Managed VPS Hosting - Best Providers?

[Blackman]

Happy New Year 2024, everyone.

I've been using Hostgator's shared hosting for the last 10 years and generally speaking, I haven't really had any issues with them, because reliability and speed wasn't too much of a concern for me...

Now when I'm running an e-commerce website and spending money on Google Shopping Ads to get paid traffic, it's really frustrating to see the website loading for like 10 seconds sometimes or even occasionally getting random internal server errors, which is what I've experienced recently and decided that it's time to make a move to VPS hosting.

I tried searching the forum before creating a thread, but couldn't really find any previous threads where this has been discussed in depth. Also did some research on Google and I've got a rough idea what I need, but wanted to hear your thoughts.

So the website doesn't get a huge amount of traffic - in fact, it's only 200-300 visitors/day, most of it is from Google Shopping Ads, but because I'm spending money on traffic, I can't afford to have a slow website or any major downtimes, as obviously this affects the sales/profit, etc.

VPS hosting seems to be the best way forward, as Dedicated sounds too complicated, it's too pricy and I don't think it's something that I need with my level of traffic. After doing some reading, it turns out that you've got Managed VPS hosting and Unmanaged.

My experience of running a server is absolutely ZERO, so basically what I want is a fully managed/maintained server with a cPanel, so I can access the server and do my basic stuff, like I would with Shared hosting, and I also need an SSL certificate included to have a "Secure" site in the eyes of Google. I believe the Email service is included with a cPanel, so can't really think of anything else that I need?

I kind of narrowed my choice down to a few providers, but just wanted to know what setup you guys are running on your e-commerce website?

LiquidWeb seems to be the most reputable provider and the price is quite competitive, but it looks like there's using InterWorx Control Panel and it also doesn't say if SSL is included or not?

BlueHost is also a popular choice, but again it's not clear about SSL, and I can't figure if their VPS hosting is fully managed or not? A2Hosting has the most clear package, which lists everything that's included, but I haven't really heard of them much? Anyone got experience with them? Possibly anyone else you would recommend based on my requirements?

Thanks for your help

 

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[Blackman]

Surely, there are some Fastlaners here using VPS hosting? Would appreciate any input to point me in the right direction. Thank you

 

[rpeck90]

DigitalOcean with free Plesk license or cheap IONOS VPS with unlimited Plesk license (which can be used for other VPS instances) is my go-to presently. Plesk is better than CPanel although they're both made by the same company. Server itself isn't hugely important if you have your overall system set up correctly, although I would suggest using a VPS over shared. Dedicated is only really appropriate for large websites.

You're welcome to DM me if you wanted to talk further about the hosting side of things. I set up hosting and do coding for a living so I can perhaps give you some intro content on how it all works.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

DigitalOcean with free Plesk license or cheap IONOS VPS with unlimited Plesk license (which can be used for other VPS instances) is my go-to presently. Plesk is better than CPanel although they're both made by the same company. Server itself isn't hugely important if you have your overall system set up correctly, although I would suggest using a VPS over shared. Dedicated is only really appropriate for large websites.

You're welcome to DM me if you wanted to talk further about the hosting side of things. I set up hosting and do coding for a living so I can perhaps give you some intro content on how it all works.

What do you think of Hetzner.com? They are cheap and fast

 

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[rpeck90]

What do you think of Hetzner.com? They are cheap and fast

Hetzner is one of the best. I actually talked to Martin Hetzner via email some time ago - amazing company & team. Only problem is they don't have as much availability as the likes of DigitalOcean or Vultr; Germany + Finland last time I checked, and now it seems they have some availability in the US (info). One of my clients uses them with an IONOS Plesk license.



The other crucial factor is the availability of a Plesk license. VPS servers are generally quite cheap and most are decently hosted. The big problem is keeping them maintained, which typically means using a software package like CPanel or Plesk. There are self-hosted ones like DirectAdmin which are bad, and there are now other "deployment management" services like ploi.io or RunCloud but nothing compares to Plesk.

