Website Hosting Cost

AJXX

Strider590 wrote: »

I host my own site on an old laptop (on 24/7/365), using my home broadband connection.

Granted its nothing fancy and it couldn't cope with huge traffic flow, but for the £150 for the laptop and a few hours figuring out Apache, it suits me fine (10yr+ trouble free). Plus I've got full control and the ability to work live without having to upload files.

It started out as a way of hosting images for use on forums/etc, back when this used to cost money or was traded for your personal data.

If I needed outside web hosting i'd make damn sure it was both necessary and worth the money.

While I realise it's 10 years trouble free as you claim... this is just horrendous advice for anybody who actually uses a website for anything even remotely related to business purposes.

1) Hosted on an old (no doubt consumer grade) laptop which in itself is going to be slow compared to a proper hosting server and likely HDD/processor/ram etc... will fail soon as it's not server grade hardware, and is not designed for 24/7 use (especially being a laptop).

2) Network connection is a DSL (I assume) standard broadband line? Oh lord. Not even a business line, just standard grade BB. Upload speeds will likely be pitiful, let alone the problem of what happens if the BB connection goes down for X days. Many ISP's specifically sate they don't allow hosting either.

3)"a few hours figuring out Apache" is nothing compared to the knowledge required to properly secure a server against hacking.

Well done to you for getting it going, but I'd never so much as consider the idea for anything serious/business related.

Cornucopia

If you are comfortable with cPanel, and the techie bits, and can cope with very occasional downtime, then you can get free hosting, ad-free from a number of companies, including this one:-

http://000webhost.com/

kwikbreaks

I've used 000webhost for a few non critical bits of hosting and it all worked very well. If it's pretty much a just-for-fun site then they are going to be fine. If it's in any way a commercial site then don't choose a free host.

chunter

Had a wee look at it and the biggest downside of 000hosting is
1. no cgi scripts allowed.
2. no smtp server
3. no webstats
Seems to be perfectly fine otherwise.

Might even use it myself for various bits and pieces. Thanks for the information.

anotheruser

http://asmallorange.com

$35 / £22 a year:
500Mb storage / 5Gb bandwidth

$5 / £3 a month:
5Gb storage / 50Gb bandwidth

$10 / £6 a month:
15Gb storage / 150Gb bandwidth

$20 / £12 a month:
30Gb storage / 500Gb bandwidth


Been with ASO for years with no problem (although I have a special account with them, which gives me free web hosting for life). I host my domain name at namecheap.com as it was something like £30 for 10 years at the time I bought it (runs out 2022).

ASO use cPanel for the backend so comes with a bunch of stats producing modules, SMTP is fine too.

They have shared hosting plans or dedicated plans.

kwikbreaks

chunter wrote: »

1. no cgi scripts allowed.

You do get php/mysql though which is pretty good for a free hoster.

Cornucopia

I get a lot more storage from 000 than from my paid hosting. (Just noticed that).

r3tude

if you want to host a basic website, HTML only you can host it from an Amazon S3 bucket for peanuts.

lots of information in hosting static content on S3 in google

if not you can get a dedicated micro instance for not much more than you are paying, in Amazon EC2

AWS have a simple calculator to help with estimating costs

InsideInsurance

chunter wrote: »

Had a wee look at it and the biggest downside of 000hosting is
1. no cgi scripts allowed.
2. no smtp server
3. no webstats

Admittedly I've always been into ASP/ .Net rather than PHP but is CGI in any way used in this day and age?

Similarly do most use host web stats rather than Google Analytics etc?

The lack of an SMTP server would be more of an issue.