Tag: Siteground

Tentatively recommending DreamHost

On: By: Mark

(If you decide to buy DreamHost hosting, please use my affiliate link. This way I earn a commission. You won’t pay extra.)

Hosting is changing

The world of hosting has been changing, and often not for the better (at least from the perspective of hosting customers). As I noted in this post, many hosts are getting gobbled up by other firms, usually Wall Street firms looking to maximize profits by consolidating hosts, cutting services and maybe raising prices.

Another big trend is to go virtual. GoDaddy, for example, is moving into Amazon’s cloud. That certainly saves the expense of managing their own hosting centers and paying a hosting staff. More recently, the same is true with Siteground, which I have been using for a few years, which is going into Google’s cloud. Siteground has also raised prices rather substantially, hoping most clients will opt for inertia. For its shared hosting, Siteground keeps an eagle eye on resources you are using and will quickly complain if you go over these resources.

So I’ve been looking for acceptable alternatives, always aware to not to put too much faith in my web host of the moment, since there’s a good chance they’ll get bought out, raise prices, reduce staff or do all of these things. I tend to be irritated by hosts that provide generally incompetent support staff, obscure really important features like limits on disk space or outgoing emails, or who raise prices way beyond the rise in inflation.

A week spent in GoDaddy support hell

I thought GoDaddy had been improving in general. Going virtual wasn’t necessarily bad if the cloud provider can provide greater speed and reliability. But this month I got caught up with a client using GoDaddy which suggested they were reverting to old habits. It might have been because his board was on an old machine that hadn’t transitioned to the cloud yet. The support experience with GoDaddy though was just horrible.

His plan was so old it only supported PHP 5. There was no migration path to PHP 7 except to buy a new plan, and they couldn’t be bothered to help him move his gigabytes of files from the old to the new hosting, or transition the database. Not that we didn’t try. Downloading and uploading files from home is generally a painful, tedious and slow experience. The volume of files was large and the uploading was very tedious because his ISP severely limits upload speeds. It took days.

On the back end I was busy trying to upgrade his board and get that working. The shared hosting timed out exporting a database and timed out uploading it too. I tried all sorts of tricks to get it to work and upgraded the database on my machine since the upgrade scripts would time out due to resource caps. This went on for more than a week.

DreamHost turned out to be reasonably dreamy

Eventually I recommended he get rid of GoDaddy. But where to go? I sent him to DreamHost.

I had a good impression of DreamHost based solely on a seminar I attended at a Boston Wordcamp in 2019. In the seminar the speaker talked about how they fended off lawsuits by the Trump Administration to monitor their servers, and succeeded. I asked my peers about DreamHost and the reviews were generally positive. Still you don’t know until you try.

Was rehosting with DreamHost a wonderful experience? Overall it was pretty good, but it had its quirks. Like most hosts they offer various kinds of hosting, and the client chose the shared hosting plan. Loading his database on DreamHost, it timed out there too with resource limitations, but I was able to work around the problem. His database is nearly a gigabyte in size. Essentially I figured out where it failed (in the middle of populating the phpbb_posts table) and created an extract of the rest of the database. That got the rest of it. I’m just glad I have a text editor that can handle really big files (BBEdit, BTW).

Their tech support was responsive, helpful and reasonably quick. One thing I liked was that they didn’t have explicit quotas on database sizes and overall file sizes. That was important for this customer. Looking through the fine print of the hosting plan, I saw only one red flag: there was a limit of 100 outgoing emails per hour. That didn’t matter for this customer. It looked like a good fit.

Curiously my hosting plan with Siteground was up for renewal, so I took the plunge myself buying their multi-site shared hosting plan. Siteground wanted about $300/year, and this initial 3-year DreamHost contract was about $142, which is a huge savings. This got me more into the weeds.

