Web Hosting

The Story of Collecting VPS’s

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Back when I was working at Thomson Reuters in New York, maybe eight years ago now, a friend told me about LowEndBox.com and the cheap VPS you could get on subscription. At the time, I was mostly doing my hosting at home, maybe just running this blog, so I filed the info away and didn’t do much with it.

After moving to the UK, I started checking the site periodically, and he wasn’t wrong. They had some wild deals, like a decently powered VPS for under $20 a year if you caught a special. Considering I was used to paying $15 a month for fairly limited hosting, the idea of getting a whole VPS for the cost of one month, but for a full year, was too good to ignore. Most of the big offers came around the holidays such as Black Friday, Christmas, or New Year, but there were deals sprinkled throughout the year too. Eventually, after seeing a Black Friday promotion, I thought: for $20, I waste more on random stuff, why not try this? I grabbed one hosted in the Netherlands and liked it a lot.

That was the start of my little VPS collection. One of them now runs hosting for my blog, set up with YunoHost on Debian. It’s been my favourite self-hosting stack: simple to install WordPress and other apps, stable, easy to back up, restore, and even migrate. I’ve moved my hosting from the Netherlands to Ireland with no real issues.

Since then, I’ve picked up a few more in different places. I’ve got a couple in Texas I’ve been using as VPN endpoints, another one I pay about €8 a month for as a remote node in my backup network with around 2 TB of storage, and a handful of ultra-cheap hosting plans that cost me less than $15 a year. Some of those I don’t even really use anymore, like CPanel hosting for multiple domains, but the VPS setups are still going strong.

At this point I’ve got three or four VPSs running different services, plus a couple of extra hosting plans I may or may not renew when they come up. I’m tempted to add another storage VPS just to play around with Borg backup, though I still keep Resilio running for sync backups. Between the VPN endpoint in the US, my regular hosting, and the backup nodes, I’m definitely collecting VPSs.

Will I pare it down someday? Maybe. But even with all of them, the cost is still half or less than what I used to pay for a single hosting plan ten years ago. Pretty crazy, really.

The Story of The New New New Web Hosting Provider

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I have had numerous hosting providers in the past 25 years. Do I date myself by saying that? It is the truth I guess. I have hosted a website in one form or another for easily over 20 years. Trying to think of them I cannot recall all the providers I have used. I have had full service web providers. I have hosted my own. Way back when I first started out I even used free sites like Geocities or hosting via my AOL account. Yes I had one of those. I have had dedicated service providers for just mail and blog. And probably for a while I might have done nothing other than simply used Gmail. Over two years ago I moved to a provider siteground.co.uk. They hosted my blog, some email domains of mine that are not on Protonmail and any odd and end webiste I put up. For what they offer it is probably overkill for me. I signed up because the previous provider I had Hostpoint.sh contract was up. Hostpoint was on the expensive side.  They were a great provider for what they offered. The cost benefit for me did not make it economically sensible to continue to use them.  Siteground had a really good deal so i signed up for a 3 year contract with them. For me three years is like a lifetime. I never used to like 1 to 2 year mobile phone contracts. The deal was too good to pass up so I signed for that term.

Now as I write this I have less than 6 months on my site ground contract I looked at how much the renewal cost will be for my hosting. Without the deal the prices it is about triple what I was spending. I have had zero problems with Siteground. Like Hostpoint they have been a fantastic hosting provider. My challenge is for what I use them for the price they’re charging just seems ridiculous. I could host a site myself at home if I wanted to sort out mail relaying. I do not want to so I started looking for alternative providers. Oddly most hosting providers are not very cheap.  yeah $5-$15 (£3-£12) or so sounds inexpensive however it adds up over the year. Most of the good ones are on the higher end of that range.

Giving up on the relitivly expensive consumer proivders I ended up looking at lowednbox.com for deals for a VPS.  If you do not know a VPS is. a Virtual Private Server. So basically a virtual machines at a hosting provider. A friend showed me the lowendbox site ages ago and i really didn’t bother looking into a VPS.  I was doing too much with my Raspberry Pi’s so did not want to pay for any remote systems.  Now however a cheap (£1-£3) a month VPS (Virtual Private Server) might just do it for me.  Most of what is offered at the £1 range may not be enough RAM for my needs however for slightly more or basically £15-£23 a year i can get a pretty decent virtual server that i could replicate most of what i get from a provider. In my search I even found a provider that does shared hosting (what most people get as webhosting) for $1.50 a month.

