Hosting for beginner

[William]

I currently have a legacy 500MB hosting plan with Tsohost, having originally signed up with Evohosting, which was taken over by Tso.

I currently have a domain name, and am training via LinkedIn Learning to get enough know-how to create my lifestyle blog. I also like the idea of creating additional sites to experiment with. Unlimited sites/unlimited storage starts at £86.26/pa inc VAT. https://www.tsohost.com/web-hosting

From searching the group, I see this company has been recommended. https://www.34sp.com/order-wordpress

Although I respect the principle of 'you get what you pay for', I'm wondering if 34sp might be overkill for hobby site with what will likely be hardly any traffic.

What do people suggest, given my circumstances? Thanks in advance for your help!

[Mike Little]

Hi William,

I had a quick look at tsohost and I can say I am not  particularly impressed.  

Their advertising for "WordPress hosting" claims it is "Fully Managed" but it has the same features as their normal hosting, and their FAQ explicitly explains why YOU should keep your WordPress site up to date. This implies they won't do it for you. 

Hosting companies like 34SP who do provide real WordPress-specific hosting, will keep your WordPress and plugins up to date for you. 

Tsohost also charge for basic ssl certificates (though 50% off for the 1st year) which all hosts can now offer for free.

Tsohost also mention in their FAQ around WordPress that adding multiple WordPress sites in your account can be insecure. This tells me they do not isolate the different websites on your account, so they are correct they do not provide a secure way to host more than one site on the same account.

34SP provide containerised WordPress hosting which means your different sites are isolated from each other securely.

34sp do provide the ability to create a staging site (initially a copy of your live site) to experiment with.

If you really are stuck budget wise, GoDaddy do managed WordPress hosting from 6.99 per site per month (first year is 2.99)

Oh, and regardless of who the hosting company are, I would never take a "free" domain name from them. Often, you only get to keep your free domain name if you keep hosting with them. A domain name is pretty much the only thing you own on the internet, everything else (hosting, storage, email service, etc.) is rented. Don't give away control of that.

Best regards,

Mike

-- 

Mike Little

WordPress Specialist

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[Andreas Andrews]

Mike, your comments about Tsohost and also free domains are incredibly useful. I've asked about hosting before and you've highlighted things I've overlooked.

I also love love love everything I've read on 34SP's website about what they offer, and also all the interesting info about their ethos, staff, history and social impact as a company (if that counts for anything - which to me it really does make an impact even if I'm mostly deciding on cost, speed, security, support and stats)

Anyways, I fear that I'm waffling without really inputting all that much.

Interesting you should mention Go Daddy, as a few of my clients have domains with them so I have a free Go Daddy Pro account just for easy management. Their hosting offerings came up reccommended in a fairly reputable publisher's article (I can't remember which I've looked at so many 'best hosting' lists lately). I had written them off as a company to use as I read about them being notorious domain squatters and that people should not ever enter domains they are thinking of registering on their search forms as they might find they suddenly get bought and then offered at a much higher price. I've never seen any evidence of this, but it does make me weary of where I do domain lookups. An interesting topic for discussion perhaps, although totally off-topic.

Anyways, I would love to discuss hosting more (with you or anyone else) and I'll see you on Wednesday so I'll stop waffling on... for now....

Looking forward to it, it's been ages!

[metaceptive]

Hi William,

I have a TSO-host package as a legacy package via what was Vidahost, and also I have a Krystal hosting package.  I can't recommend Krystal enough, and I am moving my TSO sites over to Krystal and ending my TSO hosting.  Krystal's starter package 'Amethyst' will be £48 per year incl. vat, check them at:  https://krystal.uk/cloud-hosting#headerplans

Their support is good, and their 'Installatron' can be set up to keep backups of your site and to automatically apply updates in the way you specify - pretty close to managed hosting IMO.

Krystal are also carbon-neutral 'plus', which at least for me is important too.

Hope that's of some use.

Kooj

[William]

Thanks ffor taking the time, Mike! I will likely defer to you on this one and give Tsohost a miss! Although not confident in deciphering the hosting spec, one other thing that jumped out at me with 34SP is that their 1-site container comes with 1.25GB RAM, versus 512MB for the entry level hosting elsewhere.

Tsohost also mention in their FAQ around WordPress that adding multiple WordPress sites in your account can be insecure. This tells me they do not isolate the different websites on your account, so they are correct they do not provide a secure way to host more than one site on the same account.

Does this same caveat apply to 34SP 5-site and 10-site container hosting? If a client comes to you for a basic site, do you set them up with their own individual one site container from 34SP? If so, where does 5-site/10-site container hosting come into play? While we are at it, does the pop-out text under Security>Unique Account Isolation on this page sound plausible? https://www.siteground.com/features/wordpress-hosting.htm

34SP provide containerised WordPress hosting which means your different sites are isolated from each other securely.

34sp do provide the ability to create a staging site (initially a copy of your live site) to experiment with.

