Help finding hosting for a forum

[LondonMan]

Hi, I am trying to start a company with low capital.
I need some help finding a decent cheap hosting company for a website with a forum.
I have wasted money with 2 hosting company now, one of them is hostpapa.
They told me, yes my site will be fine on their package,
After I upload my WordPress site they told me I'm using too much resource and must upgrade to VPS.
At that time I was only getting 20 hits per day.

My site may get roughly 500 unique visits per day.
I just need a cheap cloud hosting with good speed and can handle 500 hits per day with about 100 folks logged on at the same time.

speedydot dot co dot uk
Thier business package looks good.
Anyone on this forum used them?
Can that package handle 100 folks using the forum at the same time with no slow logging and great up time?

krystal dot co dot uk
Thier Ruby package looks good.
Anyone on this forum used them?
Can that package handle 100 folks using the forum at the same time with no slow logging and great up time?
I know this varies but just need some rough estimate from folks who know the workings of hosting and websites

Truly appreciate some help and recommendations
Thanks

 

[Inva]

Buy VPS as they told you. Forum software is heavy and most shared hosts will not have it.

 

[KM-Tiger]

a decent cheap hosting company

That's a contradiction in terms, and therein lies your problem.

Decent will not be cheapest, so you would be better to seek best value for a host that can meet your requirements. Bear in mind you have already wasted time on cheap.

 

[Inva]

Agree with KM-Tiger. Do not buy cheap hosting as it will cost you a lot more trying to make it work.

Reminds me on those freelancing platforms "Need EXPERT high quality coder for BEST e-commerce website. Budget $120."

 

[arnydnxluk]

For your WordPress website to be hitting resource limits at 20 hits per day (i.e. likely with just a single simultaneous visit) then most likely there is something very wrong with your website. I would ask the hosting provider for details, it's quite possible you need to fix your website.

When talking about "100 people using the forum at the same time" there's a big difference between 100 people being logged in, perhaps changing pages every 30 seconds, and 100 people hitting the website at once. 100 people logged in at once and changing pages every 30 seconds is an average of 3-4 hits per second, I would expect most decent shared hosting providers to support this on their mid to high shared plans. If you have the appropriate caching layers in place, that will help a lot.

The main stat you should be looking at when comparing these shared hosting providers and their plans is the memory, entry process and CPU allocation, as these are roughly comparable between hosts and determine the resources available to run your website. You do of course need enough disk space and bandwidth too but these are usually quite high limits or "unlimited" these days, so you generally don't need to worry about those so much. However it's not just all about numbers, you should also look at the provider and determine what their ethos is, how much experience they have, how well they run things, etc. A hosting provider can claim to give you all of the resources in the world but at the end of the day if their service is oversold then those resources may not actually be available to you when it comes to consuming them. The service will just be shoddy all around if oversold.

That said, nobody can say for sure how your website will be handled until you host it and begin sending traffic towards it, every website is different. It also depends on just how active your forum members are while browsing the forums. I think once you're at that kind of activity level of having 500 daily active users, a VPS may well be the better option regardless, as presumably at that point your website can be monetised and the investment will be worth the cost to improve performance and avoid the issues of 'noisy neighbours'. You are pushing shared hosting at that point, as shared hosting is generally used for less busy websites such as marketing websites, especially with the availability of high quality, low cost private servers from the likes of DigitalOcean these days. I would highly recommend DigitalOcean but they provide an unmanaged service, you would need someone with server admin experience to run the server, implement appropriate backup procedures, monitor the server, etc.

Here's what I would recommend doing:

1. Find more details from HostPapa about the resource limits you're hitting. What resource limit has been hit? What are your current resource limits?
2. From this, you may learn that HostPapa just has awful resource limitations (you can compare their limits to the ones you see listed on other provider's websites) or you may learn that their limitations are somewhat reasonable and therefore something is wrong with your website (most likely in my opinion given the information we have so far).
3. Fix any issues with your website's resource consumption. If necessary, find a new shared hosting provider which you can use while starting out and building up traffic. Shared hosting gets a bad rep sometimes but it definitely has its uses, unfortunately the service between different providers can vary wildly.
4. Go from there - once your traffic is where you want it to be and perhaps getting too much for shared hosting, then upgrade to a managed VPS.