I wasn’t sure what i wanted so i picked up two seperate deals (3 if you could a VPS i got for a VPN project that i may write about another time) from lowendbox.com.  I got the cheap $1.5 a month shared hosting as well as a VPS for a year for £22.  Even with both providers I am paying 25% of what i would have paid if i renewed siteground.

After a bunch of trial and error with the cheap shared hosting provider and the VPS I settled on the VPS. While I was figuring out what to do and realised the $1.50 a month basic provider didn’t seem to be working out I approached the situation a bit differently. My VPS can support my website pretty easily. Even if there is a reliability issue the website doesn’t need to be up 99.99% of the time like email kinda needs to be. That meant I could decouple my mail hosting from my website if I could do it cheaply enough. I went about trying to find an email only hosting provider. The problem was just like with regular hosting everyone offered really cheap introductory rates and then the price was much higher. With email only hosting providers it was kind of funny since the price they were offering I could buy a cheap complete hosting package for the same amount of money. I then continue to look for relatively easy to maintain out of the box email applications so I could possibly host a dedicated email VPS. That was proving problematic.

In my research around hosting my own mail on a dedicated VPS I stumbled across someone reviewing a relatively inexpensive email hosting provider. Their annual plans that offered more than what I needed were pretty cheap. What was even more interesting was the fact that they offered a lifetime plan that was only slightly more limited than the annual offering I was looking at. That lifetime plan options was also more than enough for my needs. It was approximately three years worth of hosting upfront to get the lifetime plan however the company seemed to be around for a while and pretty stable. I assume that I could at least get a return on my investment in the first three years. If I am lucky I won’t have to worry about paying for mail hosting for a while beyond that. The email provider was MXRoute.

I set up a few of the email domains that are use already and the system has been pretty stable. The final cut over was moving the mail domain my mum uses and that I sometimes use. The move was pretty easy. The only challenge was setting up mum up while she is in the US and I am in the UK. The fix was getting her to use GMAIL. She had a GMAIL account she previously used already. I just directed her GMAIL account to pull from her old hosting provider I had. I then switched her over to gmail in two FaceTime sessions with her. Then once GMAIL was working I simply changed the POP account settings in GMAIL web for her and migrated the MX records of the domain. Overall there was not may issues.

With mail sorted I went back to the VPS I setup and got my blog setup. I decided to use Yunohost for the VPS. it is an app that sits on top of Debian that lets me administer the server and install other apps pretty easy. it had a one click install for WordPress (what I use for the blog) as well as many other applications. After playing around with the setup for a while I decided to move the blog over and hope for the best. I found a plugin that pretty easily migrated the blog from one instance of WordPress to another. I then changed my DNS and everything moved over pretty well. I am finishing writing this in on 6-April, exactly one month from when I moved over to my VPS. So far things are working fine. Only thing different for me and the old provider so far is that I need to remember to monthly take a backup of the site in case I break something.

Overall my VPS is costing me £24 a year. If I kept site ground that price would not cover 2 months on the regular priced plan I would have to move to when my contract runs out. Now lets hope I do not mess up my setup since I only have myself and friends to fix it vs a provider!

Editing note I wrote this in Feb 2021 and agave been slow to post. Funny enough even though I change my tech setup a lot this post is still accurate a year and a half later.

$8.89 Web Hosting

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Last year when the promotional deal I had for three years of Web hosting was running out I purchased a VPS costing about $24.00 for the year. A VPS, aka Virtual Private Server is a Virtual Machine at a hosting provider that is setup just for you/me. It is a nice playground to let me install use the compute power however I want it. The deal I bought I thought was great. To renew via the traditional hosting plan I had at the time would have run me like £15 a month. I wrote about the crazy costs of web hosting when i purchased the VPS (Virtual private Server) aka a Virtual Machine dedicated for my use at a hosting provider.

