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Come back PhP, all is forgiven!

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  • Its 2023 but lots of hostings still cant run nodejs.
    After a not good hosting experience with Ionos (looks cheap at first, but requires add-on ££ packages) Im wondering what realistically is cheapest monthly hosting, that can run nodejs and Nodebb.
    Many offer 70% discount for first 3-12 months, which then reverts to a higher price.
    It is one advantage of PhP code that its more universal.
    @phenomlab may I ask which host you use, and how much per month roughly to host Sudonix?

  • Its 2023 but lots of hostings still cant run nodejs.
    After a not good hosting experience with Ionos (looks cheap at first, but requires add-on ££ packages) Im wondering what realistically is cheapest monthly hosting, that can run nodejs and Nodebb.
    Many offer 70% discount for first 3-12 months, which then reverts to a higher price.
    It is one advantage of PhP code that its more universal.
    @phenomlab may I ask which host you use, and how much per month roughly to host Sudonix?

    @Panda said in Come back PhP, all is forgiven!:

    Its 2023 but lots of hostings still cant run nodejs.
    After a not good hosting experience with Ionos (looks cheap at first, but requires add-on ££ packages) Im wondering what realistically is cheapest monthly hosting, that can run nodejs and Nodebb.

    You raise an excellent point here. Sadly, NodeJS doesn’t seem to have found it’s way into all shared hosting packages just yet, whereas Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are still the mainstay because these are the required components to run a WordPress site.

    The WAMP, LAMP, and LEMP stacks (see reading material below) are commonplace because they work well on shared hosting (although not all are created equal), and because they only give you a “slice” of the power (usually 1 CPU and 512Mb RAM - or 1Gb if they are feeling generous, coupled with a small disk size, free backups etc) they can keep the cost low as their overhead in this case is literally zero as they already acquired the hosts themselves which often run hundreds of sites, and are over subscribed to the point where they are ridiculously slow).

    In fact, several WordPress hosting providers encourage you to use caching plugins like WP Rocket, or Cloudflare which really is to mask their poor hardware performance and the fact that there are too many websites sitting on on server. This is known as “Cloud Linux” (see below)

    This hosting platform also contains Control Panels such as cPanel, Plesk, and the like. However, not all that glitters is gold. At the expense of low cost websites comes 7-p’s style performance (a bit more about that below)

    In essence, over subscribing plans means that they all use a shared resource pool. There are often certain clients who will max out a running PHP process (default here is 30 seconds, but very easily overridden) which then locks the CPU and kills the speed for everyone else. It’s up to the hosting provider to find the culprit, and kill the session.

    A VPS however, is by far a superior model. It too uses shared resources, although these are cut logically meaning that one VPS on the same host cannot interfere with another. The additional benefit of a VPS is that, although self-managed and by that I mean there is nobody to help you with issues, it comes with full root access and is a bare-bones operating system meaning you can install what you like - NodeJS, MongoDB, you name it - you just need to ensure you scale correctly in terms of hardware like CPU, Memory, and disk space.

    Shared hosts have started offering Composer support, but only because it’s an accepted standard when installing PHP packages - no more or less, and it’s taken years to get even that basic support. Composer also requires SSH access, so hosting companies are also having to provide this when previously, they have locked it off to secure the environment (although that’s more like security through obscurity to be honest).

    @Panda said in Come back PhP, all is forgiven!:

    Many offer 70% discount for first 3-12 months, which then reverts to a higher price.
    It is one advantage of PhP code that its more universal.

    True, but cheap is not cheerful. The more complex your site becomes (along with your coding skills increasing), the quicker you will grow out of the plan you have. If they can’t limit you in terms of hardware, they’ll do it in visitors instead. The 70% discount is a carrot - nothing more, nothing less. Don’t be fooled by this if you are serious about hosting.

