jb2448.info web host transfer update
I thought that I should make an update regarding the transfer of jb2448.info from Bluehost to a better web host. At first, we were pretty excited about FastComet (which was our go to host), but, as I would learn as I kept researching hosting options, there is no such thing as “unlimited” hosting, especially on a shared server where many customers share server resources. It’s just a marketing pitch that pretty much every web host uses, and the web host will deactiveate the site if it impacts the performance of other sites on the shared server negatively due to heavy load. The site, which consumes about 1 TB bandwidth per month, was too much for FastComet’s shared hosting to handle. Actually, it’s too much to handle for almost every shared hosting plan of all of the web hosts I looked at. The best solution is to get a VPS, a virtual private server. That gives the site a lot more resources, provided that the right virtualization type is chosen for the VPS. At FastComet, a VPS that could handle the site would have cost $79.95 (~74.5€) / month, so that was out of the question. Back to searching.
That’s when I remembered that a bunch of techies on IRC had recommended Scaleway, which would have charged 15.99€ (~$17) per month for hosting the site on a dedicated bare metal server. They build their own servers to keep down costs and are backed by Online.net, which is the second largest hosting company in France. That is why they are so crazy cheap. So, having a dedicated physical server for just 15.99€ per month with the option of adding 50-150 GB partitions of SSD storage for 1€ per 50 GB sounded great. We started setting up the server, but after a while I found out the catch with Scaleway, and there are many: The servers are made of sub-par components and don’t perform to what is expected of the server specs; also, their transfer speeds are slower than their competitors. SSDs are not physically attached to the servers, but instead are attached via a network, so they are slower than what they would be otherwise. No RAID, so if the SSD dies, there won’t be any way to recover the data. Minimal to no support, which is to be expected when it comes to VPS hosting (since it is kind of a self-service business), but you’d expect that they’d at least be able to get servers back online again after server downtime (and you'd expect them to have better customer service in general). The general consensus on Reddit seems to be to not use Scaleway for hosting anything important or resource intensive. I should have researched them more throughly and not just trusted techies on IRC, so the Scaleway sidetrack is my fault.
The search for a good and decently priced VPS provider continues, and I actually found two potential candidates:
Hetzner is the largest web host in Germany and hosting with them would cost 23.68€ (~$25.4) per month for their vServer CX40 VPS. However, support there is minimal to non-existent, with the only guarantee basically being that they’ll keep the server online.
BuyVM is a web host with a great reputation on Reddit, LowEndTalk, other web hosting forums, and the Internet in general, and while it is generally not a VPS provider’s job to help beyond keeping the server online, they will help with stuff like installing software if asked. Hosting would cost $30 (28€) per month for their dedicated SLICE 8192 VPS server. Another very nice detail about them is the offshore hosting that their Luxembourg data center offers. The Luxembourg data center does not care about DMCA notices, since DMCA doesn’t apply in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is also one of the eight best countries in Europe to host websites in from a privacy standpoint (the other ones are Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, and Romania). The SSD is 160 GB, so it is 40 GB smaller than Hetzner’s 200 GB SSD, but it should be enough for hosting the site. Right now, it looks like the site is moving to a BuyVM VPS server in Luxembourg.
Now we will have to rebuild the site on BuyVM’s VPS server, which will take a while. Stay tuned.