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What type of hosting for this ambitious idea?
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What type of hosting for this ambitious idea?

dordrechtdordrecht Member
edited January 2020 in General

Hello, everybody!

I have some news, bad for Treta Gunberg and good for whoever's the provider.
This world will be complemented by another useless travel blog.
And as far as my greatest strength in this venture is my ambition (nah), not my ability to run a server, I am asking for your advice.

Before that, I dealt only with shared hosting with two buttons (Cpanel+Wordpress).
But now I am not sure that it will be enough for all English speakers in this world to visit my page simultaneously.

I realized that I might need a CDN.
But I'm not quite sure what type of hosting I need, given the criteria of money, scalability, security and support (solace).

  • Is shared hosting sufficient for this Wordpress blog (WP-Plugins + Hi-res photos + Longreads)?
  • If I go with VPS (which specs? any other expenses besides the control panel?), should it be managed or unmanaged?
  • In case of a managed one, can you trust only a hoster or can you let that freelancer dude set up and maintain that VPS for you?
  • Or maybe I should use a hosting with the cloud-word in it? All in one button. How dare they?

Thank you for your answers.

Comments

  • @dordrecht said:
    Hello, everybody!

    I have some news, bad for Treta Gunberg and good for whoever's the provider.
    This world will be complemented by another useless travel blog.
    And as far as my greatest strength in this venture is my ambition (nah), not my ability to run a server, I am asking for your advice.

    Before that, I dealt only with shared hosting with two buttons (Cpanel+Wordpress).
    But now I am not sure that it will be enough for all English speakers in this world to visit my page simultaneously.

    I realized that I might need a CDN.
    But I'm not quite sure what type of hosting I need, given the criteria of money, scalability, security and support (solace).

    • Is shared hosting sufficient for this Wordpress blog (WP-Plugins + Hi-res photos + Longreads)?
    • If I go with VPS (which specs? any other expenses besides the control panel?), should it be managed or unmanaged?
    • In case of a managed one, can you trust only a hoster or can you let that freelancer dude set up and update your VPS too?
    • Or maybe I should use a hosting with the cloud-word in it? All in one button. How dare they?

    Thank you for your answers.

    What's up bossman!

    A fellow human with a dream!!

    So here is a sweet and simple human friendly summary.

    -Optimize your wordpress. Remove anything that is not neccessary. Try to use as less plugin as possible. Don't have 300 something javascript and fancy ads loading on the website.

    -Once that is done, how heavy is your website, when you browse it from your phone with 3g or even 2g network.

    -Ask your existing shared host, if your website is hitting any kind of limits with them (cpu,memory etc).

    -CDN for your image and javascript/jscript would definitely help.

    -Now you are ready to decide. VPS or shared?

    With wordpress or any kind of content based website, caching is the key. For caching, you can either use memory(ram) or disk based caching. RAM will always be faster. But even SSD cache will be good enough.

    While I have seen busy wordpress blogs being run on a tiny vps, for a newbie, I will recomend atleast 1GB RAM or more. Depending on your usage.

    Now comes your database queries. You need that to be fast. Lake shazam fast. NVMe is the fastest option. But even SSD will do. But if your DB isn't that big, regular HDD will do perfectly fine.

    Usually 2 fast cpu core will be more than plenty when you are simply starting out.

    You can still have CPANEL styled control panel for cheap or even free (Directadmin, webuzo myvestacp etc).

    • Administration is your choice. Usually with a proper control panel, you won't need a server admin available 24/7. Things will run as intended once it is setup. Depending on your need, your host or any competent sysadmin can do that, without taking forever or costing you an arm and leg. This is why most of your managed host will offer CPANEL or da control panel as part of the package.

    If it breaks badly, yes, you will need a sysadmin to look into it. Otherwise, once things are up and running and regularly updated , you are set.

    When you use a standard control panel, more or less, majority of your questions were already asked by someone and usually you will find an answer with couple of simple google searches or forum posts.

    • Cloud is just a glorified VPS. Some might actually will offer you failover, but still within the same location, you will never have full redundancy. keep backup and backup or backups. If you need that 24/7 uptime, setup a second server with a different provider for redundancy. Clone everything. With proper DNS setup, once server A fails, server B will pickup.
  • @dordrecht said:

    • Is shared hosting sufficient for this Wordpress blog (WP-Plugins + Hi-res photos + Longreads)?

    Usually, yes. Unless your site becomes incredibly popular, shared hosting is ideal.

    • If I go with VPS (which specs? any other expenses besides the control panel?), should it be managed or unmanaged?

    If you can fix it yourself confidently, unmanaged. Otherwise go managed but see the next point..

    • In case of a managed one, can you trust only a hoster or can you let that freelancer dude set up and maintain that VPS for you?

    Both, in my opinion. For example I have clients who I manage their VPS for, they email me with what needs to be done and I do it.

    • Or maybe I should use a hosting with the cloud-word in it? All in one button. How dare they?

    Cloud is a buzz word, forget it :-)

    Thank you for your answers.

    You're welcome and good luck :-)

  • JordJord Moderator, Host Rep

    Just want to touch on what @seriesn if your site handles a lot of traffic, you could look for a shared hosting provider who uses Litespeed. Litespeed is a much faster Web server and performs very good. Loading websites a lot quicker.

