Hosting recommendations

[John Ruch]

I'm looking to move a processwire site that is currently sharing space on a powweb.com account, and I'm looking for recommendations for a low cost host.  The site is for a non profit school related group. There have been some issues during periods of heavy multiuser maintenance where the host crashes with the message: "User 'dbusername' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 150000)". I don't have any control over resource settings on this host so there is not much I can weak there. 150000 seems like a large number to have exceeded for a site used by a limited group and only a handful of active editors, but whatever. The limit resets in an hour and all is good with site, but confidence in performance remains damaged. Anyone have a host that they like with decent performance and generous limits? Thanks.

[bernhard]

Define "low cost" ? 

[John Ruch]

It's a low traffic site with no high security needs. Shared server is ok. Current host is under $12/mo. Probably not worth much more the $30/mo. Basically looking for the best performance I can get from a budget host for a ProcessWire site. Ability to do a subdomain dev site without extra cost preferred. 

[wbmnfktr]

5 hours ago, John Ruch said:

some issues during periods of heavy multiuser maintenance

What exactly does this mean?

In case this means "5 people updating pages and the host goes down"... yeah you really should look for a more reliable host.

In case this means "we have 50-100 users visiting the site to look up the news"... you might want to look into optimizing the page or invest in ProCache.

 

Can you give us a number (ballpark ranges are fine) of visitors and page impression we talk about here?
Low traffic can mean everything between 100/month to 50k/month.

[flydev]

It's seem that "OVH/Hosteur/DigitalOcean" VPS are good candidates - I am not affiliated with them, I manage some dedicated bare metal servers and VPS on OVH - you could start with a ~$4 VPS, and upgrade it if you need more vCore and/or RAM without reinstalling the system. By using Ubuntu 23 (v22 support end on July 2023) you can get started in ten minutes if you are used to deploy LAMP/LEMP.

On the backend side, you will get a response time of around 60ms, use Cloudflare on front, and your $4 VPS perfs will be really nices.

You can check for example the guide on DigitalOcean to choose what suit your needs: concepts/choosing-a-plan

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by flydev
cloudflare tips

[millipedia]

We look after a lot of non-profit sites including half a dozen schools and they're mostly hosted on Digital Ocean instances managed by Cloudways.

Their cheapest instance is currently $11 a month and that's what we normally start and which provides good performance for most cases (there are some additional per Gb backup charges but they're normally very minimal). You can scale up instances if you need to.

One thing we find particularly useful is being able to 'clone' sites so we keep a skeleton PW site up to date and can just replicate that to kick off a new project (no, all our sites do NOT look the same...). You can also clone a site to a staging site and then push changes from that to the live site.

We generally stick sites behind a free Cloudfare account as well (because honestly why wouldn't you), and Cloudways also have a deal with Cloudflare where you get the enterprise level for $5 a month which seems great if you need it (we rarely do).

We also use https://krystal.uk/ for clients who need emails - that's more of a traditional CPanel setup but works well for us.

[jacmaes]

I've been testing Hetzner for a couple of months after hearing a lot of good things about them. I've been really impressed so far. Stable, fast, and really cheap for the generous amount of resources (around 8€ for 80 Gigs of space and 8GBs of RAM). Not affiliated with them in any way, just a recommendation on my (admittedly limited) experience with them. I'm using the excellent and free CloudPanel (NGINX control panel) to manage about two dozen low-traffic sites on two different servers with Hetzner in Germany, and I have plenty of resources left in each. 

I also have a VPS on Vultr managed with the free Cyberpanel control panel, and that's been consistently reliable for a few years, except yesterday when they had a really exceptional downtime of about one hour. I find that Cyberpanel, although easy to use and Apache compatible (easier to deal with for ProcessWire installations), is sometimes buggy as log files sometimes fill up space for no apparent reasons.

I've tried a lot of different hosting providers in the last 20 years – from shared to dedicated, managed and unmanaged– but I feel that I have to worry much less about downtimes and unexpected slowdowns with these two.

 

[BillH]

By chance, I use the same two suppliers as @millipedia, and have been pleased with both!