The good:

  • It’s a very good value. Naturally new customers get a discount. Mine is $3.95/month for three years (my contract) which is a great value if they can maintain the same level of service. The discount is 72%, so the non-discounted price is probably $12.95/month. This gives me unlimited storage, bandwidth and databases, making it a good deal if you have to store lots of stuff online. However, it is shared hosting so it’s not appropriate for highly trafficked sites.
  • Technical support was reasonably quick, responsive and helpful, and I threw a lot of issues at them.
  • Moving WordPress sites is easy. They offer a plugin you put on your old host. You enter the WordPress username and password and wait. It does the work for you.
  • It’s easy and quick to set up free Let’s Encrypt certificates. But you have to wait until the DNS transfers to DreamHost. (There’s no way for any host to get around this.) So for a short period of time there will be certificate errors.
  • End to end solid state hosting. This speeds up rendering of web pages and makes the hosting more reliable.

The bad:

  • While tech support was good, they are based on the USA West Coast, and they work standard hours. It doesn’t appear that support is available outside of this window, although it is available seven days a week.
  • 100 emails per hour is pretty skimpy. Anything over that just doesn’t get sent and won’t go into a queue for sending later.
  • Testing your domain can be confusing. Your database server will have a subdomain like mysql.mysite.com but until the DNS transfers over the only way to test it with a database is to configure the database server’s IP address. (This was a problem with phpBB, but not with WordPress thanks to their plugin.) Otherwise modifying the local hosts file worked for testing. So you really need to remember that the server’s IP could change, so after the domain moves you should go back and replace the IP with the subdomain name.
  • Their support system has no way to reply to a ticket, as best I can tell. So I coped by entering a new ticket with the same subject line.

The weird and unusual:

  • No cPanel. They rolled their own control panel and it’s not the most intuitive. For example, it’s unintuitive to go to Domains > Manage websites to manage a website. Most hosts cleanly split domain functionality from web hosting.
  • For each domain or subdomain you get a separate set of SSH and FTP credentials. Keeping these organized is a bit of a challenge!

If you can deal with these oddities, DreamHost may be for you. It is for me, presumably for the next three years at least! It does appear to be a very good value.

December 2020 work summary

On: By: Mark

My books aren’t quite closed yet on 2020, but 2020 was at least a good year for me and this business. I am unlikely to see a repeat next year.

Much of the new income was from one commercial client and the work there is slowing down. So I expect less revenue in 2021. But what a nice year it was! I nearly doubled my income from 2019. Normally I’d have spent a good portion of it, but with the pandemic there was no place to spend it. It normally goes toward fancy vacations (like a trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos in 2019), but this year except for a short cruise right before the pandemic hit in earnest, we had no choice but to vacation at home. My phpBB consulting is ideal work during a pandemic, as it is all done from home safely over the Internet. So thank you to all who trusted me with your forums in 2020 and kept me very much in the black.

Otherwise, my work in December was kind of slow because there wasn’t much to bill the one commercial client although curiously they did give me a $250 bonus! I enjoyed the downtime, but I also gave back to the community. Both my digests and filter by country extensions had new releases in December. More importantly I continue to work on a Spamremover extension, which finds spam using the Akismet web service. I had nothing to release yet, but I am getting close to a release.

Other work in December:

