Hosting Company for Business Websites.

Sledge

Sledge

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I currently use a company called Hostgator. It doesn't seem like their service is as reliable as it should be and there's a bit of down time and slow loading. But the couple sites I have are on a shared server with who knows how many others, so that could be part of the problem.

I was thinking about upgrading the site and moving to a dedicated server and/or changing hosting companies. But doing that is sort of a shot in the dark.

Can anyone recommend a good hosting company, and is it worth paying the extra for a dedicated server? Any ideas how much a dedicated server should cost for a small business?
 
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Aldarion

Aldarion

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AWS is cheap and appears very stable... no idea how it scales with heavy traffic but I bet they have solutions that would help there too...
 
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A

a_skeleton_03

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DigitalOcean is great and I would suggest switching to them.

It really depends on what is running to figure out how much power you need. Outline it for me.
 
alavaz

alavaz

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You can get quality shared hosting for a decent price. VPS are nice for when you need OS access and what not, but if you are just installing a wordpress site and doing medium traffic I wouldn't pay the extra money.

eskimonorth and dreamhost are two that I can recommend for shared hosting. Excellent uptime and quality support. They also have VPS and all that as well if you decide you really need it.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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alavaz said:
You can get quality shared hosting for a decent price. VPS are nice for when you need OS access and what not, but if you are just installing a wordpress site and doing medium traffic I wouldn't pay the extra money.

eskimonorth and dreamhost are two that I can recommend for shared hosting. Excellent uptime and quality support. They also have VPS and all that as well if you decide you really need it.
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DO is cheaper and better than any value shared hosting
 
alavaz

alavaz

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Lanx said:
DO is cheaper and better than any value shared hosting
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Cheaper? I paid more pretty much every month with Digital Ocean than I do with dreamhost. Never noticed performance being any better either.
 
BrotherWu

BrotherWu

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I started mine up a couple of years ago with GoDaddy but I have been having trouble connecting to Outlook to my email on Android. It previously worked fine. How big of a deal is it to move the domain and website to another provider?
 
alavaz

alavaz

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BrotherWu said:
I started mine up a couple of years ago with GoDaddy but I have been having trouble connecting to Outlook to my email on Android. It previously worked fine. How big of a deal is it to move the domain and website to another provider?
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It depends. You can either leave the domain with godaddy, and just set the nameserver to your new hosting provider or you can actually transfer it to a new registrar - which most hosting providers are also. The first option takes only a few minutes, the latter a few days or so. I personally prefer to register all my domains through a central registrar (namecheap for now) and I swap hosts every couple of years since you can generally get very good introductory pricing.

Moving the website also depends. If it's just flat files (html, js, css) you can simply download them and then upload to your new provider. If it's using some sort of server side coding (php, python, perl, etc.) and/or a database then you have to make sure your new host supports whatever version of code and database you are using. Then you have to back up the db, restore it to the new host and update all of your confs to reflect the new location. Not super tough, but requires some planning and some general knowledge of web applications and web servers.
 
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Sledge

Sledge

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a_skeleton_03 said:
DigitalOcean is great and I would suggest switching to them.

It really depends on what is running to figure out how much power you need. Outline it for me.
Click to expand...

Sorry, no idea why I didn't get notifications that people replied.

Right now it's a small ecommerce site with about 75-100 products and then a very basic site with a different domain name that describes some of those products (like a manufacturing site). I also have a nearly worthless small forum that that allows people to ask questions. These were set up at different times and likely on different shared servers. I had plans for all of this working together but failed miserably at implementing it because I don't know enough about website design. The farther I go, the deeper hole I'm digging for myself to get out of.

So it all needs to be pulled together before growing the business, but I'm worried about sticking with Hostgator due to the down time issues. Maybe it's due to shared servers, I'm not sure.
 
TrollfaceDeux

TrollfaceDeux

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Just a loaded question.... My boss asked me to look into making several webpages that have lead generator component to it..... Now I am at loss as to where to begin...
 
Lanx

Lanx

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TrollfaceDeux said:
Just a loaded question.... My boss asked me to look into making several webpages that have lead generator component to it..... Now I am at loss as to where to begin...
Click to expand...
get webhosting, if you have no idea wtf that is, just goto something super simple like hostgator and from their control panel install wordpress (it's like 2 clicks)
in stall this plugin for lead capture Contact Form by WPForms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress

and get any of these services aweber/getresponse etc to capture the lead, Marketing Platform for Small Businesses | Mailchimp will be free for 2k subscribers.

thats all zero cost stuff you can mess around with, i mean you're gonna mess up a lot and it's gonna be ugly, so you'll be deleting the site many times.
 
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TrollfaceDeux

TrollfaceDeux

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Lanx said:
get webhosting, if you have no idea wtf that is, just goto something super simple like hostgator and from their control panel install wordpress (it's like 2 clicks)
in stall this plugin for lead capture Contact Form by WPForms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress

and get any of these services aweber/getresponse etc to capture the lead, Marketing Platform for Small Businesses | Mailchimp will be free for 2k subscribers.

thats all zero cost stuff you can mess around with, i mean you're gonna mess up a lot and it's gonna be ugly, so you'll be deleting the site many times.
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Hostgator hid bunch of stupid fees at the end so I just went with DO. Will keep you updated in case you are interested. Looks nice tho
 
Sledge

Sledge

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a_skeleton_03 said:
DigitalOcean is great and I would suggest switching to them.

It really depends on what is running to figure out how much power you need. Outline it for me.
Click to expand...

a_skeleton_03, do you know if DigitalOcean will protect a website from DDOS attacks?
 
alavaz

alavaz

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Most hosting providers partner with cloudflare to offer ddos protection. With DO, you would just set cloudflare up on your own.
 
AladainAF

AladainAF

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a_skeleton_03 said:
DigitalOcean is great and I would suggest switching to them.

It really depends on what is running to figure out how much power you need. Outline it for me.
Click to expand...

I use DigitalOcean. I can vouch for them, they are fantastic. However, you pretty much run your own shit. They don't really manage much for you, other than keeping shit online, and backups (if you pay for it).
 
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