I had wanted to make my own called VPSDeploy. I bought the domain some time back but got stuck building up the company's capital base to bring it to fruition at that time. There's a distinct need for a "managed" deployment solution for distributed web infrastructure which is detached from individual servers.

I had wanted to create a system similar to Heroku, whereby you can push packages of code to multiple self-managed servers, that are all maintained from a central system. The intention was to make it so that you could link an account from one of the cloud providers and have a server provisioned, with any pushes you make being automatically sent to them all.

Since I had the idea, several similar solutions have been created but nothing like what I've wanted to do.

 

[Blackman]

@rpeck90 , thanks for your help. In terms of server spec, what would you say would be sufficient enough for my requirements, i.e. WooCommerce store running Wordpress, roughly 200-300 visitors/day (hopefully more soon), about 150-200 transactions/month, and at the moment it's just 1 domain/website on the server and nothing else.

RAM, CPU, storage, bandwidth recommendations?

And if I was to build a similar store in the future, I wouldn't want to swap hosting again, so ideally I'd need something that would be able to handle a few of these websites, potentially with higher traffic?

 

[Oso]

I tend to avoid EIG companies like the HIV diagnosis they are. For the last ~3 years, I've exclusively used Inmotion Hosting. Both of my agencies were setup and launched via managed vps hosting. If memory serves, I paid 350$ for 1yr of hosting. After the year promotion, it bumps up to 550$.

Cheers.

 

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[rpeck90]

@rpeck90 , thanks for your help. In terms of server spec, what would you say would be sufficient enough for my requirements, i.e. WooCommerce store running Wordpress, roughly 200-300 visitors/day (hopefully more soon), about 150-200 transactions/month, and at the moment it's just 1 domain/website on the server and nothing else.

RAM, CPU, storage, bandwidth recommendations?

And if I was to build a similar store in the future, I wouldn't want to swap hosting again, so ideally I'd need something that would be able to handle a few of these websites, potentially with higher traffic?

Most important is the overall structure. You need to spread the "load" between different silos of functionality, which means database, web, cache + assets hosted separately.

For the moment, you'll be able to get away with a single server but if you needed to grow the site or business (EG multiple sites), you'll be better splitting things up.

I'll briefly explain the general methodology behind this for you so you have an idea of the context and then provide a specific recommendation based on your requirements.

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General Context

There are now a significant number of hosting, caching & "infrastructure" services for the web which are inexpensive to operate. "Cloud" basically has dropped the price of hosting/digital delivery on an infrastructure level massively.

The result is "shared" hosting is no longer an effective way to host a website in a way that's scalable.

It works for smaller scale websites (even something like yours) but if you ever need to grow, because it only has a single scalable component (server), you will end up scaling linearly, often leading to unnecessary expenditure.

Typically, the "shared" hosting paradigm has 3 levels of capacity: -

1. Shared has a single server with 1,000's of websites running on it.
2. VPS instances are single servers running 10 - 20 sites.
3. Dedicated is a single server running a single site.

In each of these cases, the paradigm is built around a single physical server. Web server software, application server software, database software, email server software are all running off a single set of hardware.

The issue you'll have is if one of your application's components needs more resource (EG you have a heavy PHP script, your database grows too large or you host 10,000's of images that require more hard drive space), you can only upgrade the server itself, not the individual components you require.

As mentioned, this works for smaller sites but does not scale.

The alternative is "cloud" hosting.

Cloud hosting (DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud Engine, Azure etc) still provide VPS instances that run on physical machines. However, those instances are spread across thousands of servers in a variety of locations: -

The benefit is you are able to achieve a significant amount of flexibility within the backend architecture of a hosted solution - basically allowing you to split the infrastructure between a variety of different systems, each one able to scale independent of the rest.

To explain why this is important, you need to consider the various components that make up a modern hosted app: -

1. Cache / CDN
Initial touchpoint that users will encounter. You need a strong cache because otherwise, you will end up having to dynamically serve pages for every request, which is going to kill the server's effectiveness.