    Digital Ocean for example has NodeJS packages, along with several others - see below

    I used IONOS for a while, and realised that Hetzner provide a much better deal for those experienced with Linux. I know @cagatay, @DownPW and myself all use Hetzner, and I think @Madchatthew (whom I haven’t seen for a while 🙂 ) was also considering taking their services. There’s an affiliate link below if you’d like to go down that route

    Obtaining a VPS comes with the double-edged sword of being completely on your own with no support, although by using Virtualmin, you’ll find life so much simpler (something I know @DownPW can attest to, as I managed to convert him 🙂 )

    In terms of cost, I pay € 31.40 per month. Sudonix sits on a 4 core CPU with 16Gb RAM and 150Gb disk space, and a custom built low-latency kernel. This is further “backed” by a 500Gb Storage Box I use for backups and DEV work

    6a21d3dd-72dd-4324-91fa-de4701a82652-image.png

    The screenshot above is from Virtualmin btw…

  • undefined phenomlab marked this topic as a regular topic on 18 Jul 2023, 15:00
  • @Panda said in Come back PhP, all is forgiven!:

    Its 2023 but lots of hostings still cant run nodejs.
    After a not good hosting experience with Ionos (looks cheap at first, but requires add-on ££ packages) Im wondering what realistically is cheapest monthly hosting, that can run nodejs and Nodebb.

    You raise an excellent point here. Sadly, NodeJS doesn’t seem to have found it’s way into all shared hosting packages just yet, whereas Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are still the mainstay because these are the required components to run a WordPress site.

    The WAMP, LAMP, and LEMP stacks (see reading material below) are commonplace because they work well on shared hosting (although not all are created equal), and because they only give you a “slice” of the power (usually 1 CPU and 512Mb RAM - or 1Gb if they are feeling generous, coupled with a small disk size, free backups etc) they can keep the cost low as their overhead in this case is literally zero as they already acquired the hosts themselves which often run hundreds of sites, and are over subscribed to the point where they are ridiculously slow).

    https://cloudinfrastructureservices.co.uk/lamp-vs-xampp-vs-wamp-vs-mamp-whats-the-difference/

    In fact, several WordPress hosting providers encourage you to use caching plugins like WP Rocket, or Cloudflare which really is to mask their poor hardware performance and the fact that there are too many websites sitting on on server. This is known as “Cloud Linux” (see below)

    https://www.cloudlinux.com/

    This hosting platform also contains Control Panels such as cPanel, Plesk, and the like. However, not all that glitters is gold. At the expense of low cost websites comes 7-p’s style performance (a bit more about that below)

    https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/7_Ps_(military_adage)

    In essence, over subscribing plans means that they all use a shared resource pool. There are often certain clients who will max out a running PHP process (default here is 30 seconds, but very easily overridden) which then locks the CPU and kills the speed for everyone else. It’s up to the hosting provider to find the culprit, and kill the session.

    A VPS however, is by far a superior model. It too uses shared resources, although these are cut logically meaning that one VPS on the same host cannot interfere with another. The additional benefit of a VPS is that, although self-managed and by that I mean there is nobody to help you with issues, it comes with full root access and is a bare-bones operating system meaning you can install what you like - NodeJS, MongoDB, you name it - you just need to ensure you scale correctly in terms of hardware like CPU, Memory, and disk space.

    Shared hosts have started offering Composer support, but only because it’s an accepted standard when installing PHP packages - no more or less, and it’s taken years to get even that basic support. Composer also requires SSH access, so hosting companies are also having to provide this when previously, they have locked it off to secure the environment (although that’s more like security through obscurity to be honest).

    @Panda said in Come back PhP, all is forgiven!:

    Many offer 70% discount for first 3-12 months, which then reverts to a higher price.
    It is one advantage of PhP code that its more universal.

    True, but cheap is not cheerful. The more complex your site becomes (along with your coding skills increasing), the quicker you will grow out of the plan you have. If they can’t limit you in terms of hardware, they’ll do it in visitors instead. The 70% discount is a carrot - nothing more, nothing less. Don’t be fooled by this if you are serious about hosting.

    Digital Ocean for example has NodeJS packages, along with several others - see below

    https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-nodejs-hosting/

    I used IONOS for a while, and realised that Hetzner provide a much better deal for those experienced with Linux. I know @cagatay, @DownPW and myself all use Hetzner, and I think @Madchatthew (whom I haven’t seen for a while 🙂 ) was also considering taking their services. There’s an affiliate link below if you’d like to go down that route

    https://console.hetzner.cloud/refer

    Obtaining a VPS comes with the double-edged sword of being completely on your own with no support, although by using Virtualmin, you’ll find life so much simpler (something I know @DownPW can attest to, as I managed to convert him 🙂 )

    In terms of cost, I pay € 31.40 per month. Sudonix sits on a 4 core CPU with 16Gb RAM and 150Gb disk space, and a custom built low-latency kernel. This is further “backed” by a 500Gb Storage Box I use for backups and DEV work