  • Worked with a client using my digests extension on Siteground hosting. Subscribers stopped getting digests. I helped the client set the email settings properly to match Siteground’s SMTP server but afterward there were still issues. It turned out that digests weren’t going out because no cron job was set up. It may have disappeared when Siteground moved him to a new server and they didn’t replicate his digests cron job. After finally getting into Siteground with the client’s help, I was able to set up a new phpBB cron which seems to work.
  • Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.3.1 to 3.3.2. Also added markup to display a favicon.
  • Upgraded a major client’s board from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.3.2. There are many customizations to phpBB 3.2.2 that had to be carried over in phpBB 3.3.2. I first did an upgrade to the test environment to work out any kinks, then a month or so later did a production upgrade to the board. All appears to be okay. I had to change the owner of the /cache/production folder to get rid of a HTTP 500 error. Later, I chased lots of styling issues, mainly on the view topic page and related to mobile display.
  • Issue with too many login attempts during admin login. I reset the number of password attempts using SQL and provided him with the SQL I used. But it didn’t work. I tried to delete the cache manually using FTP but didn’t have permissions in the twig folder. Also, CAPTCHA would not come up even though a message said to solve the CAPTCHA. Had to give my account (and his too) founder permissions. Later I realized there was a simpler solution: use phpBB’s lost password feature. The CAPTCHA issue I figured out was likely a bug in phpBB, so I submitted a problem report. It turns out that if a CAPTCHA is used, allow_url_fopen is false and the CAPTCHA is validated with a post request, the error will occur. A HTTP GET request though won’t have an issue. This is a bug in phpBB that needs fixing.
  • A phpBB 3.2 board that can’t be upgraded had emailing issues. Test emails went out okay. Could not get SMTP to work for sending email. I suggested talking with the client’s web host to see if they are blocking “spammy” looking outgoing emails. Later, I added ACP Add User extension, which apparently was what he really needed.
  • Updated a board from phpBB from 3.3.0 to 3.3.2, and my digests extension from 3.3.1 to 3.3.3. No surprises, just slow FTP and I couldn’t find cPanel credentials that worked. Later, I updated Cleantalk to version 5.7.3.
  • Upgraded forum from phpBB 3.0.x to 3.3.2. No issues during upgrade. Most of the work was trying to replicate the styling to give a similar look. It’s quite close. Created a custom style that inherits from the Elegance SoftBlue style. Copied over two templates. Installed reCaptcha V3 but registrations aren’t allowed. I disabled the contact form. I changed PHP to version 7.4 and set allow_url_fopen to true. Later, I added an extension to add next and previous post buttons inside a topic. I also moved the post edit controls from top right corner to bottom right of the post. I expanded width of content window from what it was before (980px) to the default 1152px.
  • Troubleshooting. Too many SQL connections error. I gave advice on the general issue and what causes it, and suggested Cleantalk’s spam firewall service if the issue is due to malicious robots (to keep spammers off the site), but first to look at traffic for the main domain and see if general increased usage was the cause. As requested, I repaired and optimized all database tables for the board. Last I heard the too many SQL connections problem was still an issue. The client’s hosting is Bluehost. I’ve seen this before on Bluehost. In my opinion, their shared servers do not allow enough resources for reasonable shared usage. I’d avoid hosting with Bluehost if you have a choice.
  • Upgraded a board from version 3.2.2 to 3.3.2. Updated the stop forum spam extension to version 1.3.10 and NavBar search extension to version 3.2.4. I created a custom style “custom” and put style changes there and made it the default. I changed PHP from version 5.6 to 7.4. No issues during upgrade.
  • Troubleshooting. Investigating why images and phpBB Gallery extension was taking up so much space. Primary issue was that the old gallery was copies from a /gallery_old folder. Suggested changing Gallery JPEG compression to 85% to match phpBB’s attachment settings.

Siteground hosting sale September 2 – 8

On: By: Mark

If you are looking to rehost your site, you might want to take advantage of a Siteground web hosting shared server sale coming up. The event begins September 2, 2019 and lasts through September 8, 2019. I use Siteground’s shared hosting to host this site.

While I like Siteground, it doesn’t make sense for everyone. In particular, before you move to Siteground’s shared hosting make sure that your databases are not too big. There are limits from 400MB to 1GB on the size of your databases, depending on the plan you choose. More details are on my rehosting page.

Also, in fairness I should note that Siteground recently raised their prices. Their GoGeek plan, their most feature-laden shared hosting plan, used to be about $20/month regular price and is now $34.95/month. However, they are a quality shared host, which is a rarity in their business. To maintain their completely solid state infrastructure means they need more revenue that hosts that still use slower disk drives.

New customers get a first year discount anyhow of $3.95/month, $5.95/month or $11.95 depending on whether you choose the StartUp, GrowBig or GoGeek plan. This represents a first year discount of between 66% and 70%.

During the sale, the GoGeek plan is discounted to $7.95/month for the first year, a savings of 77%.

Siteground will rehost you for free if you choose the GrowBig or GoGeek plan.

If you decide to sign up during the sales period, please be kind and use my affiliate link. You won’t pay anything extra and I will earn a commission.

You can see more details on their shared hosting plans and limitations here.

