Web Hosting suggestions

Antwan

Member
I'm currently having trouble with hosting on an 'old server, we dont sell packages for'. I think they want me to move over the newer servers/packages so there support appears non existant at the moment.

So where would you recommend for mysql, cgi, pearl etc.. and bamdwidth between 4 and 30Gb depending what Im using it for at the time.

All suggestions welcome, I currently pay ?25 per year for unlimited bandwidth and 25Gb of space
 

Mike Hopley

New member
If you're comfortable administering your own server, I would recommend Digital Ocean.

Slightly more expensive than dirt-cheap shared hosting, but fast, reliable, and flexible.

Then again, if it's just for a little "brochure site", VPS might be overkill.
 

Mike Hopley

New member
paul said:

Not wanting to be bitchy or anything, but...

BCA is absolutely the last organisation I would consider as a web host or domain registrar. It's simply not their business, and I would have no faith in their ability to provide a good service. They are a caving organisation, not a web host.

I'm sure there are clever & technical people involved. But they cannot be working full-time on this. It's a little side-project.

There are so many good, professional web hosts; why would you choose an option that will inevitably be amateurish?
 

Badlad

Administrator
Staff member
The following report by Matt Wire of the BCA web team was put before BCA council in March.  I've lifted it straight from the publicly available minutes from BCA's web site.  It throws light on the comments above and shows BCA are developing a strategy to deal with the problems.

"Report on the Future of BCA IT

BCA currently has a loosely formed group of volunteers who look after some of the BCA IT
services. There are no central records of what those services are, or what they do.

IT services have moved from being a useful addition to an essential part of BCA?s business,
without which it would struggle to function. The expectation that IT services will continue to
function and will not break is reasonable for an organisation like the BCA but not reasonable
to expect that level of service to be maintained by volunteers.

Core BCA IT services:

Website, databases, email etc.

These services currently share hosting with all of BCA?s webservices customers which means
that any issues with a webservices account or a BCA core service can impact on each other,
and configuration changes also impact on each other.

Currently a mixture of services hosted on british-caving.org.uk and caves.org.uk. Bespoke
software development by Cookie and David Gibson to manage different parts of our
membership and other functions. If David Gibson, Cookie or myself are unavailable we have
no-one who is prepared to support those systems and no-one we can call on commercially.

WebServices:

Providing web hosting and support for customers (mostly caving organisations).
I do not believe that BCA should continue to offer this for the following reasons:

1. Support requirements: We are not in a position to offer support in a timely manner.
If Cookie and myself go away for a month and an issue arises requiring more than a
server reboot there is noone who can resolve it.
2. Security / Liabilities: Maintaining the security and keeping software up to date is
something that needs continuous validation and regular checking. We do not have
those kind of resources available.
3. What benefit is it to BCA and their hosting customers when very similar commercial
packages are available for very little extra cost? (Packages with more features,
including support are available for ?29 per year from reliable UK based providers,
the basic package from BCA is ?25 per year).
4. Do BCA actually make anything out of the service for the hundreds of hours spent by
volunteers running it? No, we actually make a loss. In the 2015 accounts a loss of
?396 was recorded, in 2014 a profit of ?28 was recorded.
5. BCA should concentrate on caving matters not be running a hosting company.
6. Software versions: Outdated software that we do not have the volunteer resources to
update. One server is still running PHP software that went end of life 6 years ago.
There are many other software packages which have not had necessary security
updates, some dating back to 2009.

Some of the issues that have taken a significant amount of my time:

? December 2016: One of our hosted accounts had a password compromised and was
being used to relay spam for at least six weeks.
? January 2017 BCA Meeting: A number of people on committee report they are not
receiving council-list emails.
? February/March 2017: british-caving.org.uk (and other hosted domains). Lot?s of
email going into black holes, being rejected by providers (not unique to BCA, this has
affected many many email services and mailing lists). This was the cause of councillist
emails going astray. Resolution causes necessary breakage to some mailing lists
and no longer allows sending email via non-BCA servers.

Proposals for BCA:

1. BCA accepts in principal that we need to pay for our core IT services and for support
thereof. - The IT working party will then develop a plan as to how this might work in
practise.
1.1.BCA agrees an initial budget of ?20-?40 per month to host BCA?s core IT
services, independently of BCA WebServices. - Allowing the IT working party to
separate the two so they are not reliant on each other.
2. BCA agrees that we should no longer be offering Web Hosting as we cannot support
it and there are now suitable commercial alternatives. - The IT Working party will
then develop an exit strategy."
 

