Response Time
24 — 48 hours
TLDR: Recommendations on VPS hosting for medium-sized communities? Should I get SSL, and what would be cost-effective and practical for a site that doesn't handle money?
I'm currently using my old account, Hostgator's Aluminum Resellers package to host my site while it's in development. While there are no guarantees, I do plan on my user-base to grow quite a bit, which means I'll eventually need more storage and bandwidth. Development alone has already eaten up about a third of my month's allocated bandwidth *laughs*.
My web development skills could be considered amateur at best, so unmanaged servers scare the heck out of me. I prefer Linux-based cPanel servers out of habit, but I'm willing to learn other systems if they offer similar feature-sets such as cPanel. Not moving to Windows, though; those were a nightmare to troubleshoot when I worked with Hostgator...
System requirements-- I can't really tell what resources my site currently uses because that information isn't available to me in WHM. So with that regard, what minimums do you guys recommend with a base user-count of active to pseudo-active users in the ballpark of 100? I eventually want to get away from Mailchimp and use my server for mass-mailing, so whatever service I use can't limit me on outbound emails. In the distant future I want users to be able to post their own video game projects, music, and videos, but for now user content is limited to text and photos. so I can probably get by with 50GB+.
Atlantic.net has an amazing offering of the following:
$39.95/730hrs
4GB RAM
2 vCPU (clockspeed not mentioned)
100GB SSD
5GB Bandwidth
But the caveat here is that it's unmanaged and I'd have to maintain everything myself. It also looks to be cloud-based and not VPS, and I'm just not sure that my project's a good fit for cloud servers yet, if ever.
A2 Hosting offers some interesting options too, but I have no experience on what I'd need to have installed. Zend server 6 vs LAPP Stack is new territory to me; all I know is what LAMP stands for. Other things like LiteSpeed and LiteSpeed Cache I've never heard of before, and online debates lean both for and against it but it seems it would be a huge benefit to Joomla!-based websites.
While I would like to stick with Hostgator, I just feel like I could get more out of other providers.
On the SSL topic, I've seen reading both for and against it. While no, I won't be having monetary transactions, users will be providing login credentials they probably use elsewhere, and they may post sensitive information in private groups on projects that really shouldn't be intercepted because of lack of SSL. I don't plan on having sub-domains, but I'm also not sure what may pop up in the future as the website evolves. A wildcard cert sounds wonderful, but the pricetag... not so much. And free certs seem generally frowned upon for anything other than testing.
What are your thoughts? What do you use? What would you recommend?
I'm currently using my old account, Hostgator's Aluminum Resellers package to host my site while it's in development. While there are no guarantees, I do plan on my user-base to grow quite a bit, which means I'll eventually need more storage and bandwidth. Development alone has already eaten up about a third of my month's allocated bandwidth *laughs*.
My web development skills could be considered amateur at best, so unmanaged servers scare the heck out of me. I prefer Linux-based cPanel servers out of habit, but I'm willing to learn other systems if they offer similar feature-sets such as cPanel. Not moving to Windows, though; those were a nightmare to troubleshoot when I worked with Hostgator...
System requirements-- I can't really tell what resources my site currently uses because that information isn't available to me in WHM. So with that regard, what minimums do you guys recommend with a base user-count of active to pseudo-active users in the ballpark of 100? I eventually want to get away from Mailchimp and use my server for mass-mailing, so whatever service I use can't limit me on outbound emails. In the distant future I want users to be able to post their own video game projects, music, and videos, but for now user content is limited to text and photos. so I can probably get by with 50GB+.
Atlantic.net has an amazing offering of the following:
$39.95/730hrs
4GB RAM
2 vCPU (clockspeed not mentioned)
100GB SSD
5GB Bandwidth
But the caveat here is that it's unmanaged and I'd have to maintain everything myself. It also looks to be cloud-based and not VPS, and I'm just not sure that my project's a good fit for cloud servers yet, if ever.
A2 Hosting offers some interesting options too, but I have no experience on what I'd need to have installed. Zend server 6 vs LAPP Stack is new territory to me; all I know is what LAMP stands for. Other things like LiteSpeed and LiteSpeed Cache I've never heard of before, and online debates lean both for and against it but it seems it would be a huge benefit to Joomla!-based websites.
While I would like to stick with Hostgator, I just feel like I could get more out of other providers.
On the SSL topic, I've seen reading both for and against it. While no, I won't be having monetary transactions, users will be providing login credentials they probably use elsewhere, and they may post sensitive information in private groups on projects that really shouldn't be intercepted because of lack of SSL. I don't plan on having sub-domains, but I'm also not sure what may pop up in the future as the website evolves. A wildcard cert sounds wonderful, but the pricetag... not so much. And free certs seem generally frowned upon for anything other than testing.
What are your thoughts? What do you use? What would you recommend?
3 Replies
The replies under this section are restricted to logged in users or users with an active subscription with us