Your web host may be virtual

On: By: Mark

Introduction

I recently wrote a post about putting phpBB in the Google Cloud. I learned that it’s not too hard to do if you have decent technical skills or even if they are more modest. There could be some serious upsides to putting your forum in a cloud like Google’s, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. (There are other cloud vendors out there.) These could include lower costs, higher uptime, and scalability if you forum gets suddenly popular.

Most of us though contract with web hosts. For example, I use Siteground. Web hosts have server rooms somewhere where they keep all the equipment they need to host your forum plus lots of other websites. Most web hosts have multiple server rooms in various countries. The closer these are to their customers and their site viewers, the better. For example, Siteground has server farms in Chicago, London, Amsterdam and Singapore. They have incentive to organize their data centers to be fast and reliable because they control them. Siteground does this not only with four server farms, but by having an end-to-end solid state infrastructure. They figured out that although solid state drives (SSDs) were more expensive, they were heaps more reliable and faster than filling their server rooms with mechanical disk drives. It’s been key to their success as a company.

Virtual hosting

These days though some web hosts are figuring out they don’t need to bother with the actual hosting anymore. There are two ways they do this. One is old, the other is new.

The first way is to be a reseller. For example, ABC Hosting may actually rent servers in (hypothetically speaking) a Rackspace server room. Becoming a reseller is not hard. Siteground will let you be a reseller. Resellers are often people like me who have multiple clients and as a convenience to their customers also provide hosting. I don’t want to bother setting up a server farm, particularly if I can lease one. If I did, I would probably choose to become a Siteground reseller, since Siteground’s spiffy servers sold me on being their client. Siteground would provide a front end console for me to use, and consoles that my customers would use too to which I would apply my own logo and some custom pages. From the customer’s perspective, it looks like I have my own server room. The downside is that I would become responsible for any hosting issues. I would essentially be the support department, and I’m not available 24/7. I don’t want to get involved in the minutia of my client’s hosting, so I don’t expect to ever become a reseller, even though it would generate a good deal of passive income for my business.

The second way is that some web hosts are becoming virtual by using cloud providers. Who’s the number one host on the web? You probably don’t have to think too much: GoDaddy. You may be surprised to learn that in 2018, GoDaddy decided to move much of its hosting inside AWS. You can read why here. Basically, GoDaddy realized that AWS built a much better infrastructure. They can resell Amazon’s cloud services under their own label for less than they can maintain their own hosting centers. AWS has a sophisticated set of services and they have the fast connection and high reliability thing all figured out. This is not good news for GoDaddy’s hosting staff. Presumably most of them will be laid off at some point.

All this suggests that web hosting will be undergoing a fundamental transformation as hosts ditch their own hosting centers to find better reselling deals in the cloud. In short, your web host may become a virtual web host. If you host on GoDaddy, there’s a good chance it’s already virtual hosted on AWS.

Should you host in the cloud?

This does raise the question: why not just buy your hosting from a cloud vendor like AWS and skip a middle man? If you read my posts on cloud hosting, you’ll realize the main issue is that cloud hosting tends to be complicated to set up, maintain and troubleshoot, at least from the perspective of someone trying to get some web space without a lot of technical skills. Virtual web hosts like GoDaddy essentially become front ends for optimizing the hosting experience for people likely a lot like you who want the process to be simpler. So they offer 24/7 support, domain management and basic customer handholding while putting up a virtual front end that suggests they are doing all this themselves when in fact the technical infrastructure is outsourced to a major cloud vendor.

My bet is that at some point Siteground will do the same, in which case I will have less reason to use them. If I know a suite of virtual web hosts are all using AWS, for example, I can get choosier and choose a virtual host based on their support and the ease by which I can do things via their control panels. I can assume the reliability and speed will all be excellent since they are hosted in a professionally managed commercial cloud. Since I do have the technical skills to put my sites in a cloud like AWS, at some point I will probably just do that. I pay a premium primarily to call someone on the phone to resolve some technical issues. Right now the $20/month I pay for Siteground hosting for my domains is reasonable, even though I am guessing I could pay $10/month or less putting my sites in the cloud. I’d just have to fix any technical problems myself, and right now the cost difference doesn’t make it worth my time.

