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should I use webhosting or VPS for personal blog?
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should I use webhosting or VPS for personal blog?

I have a blog whose history is about 3 years. It gets 500 IPs each day (including bots).
Currently it's running on a medium VPS (2G RAM/2 Cores/40G disk).
I have got the idea to migrate it to a webhosting provider for less maintenance work.
(backup, logging, SSL renew, statistics, domain setup etc)
Do you think I should stay with VPS or move to webhosting? What are their Pros/Cons?
BTW, the blog is wordpress powered, has some videos and images, total size is 1GB about.
Thanks.

«1

Comments

  • BertieBertie Member
    edited December 2020

    Do you need specific features that aren't available in Shared Hosting?

    Do you ever expect to be slashdotted/receive the reddit hug of death?

    If none of the above, moving to a reliable shared hosting service with Mailchannels is a decent bet. Just remember to take backups.

  • @Bertie said:
    Do you need specific features that aren't available in Shared Hosting?

    I have no special requirement on VPS than hosting.

    Do you ever expect to be slashdotted/receive the reddit hug of death?

    What does this mean?

  • How’s your average usage now (load, memory etc)?

    500 a day isn’t a lot unless those 500 are coming at the same time.

    Thanked by 1webcraft
  • @jpeng said:

    @Bertie said:
    Do you need specific features that aren't available in Shared Hosting?

    I have no special requirement on VPS than hosting.

    Do you ever expect to be slashdotted/receive the reddit hug of death?

    What does this mean?

    do you expect your website to actually get traffic? if so, get vps.

  • @SirFoxy said:

    @jpeng said:

    @Bertie said:
    Do you need specific features that aren't available in Shared Hosting?

    I have no special requirement on VPS than hosting.

    Do you ever expect to be slashdotted/receive the reddit hug of death?

    What does this mean?

    do you expect your website to actually get traffic? if so, get vps.

    oh sorry. why using VPS can get traffic from reddit etc? share hosing can't?
    Thanks.

  • @seriesn said:
    How’s your average usage now (load, memory etc)?

    500 a day isn’t a lot unless those 500 are coming at the same time.

    the usage are quite small, low load on both CPU and memory.

  • Pretty clear that shared hosting is the way to go for you.

  • @corbpie said:
    Pretty clear that shared hosting is the way to go for you.

    can you state the reasons? :)

  • lentrolentro Member, Host Rep
    edited December 2020

    @jpeng said:

    @corbpie said:
    Pretty clear that shared hosting is the way to go for you.

    can you state the reasons? :)

    As you mentioned:

    @jpeng said: the usage are quite small, low load on both CPU and memory.

    The traffic seems rather low, and your site is small too. Shared hosting should be enough, especially if the LVE limits (if the host is using CloudLinux) are generous.

    Thanked by 1jpeng
  • @jpeng said:

    @seriesn said:
    How’s your average usage now (load, memory etc)?

    500 a day isn’t a lot unless those 500 are coming at the same time.

    the usage are quite small, low load on both CPU and memory.

    Shared hosting should be perfect if that’s the case :)

    Thanked by 1webcraft
  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    I moved from shared hosting to VPS in 2011 and never looked back. In VPS there's more control on exactly how the content is generated and delivered. I have control over:

    • TCP congestion control
    • TLS crypto algorithms
    • HTTP response compression
    • FastCGI caching
    • WebSockets
    • HTTP/2 server push
    • HTTP/3 transport

    Most of these are unavailable in shared hosting accounts.

  • @yoursunny said:
    I moved from shared hosting to VPS in 2011 and never looked back. In VPS there's more control on exactly how the content is generated and delivered. I have control over:

    • TCP congestion control
    • TLS crypto algorithms
    • HTTP response compression
    • FastCGI caching
    • WebSockets
    • HTTP/2 server push
    • HTTP/3 transport

    Most of these are unavailable in shared hosting accounts.

    great. you are such an advanced user.

    Thanked by 2yoursunny Chronic
  • 500 IPs each day means 15,000 per month. You can easily handle that level of traffic with Nginx + a good cache program like WP fastest cache plugin for WordPress. Additionally install Autoptimize to improve the performance. Since majority of Shared Hostings don't support Nginx, I recommend to go with a VPS. You can find cheap reliable VPS from Vultr, DigitalOcean, and Linode. I guess the $10-20 package is sufficient for you depending on the content you have.

