web hosting ideas?

Sat Jul 7 21:59:59 UTC 2018

Tim here.

First, my condolences regarding Dreamhost.  They used to be good, but
they were bought out by EIG (Endurance International Group).  That's
EIG's MO.  They buy good hosting companies to obtain the customers
and then ruin the property.  Twice now I've found a great hosting
company and migrated there, only to have EIG buy them out and turn
it to [stream of profanity here].  So my first word of advice is to
check lists of EIG-owned properties and avoid them like the plague.
Here's one such list

https://researchasahobby.com/full-list-eig-hosting-companies-brands/

I'd also avoid "1&1" hosting based on my past experiences with them.

Once you know who *not* to pick, it depends on how much management you
want the hosting company to do. There's managed (often called
"shared" hosting) and unmanaged "VPS" (virtual private server)
hosting. It sounds like you currently have managed hosting where the
hosting service takes care of email, configuring your web-server &
database, and you just customize with your domain-name,
web-content/applications, and mail-addresses.  It can usually be
found cheaper than VPS hosting because they share one server's
resources across a LOT of customers.

With a VPS it's more like tou get a virtual machine and you're
responsible for administering it.  You can usually choose the OS
(usually from popular Linux distributions, but some also provide
FreeBSD or OpenBSD which I've come to prefer), choose which servers
you want to run (mail, web-server, database, IRC, whatever), install
those, and you are responsible for upgrades too.  For these, I've been
pleased with (or heard good things from people I trust about) OVH,
Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Linode.  For basic email and light
web-hosting, any of their low-end plans should suffice, including
Vultr's $2.50/mo which is about the lowest-price-for-best-features
I've seen.  Most of the others have reasonable starter plans around
$5/mo which may be a better price-point for you.  With 1GB of RAM and
20-30GB of disk-space, you shouldn't have any issues (unless you're
hosting large files).

For managed/shared hosting, here are a couple recent reviews of such
services:

https://www.cnet.com/web-hosting/

https://researchasahobby.com/best-website-hosting-companies-fooling/reliable-web-hosting-recommend/

though I'd eliminate any EIG properties from consideration.  There
are lots of such services and they vary in cost depending on how much
hand-holding you need, phone-support, whether you want SSH access (I
consider this a must-have), disk space, number of databases and email
addresses, etc.  You should be able to get something pretty
reasonable for $5/month.

-tim

On July  7, 2018, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> Hi folks,
> I realize many of you do your own servers and the like, so I am
> going to ask this question with great care.  My needs are rather
> specific, and even if they seem old fashioned, they are rooted in
> part in how my specific disability experiences manifest just now.
> I work with a nonprofit organization with several program areas in
> more than one country.
> presently our  web needs are housed with dreamhost.
> www.dreamhost.com
> Their hosting accounts include a fairly solid shell structure, in
> Ubuntu, including programs like alpine.  I use ssh  telnet to reach
> these services and must have comparative access where ever i go.
> Dreamhost made security changes about a week ago which now block my
> ssh access.  while I may discover a work around, their mail server
> behavior has been loopy for a while so...a blessing lies in all
> this mayhem. I am going to contact one shell service of which I am
> already aware, preferring not to bring all of my Internet life here
> to shellworld. So, yes there is a question laughs.
> Can you suggest a comparative hosting service that
> a, provides a functional shell as apart of their account.
> b allows for more than one domain to be hosted with them, including
> sftp access and a great deal of account space.
> c. has good customer service
> and
> d, is reasonably priced?
> dreamhost donates hosting accounts to 501c3 organizations, so it
> has been a free ride.
> I do not expect that to continue, but I do  hope to find  something 
> reasonable.
> 
> Thanks for your ideas if any.
> Oh, I have no interest whatsoever in hosting my needs on my own.  I
> lack both the resources and talent for such a venture here in
> Toronto. Thanks,
> Karen
> 
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