Looking for a web-hosting service

  • Thread starter jtbell
  • Start date
In summary, the ancient web server that has hosted faculty and student personal web sites here has died. The college might come up with a replacement for it, but since I'm going to retire sometime in the next couple of years anyway, I'd just as soon get a domain name and move my stuff to a commercial web host now.The site is pretty basic as far as technology goes: about 150-200 pages of static HTML+CSS, and accompanying images, less than 500 MB altogether. Most of it is a photo gallery for one of my hobbies. Probably not very high traffic. No dynamic technology (databases, etc.) although I can see myself experimenting with that stuff
  • #1
jtbell
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The ancient web server that has hosted faculty and student personal web sites here has died. The college might come up with a replacement for it, but since I'm going to retire sometime in the next couple of years anyway, I'd just as soon get a domain name and move my stuff to a commercial web host now.

The site is pretty basic as far as technology goes: about 150-200 pages of static HTML+CSS, and accompanying images, less than 500 MB altogether. Most of it is a photo gallery for one of my hobbies. Probably not very high traffic. No dynamic technology (databases, etc.) although I can see myself experimenting with that stuff when I have more time for it.

I don't need a fancy site-builder interface. I'm used to uploading files via scp or FTP, and tweaking things with a text editor at a Unix/Linux command line. I do some WordPress stuff at work, so I can see starting a blog alongside the existing pages, but there's too much stuff to convert it all to blog format.

Any suggestions?
 
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  • #2
I use two, myhosting and ipower. I do NOT recommend ipower but myhosting is OK and they have various plans. No noticeable downtime and their tech support is good.
 
  • #3
Thanks for those two data points. I've started wading through some review sites to see if I can get any common general impressions from them. I've seen prices ranging from $1 to $5 per month for the first year as introductory offers, followed by $7-$9 per month afterwards, with the domain registration often being "free" when bought along with the web hosting.

In any event, it will be a few days before I finish editing all the pages to make them suitable for a new host. Most of the navigation links are relative, not absolute, but there are a few links on every page that use the college's domain name. Fortunately, the format is very consistent from one page to the next, so the editing falls into a pattern.
 
  • #4
jtbell said:
Thanks for those two data points. I've started wading through some review sites to see if I can get any common general impressions from them. I've seen prices ranging from $1 to $5 per month for the first year as introductory offers, followed by $7-$9 per month afterwards, with the domain registration often being "free" when bought along with the web hosting.
Yep, that's about right.

In any event, it will be a few days before I finish editing all the pages to make them suitable for a new host. Most of the navigation links are relative, not absolute, but there are a few links on every page that use the college's domain name. Fortunately, the format is very consistent from one page to the next, so the editing falls into a pattern.
I have a utility that will go through all of the html files and replace one URL with another, but unfortunately it's specific to my machine so you'd have to send me the files.
 
  • #5
phinds said:
I have a utility that will go through all of the html files and replace one URL with another

There are three links on each page that have to be dealt with. Two of them can simply be deleted. The third one points to my home page. For some reason I did that one as an absolute URL. I'm converting it to a relative URL that doesn't contain the domain name, but that makes it different, depending on where in my tree-like hierarchy of directories (folders) it's in. On some pages it becomes "../", on others it becomes "../../", on others, "../../../", etc. So I have to do it by hand.

There's one more thing I need to change on each page, but I can't do it until I know my new domain name. The <head> section of each page has a "canonical URL" tag to ensure that Google indexes it with a consistent URL:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain/~jtbell/rest/of/path.html ">

I'll need to replace "domain/~jtbell" with my new domain name. Fortunately I can easily write a Perl script that loops over all my .html files and makes that substitution.
 
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Likes Medicol
  • #6
Sounds like you've got it covered.
 
  • #7
I use Apis Networks, which costs $5 a month, and gives you a MySQL database, 10gb of bandwidth, and I think only 1gb of web space (you can upgrade your service package to accommodate for more space and features). The low tier package also offers other features, but I'm not sure what they are as I don't utilize them (my sites are pretty basic when compared to the features being used), but I've had nothing but good experiences with their hosting (99% uptime, customer services is fantastic, and their managing tools are very easy to use).

If you're interested, check them out: http://apisnetworks.com/web-hosting-packages

It seems they've updated some numbers that I gave above :) if you do end up using them, if you don't mind using me as a referral, that would be awesome :) (they give you $5 towards your hosting for each person that uses you as a referral)
 
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  • #8
I haven't made a final decision yet, but I've found out something significant from reading web-hosting forums and blogs. A company named Endurance International Group (EIG) has a lot of money and has been buying up web-hosting providers. Instead of rebranding the services under their own name, they keep the old names but get rid of most of the old staff and move the sites to their own servers, generally with a decline in service and support quality. As a result, a long list of apparently separate web-hosting providers is really run by the same company.

http://www.linux-depot.com/non-endurance-international-group-eig-hosting/

I found some good reviews for arvixe.com, for example, and then discovered that it was sold to EIG at the end of October!

Note to phinds: ipower.com is now an EIG company, but myhosting.com is not (yet).

Right now I'm leaning towards namecheap.com which can also do my domain registration, and is not in the EIG camp.

Luckily, my preferred domain name is still available under .net which is one of the original global top-level domains (TLDs). However, I'm also tempted by one of the newer generic TLDs, .website. Maybe I'll register both of them.
 
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  • #9
Just do some research on the host you want to use, as some are very difficult to move away from (such as godaddy).

Good info as well about EIG
 
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  • #10
Update: I did go with Namecheap. Their main business is domain name registration (hence their name), but they also have a decent hosting service, from the reports I've seen. A .net domain name is $12 per year, and the lowest tier of shared hosting is $10 for the first year (special introductory offer), $40 per year afterwards. Disk space is 10 GB, but only 5 GB can be used for media files (images, videos, etc.).
 

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