    You can read my blog post to find out how to configure Wp fastest cache for WordPress.
    https://nucuta.com/wp-fastest-cache-configuration-for-nginx/

    Thanked by 2jpeng fabriciofoxx
  • @jpeng said:

    @yoursunny said:
    I moved from shared hosting to VPS in 2011 and never looked back. In VPS there's more control on exactly how the content is generated and delivered. I have control over:

    • TCP congestion control
    • TLS crypto algorithms
    • HTTP response compression
    • FastCGI caching
    • WebSockets
    • HTTP/2 server push
    • HTTP/3 transport

    Most of these are unavailable in shared hosting accounts.

    great. you are such an advanced user.

    Yes , push-up king @yoursunny is an expert and I guess many of us here don't have his knowledge level. I would suggest going via Shared hosting, which would save you much time for other work. :)

  • @swat4 said:

    @jpeng said:

    @yoursunny said:
    I moved from shared hosting to VPS in 2011 and never looked back. In VPS there's more control on exactly how the content is generated and delivered. I have control over:

    • TCP congestion control
    • TLS crypto algorithms
    • HTTP response compression
    • FastCGI caching
    • WebSockets
    • HTTP/2 server push
    • HTTP/3 transport

    Most of these are unavailable in shared hosting accounts.

    great. you are such an advanced user.

    Yes , push-up king @yoursunny is an expert and I guess many of us here don't have his knowledge level. I would suggest going via Shared hosting, which would save you much time for other work. :)

    for share hosting do I need to backup myself? or the provider do backup for you?

  • AbdAbd Member, Patron Provider

    Go with Shared hosting to save yourself the trouble maintaining updates & security.

    Most of the times shared hosting is much more stable than a self-managed VPS (but depends if you know what you are doing)

    Litespeed webserver can easily handle that much traffic :)

  • swat4swat4 Member
    edited December 2020

    @jpeng said:

    for share hosting do I need to backup myself? or the provider do backup for you?

    Actually you are quite lucky in this thread :D Two providers who are helpful have already joined the discussion. They are always able to provide a solution.

    @seriesn and @WebHorizon - feel free to ask them ;)

  • Just go for free wordpress @ hostwp.net

  • @LTniger said:
    Just go for free wordpress @ hostwp.net

    I don't like any free plan. thanks.

    Thanked by 1Levi
  • Shared hosting with @seriesn
    If load is too high, he'll help you upgrade.

    Thanked by 2jpeng seriesn
  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    @swat4 said:

    @jpeng said:

    @yoursunny said:
    I moved from shared hosting to VPS in 2011 and never looked back. In VPS there's more control on exactly how the content is generated and delivered. I have control over:

    • TCP congestion control
    • TLS crypto algorithms
    • HTTP response compression
    • FastCGI caching
    • WebSockets
    • HTTP/2 server push
    • HTTP/3 transport

    Most of these are unavailable in shared hosting accounts.

    great. you are such an advanced user.

    Yes , push-up king @yoursunny is an expert and I guess many of us here don't have his knowledge level. I would suggest going via Shared hosting, which would save you much time for other work. :)

    I'm a push-up specialist that happens to have a PhD in computer networking.
    I understand the theory of those things I listed and have read the relevant RFC, but I didn't deploy most of them on my websites because either I don't have a use case or I haven't found the right software.
    Nevertheless, I want the flexibility and like the feeling of being in control.


    Shared hosting has definitely improved since 2011 though.

    I gave up shared hosting back then, because some providers have strange php.ini settings for "security", such as magic quotes turned on.
    Webmaster cannot change these at all, and it's tricky to workaround those problems in the scripts.

    I never used DirectAdmin shared hosting, but screenshots indicate that the webmaster has some control over the scripting environment, such as HTTP rewrites and php.ini.


    I still actively use one shared hosting account: alwaysdata (100MB free).
    Occasionally I want to put up a simple PHP script but don't feel like writing nginx / Caddy configuration, I would temporarily upload the script to alwaysdata.

    I also use alwaysdata to setup domain redirects.
    Cloudflare doesn't support domain redirects easily: I must use either Page Rules that are limited to three per domain, or Workers that requires programming.
    It's faster to define a "redirect" site in alwaysdata and put a CNAME in Cloudflare.

    Their control panel supports multiple scripting languages (PHP Ruby Python Node) with version selection, with almost full control over the configuration.
    I don't know what software it is, but I wish a US provider can offer this control panel.

    Thanked by 1jpeng
  • seriesnseriesn Member
    edited December 2020

    @swat4 said:

    @jpeng said:

    for share hosting do I need to backup myself? or the provider do backup for you?

    Actually you are quite lucky in this thread :D Two providers who are helpful have already joined the discussion. They are always able to provide a solution.