I have had really good luck with the VPS and the provider. I even purchased a 2nd more powerful VPS when they had a New Years sale. I use each VPS for different purposes however the one I used for hosting I have used all year. The only slight downside is that its my responsibility to manage and maintain. In a big deal however it is in the back of my head what happens if I have a catastrophic failure. I do have back ups it would be awesome effort to get the system restored. Thanksgiving started rolling around I kept my eye out for new deals for hosting. When Black Friday came around the same provider that offered the VPS deal had a deal for what they call CPANEL hosting for $8.89 a year. Basically that means they were offering a managed hosting package for less money a year than many plans offer for a month. There were some small limitations on the number of domain’s i could link to the account. For a few dollars more i could increase the offering. For my needs the $8.89 plan was just fine. I “splurged” and bought 2 years for less than $18.00.

One thing I like about this provider is when they offer a deal it’s not an introductory one. Meaning I just renewed VPS purchase last year and I feel exactly the same amount for the renewal. This is a refreshing change from pretty much all other mainstream Web hosting providers at the deal the offer is only good the first time you buy it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing out there setup. It has been pretty stable. Anything I have wanted to do i have been able to. Building that confidence today I migrated my mail and blog over to the new hosting. The VPS i have is not going away. I renewed that already for the next year. I will continue to use it for some other apps i host and a few other things however i will entrust my blog to the hosting provider instead of running on my own VM.

And no I cannot tell the difference between the £100+ per year hosting vs the $8.98 a year one. That is what amuses me.

Now lets hope that after writing how things look stable they do not blow up in my face tomorrow.

My Self Hosted Site Is Alive

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If you are reading this then first of all thanks. Second that means my switch to my self hosted server is working (for now). I have a post about the what and why. That story is still being edited however I needed to post something to confirm that if I or anyone see’s this post on the site then you are being routed to the new site. if you do not see this, well then you will have no idea that you are pointing to the old site.

Hosting Changes

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All my thinking about changing domain names led me to another bigger change. For the past few years I have been using wordpress.com to post my blog. Before that I mainly hosted on TypePad for years. in between I played around with movable type, and WordPress. In 2009 my started using WordPress.com it was free, and they offered services cheaper then TypePad if I wanted any. At the time I wasn’t walking a lot and the easy dollars or so year just for bloging seemed like a lot from TypePad. With my recent revival to writing I was making changes to my site. Unfortunately any real changes that I wanted to make on wordpress.com would require several add-on purchases. At that point I looked at the price of a true hosting provider. I signed up for one, only to cancel the trial account within an hour. I then continue to waffle and signed up for another hosting provider. The second provider bluehost.com hey pretty decent rate for a 2 year package. It was pretty simple to set up all my content on the new provider and add both my new domain name and my old one to point to that site.

For the most of the life of my blog I’ve been on TypePad, but I have over the years used several different hosting providers on and off. In recent years using Google apps and other web services for free or small fees having my own hosted account didn’t seem like it was worth it. By simply decreasing my Google apps for business mail quota I was able to go from the paid plan to the free plan. That cost savings alone offsets the price of the new hosting plan per year, so I figured why not give it a try. I like the additional flexibility I can have with my own website. I am already playing around with media wiki again, and some WordPress plug-ins that I could not get on the hosted account.

Having my own FTP account should also come in handy. I can remember at least two or three instances in the past several months that I’ve needed it, most recently two weeks ago.

Now I just have to see if I continue writing to make these changes worth it. I told MC yesterday I would love to be able to carve out 30 minutes night to just sit and write. I always found that pretty therapeutic to do that. It helped me unwind from the day. I just haven’t done it in years. Of course it’s my luck that I decide to really get into this again right before I have a baby. That means pretty much no free time at all. On the flip side it would be nice to have time to document what the baby does, and other milestones. I think years from now that would be nice to have. I always said I like to write for me.

I will see how it goes over the next few weeks.

