@pkeenan NameCheap seem to be fine for domain registration, though I’ve not used any of their other services. To be fair, all the ones you have listed seem to be at the cheaper end for hosting and very often it is worth spending just a few dollars more each month to save a lot of time & stress through improved services. Fast, reliable hosting is good for business…
Looking at your list, many years ago I used Dreamhost and they were basically OK for hosting, but email was terribly unreliable and I think their systems were major targets for spammers. After a year of frequent issues I moved away, having concluded that one important missed email could easily be worth more than a decade of hosting costs.
Another issue with Dreamhost was that they used a non standard custom control panel and this can make life very difficult, so I always suggest sticking with web hosts that can offer cPanel, which is regularly updated and well understood across the industry. If you decide to change web host, migration from cPanel to cPanel is pretty straightforward.
My one final word of advice to everybody is to stay clear of GoDaddy.
I’ve been moving all my websites (I host over 60 sites) from “traditional hosting” (I’ve been using a combination of Greengeeks, A2, and Namecheap) to looking after my own servers (using Digital Ocean, Vultr, or UpCloud) and using the Runcloud.io dashboard. I wasn’t using any of the cPanel features anyways, and this combination is cheaper, has “let’s Encrypt” SSL built in (although I am now starting to use Cloudflare for all my SSL both at Cloudflare and setting up a “Cloudflare Origin Certificates” at the host) and speed of this hosting setup, is much faster! Cloudflare is also a “Domain registrar” now, and doesn’t markup the price! .com addresses are like $8/yr
To give you an idea of my setup for my Rapidweaver & Blocs sites:
I started with a “Runcloud Basic” plan which is $8/month USD
I have a fairly basic Upcloud server: 1 core CPU, 2gb memory, & 50 gb’s storage,
On this server I currently have 25 websites, and half are Wordpress sites, the other half a mix of Blocs and Rapidweaver sites, and it is costing me $10/month to run it,
so $18 total/month for hosting 25 sites
This setup never breaks a sweat, my “speed scores” are way up from my old hosting, and it is really easy to setup and manage sites through Runcloud. You can “clone sites” easily, they give you “test URL’s” that you can build a new site on, and when it is ready, easily change the URL to the production URL, and the one time I needed help, they were on it!
I still have 30+ sites to move over, and will need to setup another server or two, and bump my Runcloud plan up to “Pro” ($15/month) which will give me unlimited servers, but I was spending almost $200/month with my old hosting, and will have better hosting, for under $50/month total.
The only drawback - no “webmail” but if you need this (I don’t on any site) there are a ton of alternatives to use, that are better anyways!
Hello Blocs Forum Friends,
Here is a link that might interest anyone (like myself) who is out there fishing for a new web hosting service. It’s up to date as of today (12/23/21). Granted, things change especially around the new year. Prices are based on what will eventually be a monthly fee. I avoided the marketing schemes that everyone is offering right now. Just trying to keep it real.
The web hosting companies are based on this particular thread as well as a Reddit Web hosting page. Flashman was instrumental in pointing me in the right direction and offering suggestions to simplify this Google spreadsheet. I would also like to thank Brecht Ryckaert who offered up some solid advice when shopping around for a web host.
Since I’m a mediocre website builder and really have nothing to offer in terms of advice (technical or aesthetic), I thought I should try to contribute something to this group that everyone might be able to use.
So, have a look and if you see an error, let me know. Thanks and have a peaceful holiday.
I have been using ICD SOFT for over 15 years and can highly recommend them for reliability, price and above all their technical support team. ALL my requests over the years have been answered within 5-7 minutes.
They are a full service host allowing you to register and renew domains (at amazing rates), buy hosting service on shared servers, or your rent your own dedicated virtual server.
I have run everything from small informational sites & landing pages up to fully blown e-commerce sites with them and have never had an issue.
Best of all they include free SSL certificates as part of your hosting plan.