I would also recommend choosing a hosting provider which uses a standard control panel, for example cPanel or Plesk, rather than a bespoke control panel. This will make upgrading to a VPS in future even easier as you can package up the entire account - including files, databases, email accounts - and restore this entire package on a different server using the control panel's standard backup procedure. The most popular control panel is cPanel, I believe both of the providers you have mentioned use cPanel.

 

[LondonMan]

For your WordPress website to be hitting resource limits at 20 hits per day (i.e. likely with just a single simultaneous visit) then most likely there is something very wrong with your website. I would ask the hosting provider for details, it's quite possible you need to fix your website.

When talking about "100 people using the forum at the same time" there's a big difference between 100 people being logged in, perhaps changing pages every 30 seconds, and 100 people hitting the website at once. 100 people logged in at once and changing pages every 30 seconds is an average of 3-4 hits per second, I would expect most decent shared hosting providers to support this on their mid to high shared plans. If you have the appropriate caching layers in place, that will help a lot.

The main stat you should be looking at when comparing these shared hosting providers and their plans is the memory, entry process and CPU allocation, as these are roughly comparable between hosts and determine the resources available to run your website. You do of course need enough disk space and bandwidth too but these are usually quite high limits or "unlimited" these days, so you generally don't need to worry about those so much. However it's not just all about numbers, you should also look at the provider and determine what their ethos is, how much experience they have, how well they run things, etc. A hosting provider can claim to give you all of the resources in the world but at the end of the day if their service is oversold then those resources may not actually be available to you when it comes to consuming them. The service will just be shoddy all around if oversold.

That said, nobody can say for sure how your website will be handled until you host it and begin sending traffic towards it, every website is different. It also depends on just how active your forum members are while browsing the forums. I think once you're at that kind of activity level of having 500 daily active users, a VPS may well be the better option regardless, as presumably at that point your website can be monetised and the investment will be worth the cost to improve performance and avoid the issues of 'noisy neighbours'. You are pushing shared hosting at that point, as shared hosting is generally used for less busy websites such as marketing websites, especially with the availability of high quality, low cost private servers from the likes of DigitalOcean these days. I would highly recommend DigitalOcean but they provide an unmanaged service, you would need someone with server admin experience to run the server, implement appropriate backup procedures, monitor the server, etc.

Here's what I would recommend doing:

1. Find more details from HostPapa about the resource limits you're hitting. What resource limit has been hit? What are your current resource limits?
2. From this, you may learn that HostPapa just has awful resource limitations (you can compare their limits to the ones you see listed on other provider's websites) or you may learn that their limitations are somewhat reasonable and therefore something is wrong with your website (most likely in my opinion given the information we have so far).
3. Fix any issues with your website's resource consumption. If necessary, find a new shared hosting provider which you can use while starting out and building up traffic. Shared hosting gets a bad rep sometimes but it definitely has its uses, unfortunately the service between different providers can vary wildly.
4. Go from there - once your traffic is where you want it to be and perhaps getting too much for shared hosting, then upgrade to a managed VPS.

I would also recommend choosing a hosting provider which uses a standard control panel, for example cPanel or Plesk, rather than a bespoke control panel. This will make upgrading to a VPS in future even easier as you can package up the entire account - including files, databases, email accounts - and restore this entire package on a different server using the control panel's standard backup procedure. The most popular control panel is cPanel, I believe both of the providers you have mentioned use cPanel.

Thanks very much for your expert advice. I will investigate those points you mention.

 

[LondonMan]

That's a contradiction in terms, and therein lies your problem.

Decent will not be cheapest, so you would be better to seek best value for a host that can meet your requirements. Bear in mind you have already wasted time on cheap.

Hi

That's a contradiction in terms, and therein lies your problem.

Decent will not be cheapest, so you would be better to seek best value for a host that can meet your requirements. Bear in mind you have already wasted time on cheap.

Hi, thanks for your reply, yes my term "cheap" is not the correct word.
I meant to say value you for money.
eg. buying a standard size can of Redbull at a service station for £2.50 or buy the same can of Redbull at Tescos for £1. It's the same Redbull, both taste the same. But Tesco is cheaper.

 

[WESH.UK]

decent cheap hosting company for a website with a forum.

Hi Londonman

I have a question that so far seems to have been missed.

What forum software exactly are you planning to or already using?
Are you using something like IPS or are you using BBPress for example?