Sounds good. However, I guess I am used to having the ability to create as many MS Word or Excel documents as I like. Whereas what you describe sees me restricted to one site plus staging for experimentation with reference to that site. Which begs the (slightly theoretical) question of what if one had a couple of dozen experimental sites - what would be the best practice cheap way to do that? I have Desktop Server installed, which I understand allows me to develop up to three local sites for free. Might one go for 1-container hosting from 34SP for each 'serious' site, and then a cheap, potentially insecure 'unlimited sites' hosting from somewhere else?

If you really are stuck budget wise, GoDaddy do managed WordPress hosting from 6.99 per site per month (first year is 2.99)

So is the right way to do it on the cheap to buy cheaper one-site hosting? Must be convenient to simply hand over a login to the client if they want to develop the site themselves or switch to hiring another web developer.

Oh, and regardless of who the hosting company are, I would never take a "free" domain name from them. Often, you only get to keep your free domain name if you keep hosting with them. A domain name is pretty much the only thing you own on the internet, everything else (hosting, storage, email service, etc.) is rented. Don't give away control of that.

I bought my domain name separately, thanks. But I will take this as a heads-up to do some more research to ensure that I maintain control of the domain, as the stakes increase over time, as the site hopefully grows.

[William]

Hi Kooj,

Thanks for sharing your experience of Tsohost versus Krystal. Krystal does look good, and cheaper than Tsohost. I wonder how much use people actually get out of Tsohost 100GB storage on the basic plan and unlimited storage & sites on the more expensive plans. No point in paying for stuff you're never going to use! Carbon-neutral is very nice in its own right, and also a good sign that they are ethical and not cutting corners.

[Andreas Andrews]

Hi,

I've looked into Tsohost & 34SP and even more so with Krystal (a client uses them and I have looked into them very heavily and started testing them out a little) and I have so many questions and things to also say from my research and experience so far (whether using or looking into or just chatting with various providers). I would love to discuss things further, but I'm also quite unsure about a lot of things so I'm a bit hesitant to say too much. I do have a very strong opinion about one thing and that is what I think about the green offerings of said providers:

I like the fact that Krystal use Netwise as their datacentre which is powered by renewable energy from Ecotricity (an energy provider that I am at least aware of and have seen visibly doing good things, such as providing green free phone charging stations at Womad festival) however I'm not sure if that means that Krystal is carbon neutral as a business, I'd argue it's very likely far from it. I also would say that it doesn't necessarily mean they are ethical as a business just because they hire servers and space in a datacentre that happens to be run on clean energy. To know how ethical they are you'd need to know whether they decided to use that datacentre for that specific reason or whether it was just a bonus to them which they can then use to sell their hosting.

In terms of ethical providers and trying to be objective here I think that the only evidence I've seen of a real care and duty towards doing something ethical and also making a concerted effort to reduce the impacts of climate change is evident in what I've read on the website of 34SP. The datacentre runs on renewable energy (like many others) however they also are commmitted to planting trees and working with The Woodland Carbon project. As you can read on their website if they plant 7,500 sq. m. of trees every year that is the equivalent of removing 300 tons of carbon from the atmosphere - more than double of what the hosting infrastructure creates. To me that is a better display of ethics than simply hiring a datacentre which runs on clean energy but which has potentially needed to use so much of the planet's limited resources in order to build not only the infrastructre but also means to create the renewable energy (shipping all the materials around the world in the growing renewable energy industry which I'm pretty sure is big business and full of controversy and ignorance). I personally don't know enough about the renwable energy industry to make a proper conclusion, but I do love trees.

[metaceptive]

@Andreas Andrews - great others are looking into this. 

I'm no expert either!! I do notice Krystal also says this:  "Going beyond our direct business operations we also offer an incentive scheme for our staff to help them make the switch to 100% renewable energy supplies at home, with the aim of actively contributing to the reduction in domestic carbon usage." 

And also this:  In addition to minimising the carbon output of both our business operations and our staff’s energy usage at home, we’re proud to be making regular direct donations to Trees for Life, a charity based in Scotland working to rewild the highlands with natural forests. Rather than simply planting rows and rows of uniform carbon-capturing but otherwise ecologically destructive trees, Trees for Life is a long-term effort to restore and extend natural forest habitats providing both a carbon sink and a healthy wildlife ecosystem. 5,120 trees planted in our grove maintained by Trees for Life".

Do you think that stacks up at all?

[Andreas Andrews]

Hi Kooj,

I had not really scrutinised the Krystal website well enough evidently as I did not realise they are also commited to working with a partner to plant trees and also in a specific way. That is really good news! I glanced at the Trees for Life website and they look like a fantastic conservationist who are also re-introducing red squirrels which sounds good. I'm digressing away from hosting a tad now, however thanks for pointing this out. I think all my ramblings about ethics are perhaps moot then in that case.

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I'm happier about trailling Krystal.

I hope to discuss speed, security, features, cost a bit more sometime. Happy to also relay my experiences and any data I gather.

I'm really excited to just start trying out Vultr in the next few days for a live project for a friend to be honest at low cost and I have no idea about their ethics, but love everything else I've seen about Vultr VPS on a London server (specifically the cost, paying per minute, ease for WP, speed and security) A.