It’s roughly the same price as I was paying at Kualo, but this has the advantage of faster speeds and no risk of single point hardware failure, which can happen with a VPS or traditional shared hosting. With Guru everything is stored across a cluster of servers and scalable if needed.
For anybody else reading this thread, I think it is important to find hosting that is appropriate to your requirements. There is a huge choice of web hosts with big variations in costs, features, reliability and customer support.
The cheapest shared hosting probably has speed & reliability issues that will hurt your search ranking and possibly lose you an important job, plus you are likely to lose time dealing with support. Don’t even think about an unmanaged dedicated server, unless you are comfortable with WHM/cPanel and have to deal with massive levels of traffic.
When choosing Guru recently, I simply spoke to a couple web designers, who said they were always fast and the servers never go offline. I’ve been messing about with servers for the last twelve years and decided I would rather leave server management to the web hosts, so I can concentrate more on my business. If Guru can maintain the speeds and reliability I’ll be more than happy like that.
@Flashman I agree with you. The stability is a must.
I do a lot of backend stuff with shell scripts so shared hosting isn’t an option for me.
I was quite comfortable with dedicated servers too. It was in days when I had about 230K daily unique visitors on my sites. Of course, the server was running RAID10 with hot-swap drives to prevent outages (got 2 HDD failures btw), the network was fully redundant so I’ve experienced no downtime in 3 years period I was with the provider.
I’ve never used cPanel as I prefer a clean system installation with manual configs. But as you’ve said it requires a lot of time and experiences to run everything yourself.
230K daily unique visitors is a lot of traffic. The only time I got close to those numbers was with a website that was directly accessible through the O2 mobile portal with 12 million users at the time. This was just before the iPhone first appeared, when mobile browsing was effectively limited to the phone provider’s portal. At the time I had a dedicated server through Leaseweb and going offline was not an option.
I would doubt there are any web designers here involved with your levels of server complication, unless they are also acting as resellers with hundreds of clients. These days I just want everything as simple as possible and not have to think about the server at all.
The VPS at Futurehosting had a decent spec with 5 gigs of ram, but it was costing me $60 a month and that really adds up over a few years if you can manage with something less. Apart from the expense I started finding it a pain to keep checking the server for updates and security etc. Server backups were extra and there was no professional grade spam filtering like spam experts.
Some of the resource figures quoted by web hosts in shared accounts can be confusing and users think they are only able to have 20-30 visitors online at the same time because of the processes allowed, but this only applies to sites like Wordpress. In the case of a typical Blocs site you could slam them with traffic and not have to worry, but on the other hand your website could still go offline even with no visitors if other users are consuming too many resources.
I don’t think FTP is a pressing issue for most blocsapp users and I wonder if there’s enough interested people to make it worthwhile. Many of us use FTP for more than transferring blocs sites, so I’m really unsure why we would need this tool.
There is another blocsapp user/developer offering an FTP-friendly solution coupled with hosting, but again I’m not convinced the blocsapp community has a segment large enough to make that viable.
As nice as the idea is, there are so many existing FTP solutions that vary from free to reasonably priced full feature FTP apps that there is no need for such a function that I can see.
FTP apps are wonderful right up to the point that the transfer doesn’t work and then there can be a high expectation of support required. I would say leave it to the established FTP apps already out there.
When I think about clients not one has managed to set up their own email client after completing a website. In most cases I have had to visit their offices to help set up their computers and phones one, by one… If that same level of computer skills were transferred to FTP I have little difficulty believing many would struggle.
I have a website where I set up a link to a PDF file on Google drive, having concluded the client couldn’t manage with CMS. All they have to do is keep the same file name, then update it by dragging in a new version. They’ve never yet managed and send me an email with the attachment every time, which usually has the wrong file name. I find it hard to grasp that a large percentage of people are so clueless with computers in 2019.
When it comes to CMS I like the Blocs simplicity. I prefer it’s generating static sites that are fast. CMS needs server backend processing and thats a different story.
If I need a CMS functionality I use Wordpress with Elementor and e.g. Astra theme. This whole combination is extremely configurable and free.
Since FileZilla can be used on various operating systems and it’s Free why not contact the developers and implement it into Blocs 3. Once they see how great Blocs 3 is and take notice of it’s huge customer base perhaps they will say Yes.
It will save anyone from hours of work and the headache to come.