    Also litespeed has a WordPress plugin that allows you to do a whole load of caching, along with a CDN option too.

    We use it all the time for our clients WordPress sites, we have some crazy sites that get a lot of traffic. Which also must be up 24/7. We've never had a problem with litespeed. Plus the client is very happy too with the performance. Faster loading and a lot of caching. I think these WordPress sites have about 20+ plugins too, heavily customised theme and quite a few DB queries.

    Just my 2p.

  • Why don't you use Hugo?

  • illyhostingillyhosting Member, Host Rep

    When you say "all english speakers in this world" the first thing that comes in my mind is: this guy needs a lot of datacenters :)

    Let's make it simple, the most important thing in this is load balancing, this means you will need two or more servers to handle your users, this can be done by many technologies, after load balancing you will need light webserver (such as LiteSpeed), high speed uplink connection and for sure a lot of Wordpress optimization (if used WP), caching is very important and disabling unused plugins as mentioned above.

    Thanked by 1dordrecht
  • Just wanted to second the advice @dahartigan gave and add to the OP:
    "HOW DARE YOU!?!"

    :)

    Thanked by 1dahartigan
  • dahartigandahartigan Member
    edited January 2020

    dordrecht said: Hello, everybody!

    Hi, I'm back again :)

    I have some news, bad for Treta Gunberg and good for whoever's the provider.
    This world will be complemented by another useless travel blog.
    And as far as my greatest strength in this venture is my ambition (nah), not my ability to >run a server, I am asking for your advice.

    Yikes! Not another blog! ;) I understand that you aren't a complete computer geek, so most of the techno mumbo jumbo is going to be confusing to you. That's okay, I have no clue about the things you're awesome at, travel is a chore to me and I can't write with passion.

    Before that, I dealt only with shared hosting with two buttons (Cpanel+Wordpress).
    But now I am not sure that it will be enough for all English speakers in this world to visit >my page simultaneously.

    The same cPanel and Wordpress combo works today quite the same as it always has, we just have other options now. My advice, stick to what you know so you don't have to struggle to post about a place you've visited, or messing about with files.

    If everyone in the English-speaking world hit your site at once, you'd have a billion dollar website on your hands - sell that and enjoy your travels, forget the load!

    It won't happen, you don't need to plan for that.. you'd notice something was up only when you provider starts to harass you about your website going insane. If that happens, let me know, I'd love to ask your advice on running a blog :)

    I realized that I might need a CDN.
    But I'm not quite sure what type of hosting I need, given the criteria of money, scalability, >security and support (solace).

    You could get away with throwing the free Cloudflare on it and call it a day, boom, you have a CDN. Super simple stuff, and it works great. Some super-geeks will say it's got some flaws, but those flaws don't bother the average person, so forget that.

    You need cPanel hosting (run of the mill, just go for a good provider.. take recommendations from others too) You could try DirectAdmin hosting, it's just a different panel, you can still use Wordpress etc and most times it's cheaper to use a DA host.

    Money, don't fret - $10/month is overkill and you'll have change.
    Scalability, don't stress either - moving a wordpress site isn't hard. If you get to this point, congratulations on your highly successful travel blog!
    Security and support - you need reputable providers, again, others can also recommend.

    My advice, try @seriesn free DirectAdmin hosting and set up a wordpress site - if that's something you can achieve without any problems, the panel is fine, no issues - you're 99% of the way there because he's part of an awesome provider. If your site starts making money, upgrade to a paid plan to say thanks to him.

    Thanked by 1dordrecht
  • angstromangstrom Moderator
    edited January 2020

    @dordrecht said: Before that, I dealt only with shared hosting with two buttons (Cpanel+Wordpress).
    But now I am not sure that it will be enough for all English speakers in this world to visit my page simultaneously.

    Congrats on your first post

    Thanked by 1dordrecht
  • dordrechtdordrecht Member
    edited January 2020

    Thank you for this fast, detailed and tailor-made answer, @seriesn ! Much appreciation.
    Thank you for nailing it down for me, @dahartigan !
    Thanks to all of you guys, for your attention!
    One more question, if you don't mind.
    Is anycast DNS in various locations considered to be a solid plus for a hosting?
    In my understanding it is just a small step towards the CDN, but not the replacement for the last one.

  • @dordrecht said:
    Thank you for this fast, detailed and tailor-made answer, @seriesn ! Much appreciation.
    Thank you for nailing it down for me, @dahartigan !

    My pleasure :)

    One more question, if you don't mind.
    Is anycast DNS in various locations considered to be a solid plus for a hosting?

    Anycast DNS is something that you definitely don't need to worry about, it's an advanced topic and mostly confusing in this context.

    In my understanding it is just a small step towards the CDN, but not the replacement for the last one.

    It's really only something that the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc would really worry about. If you get to the point you need anycast DNS then enjoy your private jet(s)

    Honestly, Cloudflare handles all that for you anyway. Worried about DDoS or something? Same deal. A lot of techo mumbo jumbo that will distract you from your travel adventures.

    You could WAY over-engineer a travel blog with all the bells and whistles, but you'd never have time for travel with all of that to maintain.

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