For most of you, this is probably true too. Price is certainly important when you decide who to host with, but ready support, easy interfaces to managing your sites and fast page load speeds probably matter more. At some point you either won’t know or won’t care if your web sites are actually in a major cloud vendor’s facilities somewhere. Virtual web hosts aren’t probably going to advertise this either.

If interested in Siteground hosting, use my affiliate link

If you are intrigued about my discussion of Siteground for web hosting, learn more on my rehosting page. If you decide to host with Siteground, please use my affiliate link. You won’t pay anything extra and I will earn a small commission.

Avoid hosts owned by the Endurance International Group

On: By: Mark

As I have noted before, since I work with many clients I have developed hopefully informed opinions about many web hosts. Perhaps I should not paint with a broad brush but I do have one suggestion: avoid any web hosts owned by the Endurance International Group.

Web hosting tends to be a low profit business. With so much competition, customers will shop around for the best deal. This results in many hosts offering cheap plans for $5 or $10 per month. Web hosts can hope to find profitability in volume but since there is a lot of competition profitability usually comes from consolidation. The Endurance International Group buys web hosts. It looks like they find profitability through throwing all these companies under one umbrella and one hosting center.

I used to host with Hostgator. I found their support good and their infrastructure above average, yet their pricing was very reasonable. Then they were bought out by the Endurance International Group. Almost immediately afterward their support became crappy and I noticed delays accessing my domain as well as infrastructure related issues. When my hosting contract was over, I was happy to move somewhere else.

When you call these companies for support, you are immediately placed into a third-level support queue. After you finally connect with a human, these brain-dead support people follow scripts that are designed basically to not solve your problem and make you go away. Moreover, I found myself far more knowledgable about hosting and how to solve problems than they were. They could rarely even cover the basics. If you needed real help I found I had to badger for second-tier support.

All this is to keep their costs low since one support center for dozens of companies is obviously cheaper. But it results in inferior service, as evidenced by my experience with hostgator.com.

Endurance International Group own a lot of hosts, most pretty obscure. Among those they purchased you may be familiar with include Hostgator, Bluehost, Hostcentric, iPage and Site5. You can see a full list of the brands they bought on this Wikipedia page.

Given the low margins, the hosting business is likely to continue consolidating. There is certainly a lot of smoke and mirrors in this business. What used to be good hosting can turn into poor hosting pretty quickly when they get acquired. This is true of MediaTemple, at least it’s Grid Service, based on my latest experience since it was bought by GoDaddy. 

My current hosting recommendations, last updated April 2019

Right now my recommended hosts include Dreamhost for most hosting and Rackspace for dedicated and virtual server hosting. If you are considering rehosting, I’ve listed some of their advantages and disadvantages on my rehosting page. Read it over carefully because all hosts have special terms and conditions and limitations. If you choose to host or rehost with Dreamhost, please use my affiliate link. This way I earn a small commission. You will not pay extra.

If you need help moving your website toa new host, I can certainly help. You might want to send me a service inquiry.

It’s quite clear to me though that you are likely to be unhappy with any hosting owned by the Endurance International Group. So avoid.

Where should you be hosting?

On: By: Mark

It’s not unusual for forum owners to want to rehost. Rehosting though is a big decision. You generally pay for a year or more of hosting up front and you have no assurance that the new host will be better, or even as good, as your current host. In addition, moving a forum to a new host is a pain, which is why a significant part of my business is helping clients move their forums. If you’d like me to help, send me an inquiry.

It does beg the question of where you should move to. Generally the pain level has to be pretty high to move to a new host. It’s often easier to renew what you have or pick a higher level of service with your current host than tackle the time and expense of rehosting.

Hosting is in flux

For the most part you are left to sifting through the general hosting market to figure out a good host. And the hosting market like much in the IT world is in flux. Thus, my recommendations to clients has changed over time. For example, I used to recommend HostGator to my clients and even hosted my sites there too. Then Hostgator became a victim of its own success. It got bought out and is now just another company that is part of the Endurance International Group portfolio. About the time they were bought out, the quality of their hosting declined. I noticed a marked decline in their technical support. Needless to say I don’t recommend Hostgator anymore.