    6a21d3dd-72dd-4324-91fa-de4701a82652-image.png

    The screenshot above is from Virtualmin btw…

    @phenomlab said in Come back PhP, all is forgiven!:

    I used IONOS for a while, and realised that Hetzner provide a much better deal for those experienced with Linux. I know @cagatay, @DownPW and myself all use Hetzner, and I think @Madchatthew (whom I haven’t seen for a while ) was also considering taking their services. There’s an affiliate link below if you’d like to go down that route

    Yep hetzner is very very cool and I haven’t seen before a panel magentment as complete as him : backup, snapshot, add cpu core, ram is easy.

    @phenomlab said in Come back PhP, all is forgiven!:

    Obtaining a VPS comes with the double-edged sword of being completely on your own with no support, although by using Virtualmin, you’ll find life so much simpler (something I know @DownPW can attest to, as I managed to convert him )

    Yep Virtualmin is very cool 😉
    And it makes life much easier for server management, domain, nginx and so on even if it is always better to know how to do all this in CLI. I would say that the 2 are really complementary

  • I know this is an older post, but I can attest to the greatness of Hetzner. I have a vps running with Arch Linux on it as a webhost and I haven’t had any issues. Today I was actually looking at their webhosting services and I have to say their prices are very nicely priced. I am sure their web hosting service is excellent as well.

    I am thinking about putting together some websites for some local businesses to maybe getting a web design/hosting business going. I have been researching some of the web hosting providers that I have used before in the past and wow, they are expensive now. So my thought would be to use Hetzner web hosting as one of the options. Of if I offered a fully managed service, would use Hetzner for that.

    The sites would mostly be Wordpress and maybe start delving into other technologies and such. Getting more familiar with Nodebb and others and start growing my knowledge. I don’t think the sites that I have made with wordpress look the best, but part of me wonders if that isn’t imposter feeling that I am having. Time will tell.

  • I know this is an older post, but I can attest to the greatness of Hetzner. I have a vps running with Arch Linux on it as a webhost and I haven’t had any issues. Today I was actually looking at their webhosting services and I have to say their prices are very nicely priced. I am sure their web hosting service is excellent as well.

    I am thinking about putting together some websites for some local businesses to maybe getting a web design/hosting business going. I have been researching some of the web hosting providers that I have used before in the past and wow, they are expensive now. So my thought would be to use Hetzner web hosting as one of the options. Of if I offered a fully managed service, would use Hetzner for that.

    The sites would mostly be Wordpress and maybe start delving into other technologies and such. Getting more familiar with Nodebb and others and start growing my knowledge. I don’t think the sites that I have made with wordpress look the best, but part of me wonders if that isn’t imposter feeling that I am having. Time will tell.

    @Madchatthew my advice here would be to simply go for it. A number of providers have reseller packages and that’s definitely an area I’d look into if you are offering WordPress etc. Nodebb is a different as it requires a different stack.

    You could use the WordPress stack for Flarum provided you had access to composer, which most packages seem to have these days.

  • @Madchatthew my advice here would be to simply go for it. A number of providers have reseller packages and that’s definitely an area I’d look into if you are offering WordPress etc. Nodebb is a different as it requires a different stack.

    You could use the WordPress stack for Flarum provided you had access to composer, which most packages seem to have these days.

    @phenomlab Thank you. I did spend some time working on a mock up for a local restaurant. I found out after I started working on the page that they have an account with square and have their business setup on there. I was going to do some research to see what the cost of square was and compare it to what they could do if they used WooCommerce and a WooCommerce restaurant plugin as well for the menu and ordering online.

    I need to do that research to see if they would be better off with the cost of square or if they would come out ahead by using a webhost cost, WooCommerce and plugin cost and that is all they would need to run a site like that. I am gonna work on that today or tomorrow to see the price differences.

    I believe even if the WordPress site is a little more spendy, they would have complete control over their website and wouldn’t have to depend on the costs of square and be able to change and do what they want. Those would be some of the sales points that I would use. I would offer a base price to set it up for them and then do an hourly rate for updates and such. Unless they want to send me the new info and update the site for them, then I would need to come up with a monthly amount to charge and allow them so many changes a month.

    It would be awesome if I could get 5 to 10 customers starting out and being able to bill monthly. Then go from there.



3/6

18 Jul 2023, 16:25


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