Web Host for Designers
over 9 years ago from Kyril Kulikov
Every good designer has a personal website. What web host do you recommend for portfolio/agency website/side projects?
over 9 years ago from Kyril Kulikov
Every good designer has a personal website. What web host do you recommend for portfolio/agency website/side projects?
I currently use a mix of either hosting on GitHub Pages (which is free and supports Jekyll) or using my own VPS which is hosted at Digital Ocean. I'd highly recommend the VPS route as it opens up a lot of opportunity and is really cheap. Also gets you setting up apache and learning about managing your own webspace. It's a great weekend project and if you don't mind diving into terminal then it's great knowledge to have. In the past, I've used one.com as it's really cheap, but you get what you pay for.
I love having a VPS on Digital Ocean - shared hosting was so slow in comparison, I've basically moved all of my individual sites over to my single VPS and seen an insane increase in speed and uptime.
Agreed. Rolling your own VPS on Digital Ocean or Linode is pretty cost effective and the performance is much much better. It's a lot easier to install anything you like on it, and migrate bigger sites/databases over.
How did you set up your VPS?
I started out with DO, but I hit complications trying to keep a simple NodeJS server running. I'd like to have a VPS, and I'm pretty comfortable with the terminal and Node, but I don't want to have to deal with configuring everything, and maintaining it in the future if I don't have to. I ended up just pushing the project to Heroku, and everything works fine, and for free.
Any suggestions?
Not sure what kind of complications but I am running nodejs on DO VPS for last 6 months without any issues.
You should checkout forever https://github.com/nodejitsu/forever for keeping node processes running, it restarts the process whenever it crashes. You can use Cron for when the server crashes/restarts.
Edit: this is a better guide http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13385029/automatically-start-forever-node-on-system-restart
Digital Ocean has a fantastic community base for support on stuff like this, check out this area of their site: https://digitalocean.com/community/
+1 digitalocean. But configuration is not simply :) (3 days I'm trying run PHPMyAdmin)
I use asmallorange.com. I've never had any problems with them and their customer service is extremely helpful.
They also have one of the least expensive plans at $35/year if you're down to share hosting.
Definitely agree. I've been their customer for a few years and send all my clients to them. Their customer service is one of the best I've ever seen :)
+1 for A Small Orange
If you're going to use WordPress, then definitely Flywheel.
If you want to play around with various frameworks and technologies, I can't recommend WebFaction enough. Set up and tear down applications with a couple of clicks, there's a ton of pre-configured options. I moved there from DH and couldn't be happier.
Have been a user of http://www.stablehost.com/ for the past 2 years after switching from Dreamhost. Never had any service disruptions and customer service was great in helping me resolve issues I ran into.
I might have to look into Digital Ocean now after all these suggestions though
Like others on here, I would highly recommend setting up your own DigitalOcean VPS. It's really worth while getting an understanding of how web servers work!
I would also recommend checking out Heroku for deploying your web apps!
Outside the US i can highly recommend hosteurope.com.
Nearly Free Speech is incredibly cheap if your needs are low, and scale up very reasonably when you need more. They have been around a long time and have a strong reputation.
I personally use one of those cheap, big hosting companies (Hostmonster) and haven't had a problem in 7 years, specifically for Wordpress.
I would say regardless of which brand, do pick a company that a) has longevity (not going to disappear in the next 2-3 years) b) has decent customer support.
You can try this out just by calling the numbers listed on each hosts' websites and seeing what the process is like to talk to a live human.
I would recommend rosehosting for their superb service, support and commitment to their customers.
I recommend Cloudways Platform for Designers.
Prices start at $15/month.
Features of Cloudways Platform: Installation 1- Selection from DigitalOcean (5 data centers) and Amazon EC2 servers (9 data centers) and Google Compute Engine (3 regions) 2- One Click Application Installs (WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, Prestashop, support for all php based applications) 3- Server scaling, based on bandwidth, hard disk space, processor and RAM. 4- Billing on hourly basis.
Server Features 1- 15 real time monitoring features. 2- Vertical Server Scaling 3- Service Management (Nginx, Varnish, MySQL, Apache, Memcache...) 4- Advance Server settings (Upload size, execution limit, memory limit etc.) 5- SSL Certificate Configuration 6- Automatic Backups 7- Server Addons (Email settings) 8- Dedicated IP 9- Unlimited Domains 10- Unlimited Application Installations
Application Management 1- SFTP connection 2- Dedicated MySQL Database 3- Application Restore 4- Application and Server Cloning 5- Git Integration and Deployment Via Git
I'm all over GitHub Pages and BitBalloon for my pages these days. I've just started to play around with CloudCannon for some client work, too.
I use Heroku to host this little one page love :)
I'm using Siteground's Geek-level hosting. It has high-end caching for Wordpress, so all my sites are faster than ever. I switched from paying $150/mo for a VPS to $15/mo for shared hosting which performs just as well!
Heroku for apps, Media Temple for Wordpress blogs (the new Wordpress hosting is actually pretty nifty!).
Although I've never had a single pleasant experience with GoDaddy, so far I haven't seen any evidence of them ruining Media Temple, so I'm still a happy customer.
For now.
I can't say enough good things about Harp.
Linode is the way to be. Digital Ocean is a newer competitor to the market and also great.
Media Temple Grid Hosting is pretty good, although they're a bit pricey and got acquired by GoDaddy. I'm thinking of switching to ASO or Digital Ocean.
github (pages) + jekyll now and forevermore.
Codepen, Github for free stuff.
Shared Hosting for low traffic. http://www.hostlatte.com/ - $2.95 per Month
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