Cookie

New member
It's good to see fellow officers supporting the work they each do!

Matt was very new to the roll when he wrote that. Most of it is rubbish.
 

Mike Hopley

New member
Cookie said:
Mike, if you believe that, you don't understand how it works.

Fair enough. How does it work, then?

If you're reselling, then whose service are you reselling? Who do I call/email for customer or technical support? Is there a full-time support team with a guaranteed response time?

What about security? Do you have people watching the latest exploits and immediately patching the servers?


One server is still running PHP software that went end of life 6 years ago.

This is an example of why I would not trust BCA to provide web hosting.


2. BCA agrees that we should no longer be offering Web Hosting as we cannot support
it and there are now suitable commercial alternatives. - The IT Working party will
then develop an exit strategy."

That seems wise to me.
 

Mark Wright

Active member
Cookie said:
It's good to see fellow officers supporting the work they each do!

Matt was very new to the roll when he wrote that. Most of it is rubbish.

So are you suggesting that the best way to support fellow officers in the work they each do is to say that most of what a professional website designer has to say about web hosting and associated services is a load of rubbish?

I think I have to agree with Matt Wire and Mike Hopley, lets stick to caving.

Mark
 

Antwan

Member
ChrisB said:
Back to the original question. I use http://www.wiserhosting.com/ and the service is good. But ?24/year gets you 500Mb space and 20GB/month bandwidth, which is tiny compared with the OP's current service:
I currently pay ?25 per year for unlimited bandwidth and 25Gb of space

It might be, but I no longer have a 'cloud' running parrallel to the website and I have had multiple support tickets open for 6 days now without a response.... so I guess speed and reliability are a bit more important now
 

Mike Hopley

New member
Antwan said:
It might be, but I no longer have a 'cloud' running parrallel to the website and I have had multiple support tickets open for 6 days now without a response.... so I guess speed and reliability are a bit more important now

If you are looking for managed (shared) hosting, as most people are, I recommend Site5. They have excellent support; I was with them for years before I moved on to unmanaged VPS with Digital Ocean. They cost ~?64 a year.

Don't judge a web host on bandwidth or storage space. That's almost irrelevant. Judge them on overall service. Personally, I would actively avoid (managed) hosting that costs less than ?5 a month!

Very cheap hosting often makes your website slow, because they cram too many clients (websites) onto one server, and don't monitor resource usage properly. On a previous cheap, overloaded web host, my pages were taking ~30 -- 60 seconds to load.

Also, remember that big files can be kept elsewhere, on a CDN. For example, I would not serve videos or lots of large images directly from my web hosting. Offloading them to a CDN improves performance, reduces the load on your server, and reduces your web hosting storage/bandwidth usage to practically nothing.

Some CDNs are free. For example, YouTube.
 

langcliffe

Well-known member
I have used http://www.penguin-uk.com for the past 15 years. They are cheap enough for my requirements, and they keep the server environment up to date. Their support is superb. They supply all the various CMS and utility packages.
 

Antwan

Member
At this moment in time, anyone with a phone number will do!

Going to give Krystal a try as they seem to know what there doing when I had a chat to them on the phone and the ?1 trial seems reasonable

My problem now is getting the ISP tag changed by a comapany that seemingly has no support staff and a registered address in a 'Registered address' company.

Looking at the Director history for xtreme it ltd is interesting though, shows this guy as a director for a few months before resigning and the guy that was the original director back in 1994 re taking the reigns, he has had 3879 director appointments. I wonder what his job is?

Oh and by the way I was with this hosting company back in 1998 when they were based in doncaster and had a pretty good download speed on dial up! they have since gone way down hill to everyone racking up 1 star reviews for them.

Mike, I don't need blazing speed as neither sites are 'the day job' but many thanks for your advice, I only have two clients now for websites as I have become too busy to do a great job for the previous and they have found other companies to take over there websites or I would have probably moved everything over to a VPS.

Thanks for all the advice guys
 

Mike Hopley

New member
Going to give Krystal a try as they seem to know what there doing when I had a chat to them on the phone and the ?1 trial seems reasonable

Yeah, I think that's sensible; the fact that you were able to call them up is reassuring.