Trying Moveable Type 4

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I have been continuing to play around with blogging software on my web hosting account. I finally decided to no longer be lazy and try an install of Moveable Type. WordPress is was easy to install on my hosting account because my provider Site5 offers a simple install script that takes about 2 minutes to run. You need to know nothing about linux software installation. I on the other hand know a little (not much but a little) so I decided to stop procrastinating and try the personal edition of Moveable Type. I was surprised at how easy they did make the install from the last time I tried to do it. Of course that was 2 versions and several years ago.

The point is I was able to get the software installed with no major issues. So far it looks good. I am comparing Moveable Type with WordPress, and my currently hosted blog at Typepad. What I am noticing is that Typepad has allot more bells and whistles built in, vs either of the other platforms. For example, the widgets make life easy. Moveable Type & WordPress both have widgets but neither of them are as nice as what Typepad offers. That of course is only my opinion.

The verdict? Well it is probably too early to say, but besides the cost involved in hosting my blog with a service provider like Typepad on top of my normal mail and site hosting I think that Typepad is still better. The major sticking point I have right now is that I cannot use custom themes with the current package I have on Typepad. I don’t really want to pay the extra fee per year to get the ability to use custom theme’s, but I want to play around with them. I am leaning to just trying out the themes I want on the MT4 install I just did, and if I find one I really like I can always pay to upgrade Typepad.

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Hosting Changes Afoot

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It’s September, so that means hosting provider changes! I don’t know why but both my blog hosting service as well as my general website hosting provider were both setup in September. That means annual fee’s are around the corner, so if i want to make changes i have to do it soon. Well Typepad did have an issue about 2 years ago so I now renew in November for them, but my hosting provider Site5 renews in about a week. I need to decide if i want to renew with them for another year or make changes to my hosting services.

I would like to cut back the amount i am paying for web services so i am thinking about alternatives. I like Site5 but my needs have changed over time. I ended up not using their free setups of linux apps like WordPress. I used Gallery for a while but just recently messed up my config and didn’t really use it enough to warrant the expense. With a blog site like this one on Typepad, having another site is a bit redundant especially if i don’t ever update it. Typepad now offers the ability to setup regular pages on my blog so i might create a version of my regular site here. That means i only have to get an email provider and keep Typepad as my main web presence. I have also been thinking of buying Flickr Pro so i can use it like i was going to use the Gallery application. With the cost of the mail hosting, and Flickr Pro, vs regular hosting with Site5 i am saving a few bucks. I am getting less features, but I am getting better functions out of the features I am using, so I am planning my migration away from Site5. The only thing that takes a little thinking is how to move my mail to a new provider without loosing any mail. Fingers crossed.

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Hosting Provider Gone

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So this awesome hosting provider I got is gone. They had a great plan, responsive tech support, etc. The only problem is they didn’t support IMAP4 mail. Their marketing info eluded to them offering it, but in fact support said they didn’t. I canceled my trial account after less than a week. I love that a trial account has your credit card charged right away. At least I got my money back relatively quick.

Right now I am hosting my site on Miguel’s web server. He is in the process of building a new box. Once that is done I can host more of my photo album and move my mail to it. So far it is working out ok, and best of all it is free…

My New Hosting Provider

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I have been self hosting my website and email for several years now. I figure if I can manage websites and email servers for my company I can do it myself. Well it costs some money to make sure that my personal server at home is up and running. I pay for dynamic DNS (don’t have a static address) and I also pay to have backup mail catching (in case my mail server goes down) Both fee’s together are a bit of money, not allot but more than free.

I found a web hosting provider that gives me over a gig of storage for my site, over 400 email address’s and other great stuff all for under $10 a month. I just signed up for a 30 day trial. Paying a host may seem crazy if you do what I do, but it is only a little more than what I am paying to self host now, and I don’t have to worry about keeping my server up and running. Since I have moved, my site has been down since I have been too busy to deal with it. I got it up today, but I don’t want to leave the server plugged in.

Since my dynamic dns and mail storage contracts are up next month I figured now was the time to try out hosting again. a gig of space is double what I need right now. I think I can grow into that for a while. Also the provider I am trying out is a Cnet editors choice. I like Cnet so I will take their recommendation. Hopefully things work out. For now my blog will stay where it is.

Once I am settled into my new provider I will also clean up my site. I hope to play around with some more fireworks pages, or some flash. This is all time permitting.