[Hidden-tech] Current hosting and registrar recommendations

Fri Dec 11 17:08:13 UTC 2020

Personally I am even more wary of services since I hosted my own 
accounts for many years, with Crocker and Amazon (AWS) when it first 
came out.
I have also been a domain reseller handling over 2,000 domains at our 
peak, about 10 years ago.
BTW still got lots of older junk servers to deal with - another story.

As such, I used Media Temple for a number of years until they were 
bought by GoDaddy and lived up to my great distaste for anything GoDaddy 
does.
For domains, we still have a reseller account with OpenSrs (originally) 
TuCows - and I actually handle a number of domains as pro-bono for local 
groups
because I found many organizations are notably lax in keeping up their 
registrations and hence lose their domains - since I still have an 
automated tracking system I can handle that easily -- in short, keeping 
domains and hosting separate is a very good idea.
For those using Hover, that is retail opensrs.

As for hosting, I moved to SiteGround with a 3 year deal at around 
$10/mon so far has been pretty good, I've got another year to go and see 
no reason to switch - what I did run into related to bandwidth caps was 
a mix of out of control spidering and/or attacks -- I had issues with 
the MT account being turned off because that activity overloaded their 
DB servers via the Wordpress (or Media Wiki) i mostly used.  The SG 
service had good traffic alerts but never stopped the account.

Net-Net: I had to keep my eyes on the robots.txt being updated and 
created an antiflood tracker I put in the index.php for each site -- 
that really stopped the issues.
    (i'll post more about those if any interest)
Since SG monitor uses flash for their monitor they better get that 
updated, although it is cpanel so not sure who is really responsible.

Another alert - When SG moved to cloud hosting, they broke use of 
amazon's Elasticsearch -- it was security related and more than I can 
explain here,
however it didn't show up as an issue until reported by research users 
of Shakerpedia where it was a search function.
Net-net: very important to have independent monitoring in place, esp on 
unique features, so issues are highlighted no matter what hosting you 
are using.

SO: SG has worked for me, I'm running about 70 domains, virtual hosted 
on one , most of which are fairly old, with light traffic. They are 
simple, WP with one MediaWiki, and some custom -- it runs on what is 
now  GoGeek - although now about more 30% expensive -
     multi-year (when you can find it) is much cheaper while a bit risky.
Other warnings, automatic upgrades, esp PHP or WP are nice but can break 
various functions, SG does a good job of allowing automatic or giving 
control, which still takes regular work but is safer. Some of the 
subtles of more complex systems can trip you up if you are not careful - 
I manage all sites using SSH keyed access, which is more than most web 
developers might like -- on the other hand it allows for more flexible 
scripting and configurations.

For those interested, HT list and some other custom services of mine is 
running on a Amazon tiny instance -- I've not seen any virtual hosting 
that can handle a mailman list with access I find I like.

Hope of this has been helpful - thanks all for contributing to Hidden 
Tech, have a Happy Holiday and above all Stay well
Rich

On 12/10/2020 7:41 PM, Mark D. Hamill via Hidden-discuss wrote:
> It seems every few years we swap hosting recommendations. Based on a 
> conversation a few years ago on this list, I chose Siteground and have 
> been reasonably happy with it, at least until recently.
>
> Of course a good host depends on your needs. Shared hosting has worked 
> pretty well for me for my modest needs but I have used virtual private 
> servers in the past. In general, hosts seem to have upped their game 
> with shared hosting and I rarely encounter performance issues that I 
> saw in the past.
>
> One of the big trends, which is affecting hosts like GoDaddy and 
> Siteground, is they are becoming virtual web hosts. GoDaddy is moving 
> to Amazon's cloud and Siteground to Google's. So presumably these 
> hosts are saving a lot of money because they aren't maintaining their 
> own server rooms. It's generally complicated to set up hosting in the 
> cloud, so they seem to add value by putting up pretty interfaces. 
> Siteground had impressed me with its all solid state infrastructure, 
> but presumably all the major cloud vendors are now solid state and 
> since Siteground is virtual now (or moving that way), it's not that 
> big of a deal.
>
> So looking at informed recommendations for shared and VPS web hosts in 
> particular. I'm a little prejudiced against virtual hosts, but I'm 
> guessing it's a trend that will only continue and at some point 
> virtually all web hosts will be virtual. I prefer hosts that build in 
> value. Siteground, for example, includes free Let's Encrypt 
> certificates and their maintenance built in. This seems to be becoming 
> more standardized but curiously last I checked GoDaddy doesn't do this.
>
> I attended a podcamp in Boston last year. A representative from 
> Dreamhost talked about how they fought off legal efforts by the Trump 
> administration to make them monitor their servers proactively. I don't 
> think they are a virtual hosting company. Anyone have experiences with 
> Dreamhost?
>
> I do have one recommendation when it comes to registrars. I keep my 
> registrar separate from my hosting so I can quickly divorce hosts when 
> needed. I see registrars as commodities. I've been happy with 
> namesilo.com <http://namesilo.com>. They seem to be the cheapest out 
> there and they throw in extras, like privacy protection, for free. 
> Most of my clients use GoDaddy and I think their registrar services 
> are obscenely priced. But I'm sure registrars are going through 
> changes too. It might be good to trade notes on registrars too.
>
> Thanks and I'm sure our discussion will be useful to many.
>
> Mark
>
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-- 
Rich Roth
CEO TnR Global

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