaged. They can likely recommend the best plan for you, or cater one to your website as they are also familiar with XF.