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Cheap, Reasonable Hosting For My Scenario?
Hi everyone! Glad to be here 
I'm trying to figure out what direction to go re: hosting for a series of musician Wordpress-based websites
My background: I grew up coding as a kid, I'm a professional musician these days. I still consider myself an amateur coder, and generally am the person in the friend group that people call on to do tech-things – be it setting up computers, repairing hardware, recovering files, etc.
I know my way around Wordpress decently. I used to know my way around Linux pretty well. I've never managed a server myself, but I generally understand core concepts.
I previously was hosting a number of music on iPage for $24 / year, for a few small projects. None of these projects have huge fan-bases yet, but are hoping to grow.
It ran okay. It was slow at times. iPage customer service was iffy at replying. I cancelled with them after they tried to start charging me far, far more than that several years in, with no warning – about a 1,000% increase
My goal is to be able to:
Deploy somewhere between 3 and 20 Wordpress musician websites, using the Sonaar.io theme that I have purchased, something looking a bit like this – https://sonaar.io/demos/?theme=Indigo
Keep the costs down. I want to pay the minimum sensible in this scenario. Trying to max out at about $50 / year, but the cheaper the better, so long as the following goals are somewhat met
Have them load smoothly, efficiently, on average internet connections
Be accessible to, say, a maximum of one hundred fans per day, for now? (Hoping this will scale-up significantly on some of these projects within a few years, but if so, I'll be in a place to pay more seriously for hosting)
Possibly integrate a platform (WooCommerce?) to be able to sell merch for said musicians into said Wordpress instances
Possibly host and stream media to said fans – although, most likely, I will have streaming audio coming from elsewhere (Spotify, YouTube, etc. via wordpress plugins) that wouldn't tax bandwidth
Have, ideally, decently reliable customer service – so I know if something goes wrong, someone's got my back
Have, ideally, decently reliable uptime – so I know that my site is generally accessible, most times, but it's not mission-critical or anything; an hour or two of down time a month would honestly be fine
Have, ideally, my site hosted somewhere that won't try to scam me, or won't suddenly disappear without warning
Keep my time and labor investment in website management reasonable; I wouldn't mind tuning up the back end every now and then, but I'm not looking to devote many hours a week to doing so
Options I'm currently considering:
• BuyWebHosting.Ca BWH2 plan: $14 / year
• HostingSpell Saturn: $16 / year
• Netcup.de 1000: $25 / year
• iFast Super Premium: $35 / year
• Amazon LightSail: $42 / year
• Dreamhost WordPress Unlimited: $47 / year (for 3 years)
• Contabo Webspace M: $48 / year
I'm leaning towards Dreamhost right now – since it seems optimized for my situation. They take care of 99% of the server stuff, I just have to worry about the actual Wordpress. Similar to iPage, but wayyyy more reputable, better uptime, better speeds, better customer service, etc.
Granted, they will go up in price significantly for renewal – but that's 3 years down the line, and by that time I, again, either plan to be in a place to pay for better hosting, or will have had time to do research into another alternative
Does that seem like the most sensible plan forward? Does anyone see a better one? Are there better options I'm not considering? Does anyone have experience with Dreamhost / some of these other hosts to talk about?
Thanks so much!
Comments
I can vouch for Netcup. I have a special 500GB plan and they are amazing. Everything is super fast and it just works. No downtime for almost a year now. They use Plesk , so it's super easy to manage anything.
Spinupwp.com
Dreamhost looks like one of the better options if having "unlimited" or very high drive space is a need.
DreamHost is nice, I use them for Gsuite and such. Just note that iirc they have a custom panel that is specialized for Wordpress, so it won't be your generic cPanel/Plesk/DirectAdmin experience
Cpanel/directadmin reseller hosting maybe more suited for you..
In contrast to the other options on your list, Amazon LightSail is a VPS service, not a shared/web hosting service
Congrats on your first post
I also like netcup's web hosting, but I think that the entry plan (Webhosting 1000) on the OP's list would be too limiting, given what the OP describes
I'd like to throw ourselves into the ring if you haven't already taken a look at our plans: https://speedypage.com/web-hosting
We offer unlimited disk space & websites which is something you have asked for, but in addition we actually offer the Bunny CDN + Optimizer, free of charge which would be useful for you wanting to serve your music files directly from the web hosting account. I'd be happy to discount our Enterprise plan to the $50 per year you have requested providing you don't make use of the free domain usually included with it at full price.
Just send a PM if you have any questions :-)
I did notice that Netcup's 1000 plan only allowed for 1 database; I assume that running multiple Wordpress instances off of a single database would be a PITA. I would likely have to go for the 2000 plan, which offers 10 databases (and 75 GB storage) at $38 / year
How do addon-domains work with them? I would need to use a different domain for every site, and I do own these domains already, mostly registered with Google Domains. Their wording is... ambiguous; almost as if they only allow domains to be added on that they register themselves??
Am I understanding correctly that this is a service that, for $12 / month, will spin-up and maintain from-zero-to-Wordpress on a server from scratch?