High usage solutions

Certain forums fall into a specialized class of hosting. If you are one of these forums, you are already probably on specialized hosting. Mostly these are highly trafficked forums. To deal with the hundred or thousands of posts per day, you are likely on a dedicated or virtual private server, and are probably paying handsomely for the privilege. If you fall into this category but are on shared hosting, you probably are having issues and need to pay for one of these solutions.

Stick with commodity software

One thing for sure: get generic web hosting. This means you need a cheap LAMP stack: Linux (operating system), Apache (web server, although nginx is acceptable), MySQL or MariaDB (its clone) for the database and PHP for the scripting language. phpBB of course is written in PHP so it must be available. Don’t pay for Windows hosting. It’s more expensive, you don’t need it, it adds complications and you will probably get poorer performance.

My guess is less than 2% of forums fall into the high usage category, which means generally that inexpensive shared hosting is where most forums belong. Okay then, which shared hosting? There are lots of hosting guides on the web, most of dubious value. Working with lots of clients though I can tell you my own personal opinions. The final choice may come down to which services you value the most, such as fast and convenient technical support. As a general rule this is not available for shared hosting.

Here are my current ratings for popular web hosts with notes as applicable. I have no axe to grind and I make no money from these opinions so at least you know they are unbiased.

Shared Hosting

  • Grade A
    • Siteground – No telephone support but chat and ticket support. Nonetheless it is smartly engineered and well thought out with features like automatically managed Let’s Encrypt security certificates.
    • Bluehost – Technical support is a bit slow but you can usually get a hold of someone within half an hour or so. Great support once you get a representative. On par with Siteground. You might want to choose between them based on price or features.
    • MediaTemple (Grid service) – Proprietary control panel (not cPanel or Plesk) but uses all solid state drives. A bit harder to use than cPanel-based sites but much more reliable and fault tolerant than what is typically available, as well as faster-serving due to the solid state drives and the built in Content Delivery Network (CDN). Stay away if you are not particularly technically inclined. Redundancy is built in making it a great choice if you need high availability. This is actually Amazon Web Services under the hood but made much less geeky for us less technical people. Terrific and fast technical support but you have to understand their boundaries of what’s available on the Grid service.
  • Grade B
    • Hostpapa
    • 1and1 – Available in many countries including UK and much of Europe.
  • Grade C
    • Hostgator – See above
    • GoDaddy – Much better than they were a few years ago, decent technical support but sometimes there are frustrating issues with how they have their shared hosting configured. Lately I’ve been having users complain about poor integration with phpBB 3.2.
  • Grade D
    • Web.com – Really poor technical support with Level 1 techs who know very little and work hard to make you just go away. Their web hosting configuration is suboptimal, confusing, nonstandard and often causes problems as a result. If it’s anything beyond the most routine issue they will want to forward you to their Level 2 service for which they will charge a $75 fee.
    • Network Solutions – Part of the same conglomerate that owns web.com. It’s ironic considering Network Solutions used to be the center of the Internet, responsible for maintaining the whole Domain Name system. As a host though they suck and are expensive.
  • Grade F

Virtual Private and Dedicated Servers

For highly trafficked forums only. You basically need to be a system administrator or can hire one to use these solutions. Don’t expect any handholding because you will be lucky if you get any.

  • Grade A
    • MediaTemple – a premium web host worth paying for with terrific technical support
    • Rackspace – services more the business community with prices accordingly, but top notch
  • Grade B
    • Digital Ocean – nice fancy infrastructure with all solid state drive but you are basically on your own. You need to be a techie. Their host control panel can be baffling if you are used to cPanel.
  • Grade C
    • 1and1 – great prices for this class of service, but servers seem to be old and underperforming. Technical support is above average for this tier.

Specialized solutions

  • Amazon Web Services EC2 – only for geeks, but it allows scalable cloud computing. There are AMI (Amazon Machine Instances) for phpBB that you can install.

Obviously I left out lots of hosts as there are hundreds out there. I reference the ones I work with most frequently with clients. Please leave comments about your experiences so others can benefit or avoid mistakes.