We have many websites hosted that use both WordPress, with IPS, and WordPress with BBPress and none of them cause our servers any issues, with varying amounts of live online users at the same time.

True what has been said too, "Decent + Cheap" is a contradiction. You either want decent, or cheap, and as you have seen, with cheap, things don't work out.

We would be happy for you to test it out on a shared plan with us, for the ungodly sum of just £1 for 3 months, and help you out with any technical issues to get things running properly too.

I wouldn't worry about how many "Hits" you have either, just the amount of daily/monthly traffic, and concurrent users online, at the same time.

Unlike REDBull, not all hosting is the same, many will overload their servers and have strict resource limits in place, which you have already encountered.

Value for money would be "Does it do what it is intended to do", if yes, its value for money, if not, then zero value.

 

[LondonMan]

Hi Londonman

I have a question that so far seems to have been missed.

What forum software exactly are you planning to or already using?
Are you using something like IPS or are you using BBPress for example?

We have many websites hosted that use both WordPress, with IPS, and WordPress with BBPress and none of them cause our servers any issues, with varying amounts of live online users at the same time.

True what has been said too, "Decent + Cheap" is a contradiction. You either want decent, or cheap, and as you have seen, with cheap, things don't work out.

We would be happy for you to test it out on a shared plan with us, for the ungodly sum of just £1 for 3 months, and help you out with any technical issues to get things running properly too.

I wouldn't worry about how many "Hits" you have either, just the amount of daily/monthly traffic, and concurrent users online, at the same time.

Feel free to drop us a line if you would like to give it a shot, somewhere "Decent", but not "Cheap"

Unlike REDBull, not all hosting is the same, many will overload their servers and have strict resource limits in place, which you have already encountered.

Value for money would be "Does it do what it is intended to do", if yes, its value for money, if not, then zero value.

Hi, thanks for your reply. I was using Flarum, now using Wpforo, a WordPress based forum.
From reading various info online Wpforo does not consume a lot of resources.
My mistake when I was first seeking a hosting company was I relied too much on google and its search reviews.
At that time I did not have much knowledge of how servers, websites and hosting operate, bearing in mind some hosting companies do not list all hosting package limits in detail view.

I am still in the process of reading up on info for running a smooth forum and all the different options available.
When the time comes to invest in a new hosting I will definitely take a look at your offers.
Regards

 

[Inva]

Hi


Hi, thanks for your reply, yes my term "cheap" is not the correct word.
I meant to say value you for money.
eg. buying a standard size can of Redbull at a service station for £2.50 or buy the same can of Redbull at Tescos for £1. It's the same Redbull, both taste the same. But Tesco is cheaper.

Hosting is not packaged goods. When you buy hosting you don't pay the hardware, you pay the people who manage it. So therefore no 2 hosts are the same, unless if it's a company of EIG or something similar

 

[WESH.UK]

Hosting is not packaged goods. When you buy hosting you don't pay the hardware, you pay the people who manage it. So therefore no 2 hosts are the same, unless if it's a company of EIG or something similar

lol, almost, but you actually do pay for everything, not just the people, but the hardware too.

Some hosts use single CPU servers with low amounts of RAM or use high contention ratio networks, having loads of servers on a single backbone to keep costs down and profit high whilst others use very low contention ratios.

Its just maths. If your not paying a lot of money, then there is not a lot of money to spend on what you are paying for.

If your paying more, you should expect high levels of redundancy in the hardware as well as high specification and no overcrowding both in the servers AND the networks.

No good having a server with 10 sites on it if that server is sharing its internet backbone with 500 servers the same...

The better the quality setup, the less problems people have and the more time the staff have to give to customers when they do need help.

 

[LondonMan]

Buy VPS as they told you. Forum software is heavy and most shared hosts will not have it.

Hosting is not packaged goods. When you buy hosting you don't pay the hardware, you pay the people who manage it. So therefore no 2 hosts are the same, unless if it's a company of EIG or something similar

Are You a Troll¿¿
Jog on, please.

 

[antropy]

I always go by the mantra of buy cheap, buy again!

 

[HostXNow]

You should be able to get a hosting package with a better amount of resources like 2 CPUs/2 GB MEM for around £5/month - that setup will perform more like a small VPS. The forum should load much faster and be more reliable then.

 

[Sal-FastCow]

Thank you

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us and we'd be happy to help.