Also I'm very much coming at this from a perspective of "my website is my job", which is overkill for most people. Plus having been burned in the past probably means I'm a little paranoid. So my recommendations may be somewhat heavy-handed.


My problem now is getting the ISP tag changed by a comapany that seemingly has no support staff and a registered address in a 'Registered address' company.

Just a suggestion for the future:

Never use your web host company for your domain too. It might seem convenient, but it gives them too much power over you.

Good luck transferring your domain. I would recommend that you transfer it to a registrar who is independent from your hosting. I use Hover.
 

Cookie

New member
@Mark, you're putting words in my mouth.

But rather than get into a tit for tat let me give you the history and rational behind BCA Web Services.

Web Services started in 2004 just before BCA became into existance. Lest it be accused of being old fashioned and irrelevent having a website was essential. In fact BCA hosts and pays for many websites which now include BCA, BCRA, Cave Registry & Archive, Caving Library, Try Caving, Ghar Parau, several of the Regional Councils and Access Bodies and several of the rescue organisations.

At the time shared hosting was expensive and poorly featured. For that many websites it was cost effective to purchase one virtual server (VPS) to host all the sites. Another benefit is that it would also give BCA complete control over the server as though they owned the hardware. So for example shell access is possible. For example we could install SVN, essential for the cave registry and archive site. Krystal is a good offering, but even they won't install server-side software like SVN for you! We can solve our own problems rather than relying on third party support (although 3rd party support is available).

As I said, hosting at the time was expensive and poorly featured. Once you have a VPS it is very little extra work to host other domains. It was an obvious step to offer hosting to the clubs. They would benefit from cheap hosting and more features than available at the time, such as databases, unlimited email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, cPanel, mailing lists, etc, etc. The more who sign up the cheaper it would become because Web Services has never been run to make a profit. BCA would benefit because it would help defray the costs of the VPS. Win win.

The webservers are hosted with the award winning memset.com. So the servers are professional managed and maintained. They run cPanel (as per Krystal) which patches itself and the server daily. We have access to Memset for support issues but on average there is less than 1 support call per year. The servers are extremely reliable (>99.99%).

What is available in the market now, 13 years later, has improved on both price and features but BCA's offering is still extremely good value for money. For a typical club website we are cheaper than Krystal at ?25/year + domain at ?6/year (cf ?36 + ?10.50).

On support we are up front that it is provided by volunteers and won't be quite as immediate as a company like Krystal. That's the deal. In practice I get a club support query about once a month accross more than 50 odd sites hosted. It really is that reliable.

Much as I'd like to just go caving, BCA does need an IT service for internal and external reasons. Since the it has to be done anyway, if we can provide our members with a useful service at very little extra effort, why not?
 

Mike Hopley

New member
Thanks Cookie for the explanation.


Another benefit is that it would also give BCA complete control over the server as though they owned the hardware. So for example shell access is possible. For example we could install SVN, essential for the cave registry and archive site.

A good shared host will provide shell access (example) and software like SVN (example). Of course, there will be some restrictions on software.

BTW I am not criticising your decision to go VPS, I use one myself! ;)


The webservers are hosted with the award winning memset.com. So the servers are professional managed and maintained.

If I'm reading this right, you are using an unmanaged VPS from Memset, so BCA is responsible for administering the server software, and memset are responsible for the hardware.


They run cPanel (as per Krystal) which patches itself and the server daily.

Hmmm. I'm no security guru, but I'm surprised cPanel patches would be sufficient. Does that patch kernel vulnerabilities, for example (which have cropped up recently)?

A managed host will be on top of those really fast. For unmanaged, I like security as a service, which achieves a similar level of robustness.


On support we are up front that it is provided by volunteers and won't be quite as immediate as a company like Krystal. That's the deal.

...and that would be the sticking point for me. I would always advise people to prioritise support rather than the cheapest possible price. However, as you point out, it has worked okay for many BCA-hosted sites so far. Maybe I'm being too picky; simpler sites may not need much technical support.


BCA does need an IT service for internal and external reasons. Since the it has to be done anyway, if we can provide our members with a useful service at very little extra effort, why not?

I can see the appeal, especially now you've explained how it works. As long as it's not costing BCA much/anything, where's the harm?

On the other hand, I don't think it achieves much. Clubs might save ?5 a year with BCA hosting, compared to (say) Krystal. In return, they get much worse support and probably less well managed servers.
 
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