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<p>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.<br>
I have also been a domain reseller handling over 2,000 domains at
our peak, about 10 years ago.<br>
BTW still got lots of older junk servers to deal with - another
story.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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<br>
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.<br>
For those using Hover, that is retail opensrs.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
(i'll post more about those if any interest)<br>
Since SG monitor uses flash for their monitor they better get that
updated, although it is cpanel so not sure who is really
responsible.</p>
<p>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,<br>
however it didn't show up as an issue until reported by research
users of Shakerpedia where it was a search function.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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 - <br>
multi-year (when you can find it) is much cheaper while a bit
risky.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</p>
<p>Hope of this has been helpful - thanks all for contributing to
Hidden Tech, have a Happy Holiday and above all Stay well<br>
Rich<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/10/2020 7:41 PM, Mark D. Hamill
via Hidden-discuss wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAB22ZO9gZT6P4-NpXHdiq4L1v_boQf+FPX9FC8xhomq-d1T9rg@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">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.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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 <a href="http://namesilo.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">namesilo.com</a>. 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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Thanks and I'm sure our discussion will be useful to many.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Mark</div>
</div>
<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Rich Roth
CEO TnR Global
Bio and personal blog: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://rizbang.com">http://rizbang.com</a>
Building the really big sites: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.tnrglobal.com">http://www.tnrglobal.com</a>
Small/Soho business in the PV: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.hidden-tech.net">http://www.hidden-tech.net</a>
Places to meet for business: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.meetmewhere.com">http://www.meetmewhere.com</a>
And for Arts and relaxation:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://TarotMuertos.com">http://TarotMuertos.com</a> - Artistic Tarot Deck
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.welovemuseums.com">http://www.welovemuseums.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.artonmytv.com/">http://www.artonmytv.com/</a>
Helping move the world: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.earththrives.com">http://www.earththrives.com</a></pre>
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