2. Web / Application Server
The underlying system that will process your logic code. Basically PHP, Ruby etc.

3. Database Server
MySQL or PgSQL - the place where the application will store its data.

4. Asset / Storage Server
User uploaded images and other media not "hard coded" into the system.

5. Email / Deliverability
A means to send emails from the system. This is increasingly done by utilising one of the "SMTP Relay" services such as Amazon SES or SendGrid. There may also be pub/sub and SMS services here.

These come into use when deploying a web based application.

Obviously, what you use depends on your application & use-case. The point is that in order to get the application working online, you need at least 2 of the above (db server + web server).

Traditional hosting puts all of it on a single server, which means a single point of failure. "Cloud" gives you the ability to split up the various components in a way that allows you to spread the load, risk and security of the system properly.

Not only are you able to deploy new instances of VPS servers instantly (IE you can add extra resource to your database, web or asset silos), but you are able to pick-and-mix a number of infrastructure-level options, such as datacentre location, firewall access, local networking IP's etc. In other words, you get control over how the system works - which means you can chop-and-change as your circumstances dictate.

Because of this, I would typically recommend using a "cloud" based provider unless you can absolutely get away with using shared. I'll explain specifics below.

--

Specific Recommendation

For smaller Wordpress sites (yours will come into this), you will only need a single server at present (IE host database, web and assets centrally). If you started getting spikes in traffic etc, then other options would need to be explored.

As I explained originally, the way I would suggest doing this today is to spin up a new server on DigitalOcean and take advantage of their "free Plesk" marketplace offer. Plesk is web server management software which allows you to set up PHP (application server), MySQL (database server) and various other components in a standardised and robust way.

If you do this with a single server ("droplet") in DigitalOcean, you can then add a cache on top of it (Cloudflare's free tier will be fine), your site should be good for the foreseeable future. 200/300 visitors a day doesn't require huge amounts of server resource, especially if you have a good cache in place.

Now, there is a downside to doing this, which is the cost.

"Cloud" is more expensive than shared/traditional hosting.

I would suggest using the following from DigitalOcean ($12/mo): -


Vultr provide a similar set up for $10/mo: -




Vultr apparently also have a deal with Plesk, although their verbiage is not clear on its constraints. They mention that you get a 30 day trial license, but also show a similar deal to DigitalOcean (IE <= 3 domains license for free): -



If you're able to get the same deal as DigitalOcean with Plesk, Vultr may be a good option.

In any case, that's the cheapest you're going to get for "cloud" hosting. Set up a single VPS instance running Plesk and you'll be able to run up to 3 sites on it. Put the sites on CloudFlare to get the ability to cache requests and you should be able to handle a decent amount of traffic per day.

If budget is a more pressing issue, the best alternative is to use Namecheap. I've been with Namecheap for almost 20 years and they are a very strong company. Their service is extremely high quality and, crucially, they have Litespeed installed on their shared servers by default. Litespeed is one of the two best caching solutions for Wordpress (the other being Nitropack): -



Namecheap will work for you presently but you may grow out of it. I've found their shared hosting to be relatively slow and underpowered. Obviously, you get what you pay for.

-

Finally, I have a link for use with DigitalOcean whereby you can get $200 credit, valid for 6 months.

It is just an affiliate link which I believe everybody gets, but it may give you some room to test out what you want to do before making commitments to the likes of Namecheap etc. I don't get any money out of the link, rather "credit" to use inside DigitalOcean. Some other people have used it before: -


Here is the link: DigitalOcean | Cloud Hosting for Builders

If you sign up with it, you'll get $200 credit for 60 days. I only receive credits after you've spent real money.

I would definitely recommend cloud if you have the means to justify spending the money on it, primarily as it gives you the ability to scale and reconfigure the stack as your needs evolve. It's better practice, essentially.

You're welcome to DM me if you want further info/help.