[EdLUG] Hosting provider recommendations

Thu Sep 28 22:14:58 UTC 2017

Probably not what you're looking for but anyway:

Many years ago I was looking at "shared hosting" setups to host a community site when we could no-longer rely on the charity of the company had originally hosted it for us.  I looked at quite a few options but they all had problems (the site was mod_python based and a bit quirky; didn't expect to be sharing the machine with anyone else).  In the end I just decided it was easier and (more importantly for us) cheaper to run it in our own private AWS EC2 instance (new users can get a t2 micro for free for a year under the "free tier" scheme, and then when that's used up paying upfront for a 3 year "reserved instance" works out about £2/month in the London datacentre; if you can get by in 512MB RAM a t1.micro would be even cheaper).  Of course you need to be happy setting up the system you want from scratch on a blank instance and learning your way around AWS's increasingly byzantine world... but for us the fact the AWS setup could be closer to what we'd had before (and not having to admin it through some "cpanel" shared hosting thing) and the total control was a big plus.  The only piece of the puzzle missing was "domain parking"; we used 123-reg (who have been famously hit by a couple of big DDoS in recent years; didn't cause us any problems as we were only using them for DNS reg though).  These days I see you can also do domain registration through AWS too ( https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/get-a-domain/ ).

No idea what Google Compute Cloud or MS Azure offer equivalent; be surprised if they didn't have something similar.

All depends on how happy you are DIY-ing and sysadmining the stuff a "hosting provider" would otherwise be doing for you (and hopefully providing decent support).  An intermediate option might be running a preconfigured CMS SaaS "applicance" on AWS; e.g the Bitnami stacks and other stuff are available ready-to-run: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/b/2649338011 e.g LAMP https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00NNZUY96

Tim

________________________________
From: EdLUG <edlug-bounces at lists.edlug.org.uk> on behalf of Edinburgh Linux Users Group <edlug at lists.edlug.org.uk>
Sent: 28 September 2017 18:06
To: Edinburgh Linux Users Group
Subject: [EdLUG] Hosting provider recommendations

Can anyone recommend a reliable UK hosting provider?

domain parking

webhosting php,  database for CMS -  python a bonus but not a requirement

inbound email smtp forwarding with anti spam and antivirus - ideally with rules I can define before it hits my mail server (for example as regex on content or spam score over x etc fwd to gmail account)

outbound smtp relay

Thanks

Walter

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