    @seriesn and @WebHorizon - feel free to ask them ;)

    @jpeng said:

    @LTniger said:
    Just go for free wordpress @ hostwp.net

    I don't like any free plan. thanks.

    Thanks for the prem mentions fam <3.

    @jpeng it is always recommended to keep your own backup, regardless of what any provider tells you. Better to be safe than sorry.

    With that said, for your peace of mind, we do take nightly backup, that you can restore (complete, individual files or db) yourself without the need to open ticket :)

    Thanked by 2Chronic jpeng
  • Shared hosting. You can find so many decent offers here on LET with 2 or 4 GB of RAM and good CPU.

    The backups still should be your responsibility.

  • AbdAbd Member, Patron Provider

    @jpeng said:
    for share hosting do I need to backup myself? or the provider do backup for you?

    Most of the providers include backup.

    We also have daily backups included, you can also restore the backups from within the panel.

    It's always good thing to maintain extra backups of your own too.

    Thanked by 1jpeng
  • Dynamic shit?
    Pick some shared hosting.

    Static shit?
    Too damn many options. Object storages, JAM-first hosters (Netlify, Vercel), GitHub/GitLab etc.

    Some few even prefer to snapshot their WordPress to get a static image of their inherently-dynamic website.

  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited December 2020

    Honestly I'd just use static hosting for a blog if possible. Think something like Amazon S3, Netlify, BunnyCDN, etc. If you still want to use WordPress, you can use it with a "headless CMS", meaning you do all the content editing in WordPress, but it publishes static HTML pages. WordPress can run on even the cheapest shared hosting or VPS then, as it doesn't receive any of the production traffic (the only traffic to WordPress is you, when editing the site)

    Otherwise, WordPress + WP Super Cache works well as long as you configure the web server (Nginx, whatever) to serve the cached files directly from disk, bypassing PHP. Here's an example Nginx config based on what I use: https://gist.github.com/Daniel15/c6dce3639f85749e2f5de013d4019d6b. The key is serving /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$cache_uri/index-https.html if it exists rather than hitting PHP. You'll get performance equivalent to a static site then, except for the first hit that primes the cache.

    Thanked by 4Abd jpeng Penguin vyas11
  • @Daniel15 said:
    Honestly I'd just use static hosting for a blog if possible.

    Yes I think this is the best advise

  • vyas11vyas11 Member
    edited December 2020

    Let us see..

    • Which Content Management System will you use / desire to use? If WordPress is answer to both the questions, that is fine. Let us move on the the other parts that are independent of the CMS.
    • Where do most of the visitors come from? Even if one were to 3x the traffic levels (and to point raised by @seriesn ) -say all users are concurrent, this question becomes more pertinent.
    • Do you host images and videos natively and serve them, or use a CDN?
    • How have you set up WP currently? (i.e. panel/ terminal or script based installer, etc.) It it in the tol level folder, or a subfolder like /blog?
    • How do you backup? How frequently? Do you use a plugin for that, or a script (e.g. All in One WP migration versus a cron job)
    • Who will do the migration? (i.e will you be comfortable doing it yourself, or the new host? In case of the latter, are you looking for 'free' migration ?)

    And so on..

    migration is the easier part of the job. Then comes the real work:
    Have the URLs changed during the process?
    How about integrations with third party apps like Zapier?
    Do the images load correctly?

    I would worry about the post migration parts more than the 'where to host' because of the low traffic volume. But I wish you well, whatever the site, is hope you will add more visitors to your site with time.

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate
    edited December 2020

    @vyas11 said:

    migration is the easier part of the job. Then comes the real work:
    Have the URLs changed during the process?
    How baout integrations with third party apps like Zapier?
    Do the images load correctly?

    I would worry about the post migration parts more than the 'where to host' because of the low traffic volume. But I wish you well, whatever the site, is hope you will add more visitors to your site with time.

    I write my own templates and rendering scripts and HTTP server configuration, exactly because I need precise control over "migration".
    I started in 2006 with PHP on IIS 5.0, in which the URI structure mostly reflects the file structure.
    During my 2017 rebuild, I introduced static site generators, but I had to add PHP scripts so that most of the links in the previous 11 years are still working.

    Thanked by 1vyas11
  • @vyas11 said: Have the URLs changed during the process?

    Cool URIs don't change. Try to avoid changing URLs whenever possible. Definitely don't include things like .php in your URLs as it's ugly and is tightly coupled to one particular technology (PHP). If you must change your URLs, ensure you redirect the old ones using 301 (permanent) redirects, eg in your Nginx config or via a script.

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