I suppose that could be useful, if I go with something that's unmanaged; and with their free trial, I could get the server spun-up, and then cancel?
Some of these fall in that category, no?
Right; I threw it in there because I'm wondering if, at their lowest prices, it's comparable pricing to the other options
As I understand it, I would have to spin-up everything on my own. But once I did... would the $3.50 / month 512 MB Memory / 1 Core Processor /20 GB SSD Disk / 1 TB Transfer likely cover the kind of project I'm describing...?
That's very tempting!
Would billing be monthly / annually / a different period? Would it renew at that rate of $50 / year?
It seems at though you're brand new, yes? While that's exciting, I have concerns about going with a company that hasn't been around for long enough for me to get a feel from reviews as to how they operate / to know they will be around for a while longer
What does customer service look like? If I have an issue, how is support handled? Chat? Phone? Tickets?
Are you offering your Wordpress Hosting Unlimited package, or just the normal Web Hosting Unlimited package, at that price? What is the difference between these packages?
The Bunny CDN + Optimizer – so, I'm somewhat green to CDN, but as I understand it, this would speed up load times by mirroring my site on servers around the globe and offering up the fastest ones to users automatically on the client-side, yes? Is there anything I would have to do to make this work with my website, or is it basically under-the-hood? Could I deploy and administrate my site, my Wordpress themes, etc., as they are without having to modify it? What about the Optimizer, would that integrate into my Wordpress site / theme automatically? And does the Optimizer work on other media (audio / video) or just images?
Thanks
I think that the general view around here would be that if you're ready to set up everything on your own, then there are better VPS deals (more resources for less) to be had than Amazon Lightsail. (Not that Amazon Lightsail is bad)
Unless you like maintaining a VPS, in your place I'd probably go for shared hosting
You would be allowed up to three external domains, where "external domain" means a domain registered at a registrar other than netcup
If your domains are registered at netcup, then you can have as many domains as you wish
(Admittedly, this is a restriction that doesn't work for everyone)
Thanks for the questions!
It would be an annual billing period, and also renew at $50 per year. We have been operating for just over 1 year and 2 months now, certainly new in the market in comparison to others but I'd like to say every one of our customers has had a good experience with us. We really try to go the extra mile to help our customers. All hardware is owned by us, our network is operated by us - nothing is rented and our business currently is in $0.00 debt.
Support is currently provided via ticket support + live chat, our phone line can be used for Sales queries. Live chat is currently turned off as we're about to release a new live chat system but usually it's available and can be used by clicking at the bottom right of the page.
The core difference of the WordPress hosting plan is the cPanel WordPress Deluxe Toolkit - I'd be happy to offer that plan at the pricing mentioned previously. In the near to distant future, we hope to make use of a bespoke solution to really differentiate it from our other plans; rather than using a generic solution such as cPanel.
Your understanding of the CDN is correct, it caches files at the edge of the user to speed up delivery to users in those locations. If your website is static & not dynamic at all, it can be used to proxy your entire website which will offer the fastest performance - but if it is dynamic (such as a store for example), we'd recommend the standard Bunny.net CDN integration which is a WordPress plugin, it is very easy to configure but we'd also be able to do that for you if you needed a hand. If you needed to modify a theme or something of that nature, you may need to clear the CDN cache but this can be done from our billing area and it's just a one-click to do so.
The Optimizer integrates directly when the CDN is in use, it compresses images by converting them to WebP which is vital for things like SEO, as Google PageSpeed Insights will mark your site higher by using next-gen web technologies. It also minifies CSS & JavaScript files, as well as optimization based on device size (another SEO benefit). The CSS & JS ones aren't required as our LiteSpeed Cache plugin can do it for you, but it's there if you wanted to use it.
Feel free to reach out if you have any further queries!
@Andraleia happy to work out a deal for you! if you're still looking just reach out. We offer WordPress Toolkit as well.
Guys, I am watching at your offers and want to try them, but it's some kind a mess on network level.
Just see: my location is middle-russia, normally ping to UK servers is about 60-80 ms and this is ok.
Your LG says that you in UK too, but ping from my location is around 150 ms. This like from me to SG or West US.
Moreover, look at this tracert:
Why traffic goes from london to wlv, than back to london and again to wlv?
From my FI hetzner box same picture (except of ms ofcourse).
I have sent a PM to diagnose this with you. This doesn't seem correct and we will get this fixed. Immediately from our end we're unable to reproduce 140ms, we get 70ms from our network to your 4th hop but we will figure this out via PM's. Thank you for notifying us!
Regarding the routing from London > WLV > London - this is just incorrect rDNS in our upstreams local network. My apologies, it's actually only going from London > WLV.
I don't think so, check IPs in brackets.
Packets goes:
195.191.219.29 > 195.191.219.21 > (again) 195.191.219.29 > 195.191.219.21
Looks like a loop, not rDNS issue.
If I will ping just 195.191.219.21 (WLV Node) I got 80 ms as "usual UK ping for me" and it is great.
You're right, I completely overlooked that - my apologies! Regarding the routing issue, we're investigating that with our upstream affected now.