For over 8 years creating websites in different ways such as e-commerce, personal and business websites for clients and for me, I have always been concerned about the quality of hosting.
As I'm in Brazil, and especially my clients, it made more sense for me to host on hosting services here in Brazil.
I started using the UOL host to which I had registered some domains. I had some problems with the pages loading slowly and, even worse, some errors that were from the hosting and that the support insisted that it was with my site.
As I had experience with Linux and installation and configuration of services such as Web server, DNS, E-mail etc. I decided to simulate a web server environment in a virtual machine on my PC with the help of VirtualBox to test the site locally and see if the error persisted.
As I already suspected, the site worked perfectly in my local environment, thus discarding the hypothesis of UOL's support saying that the error was on my site. This made me cancel the service with them and host elsewhere.
Testei mais alguns serviços de hospedagem no Brasil e o desempenho foi pífio, em todos eles. Muita lentidão o que para mim era inaceitável pois já naquela época haviam dados dizendo que a pessoa não ficava mais de 7 segundos esperando a página carregar antes de sair de vez do seu site para nunca mais voltar – hoje é muito menor e está na faixa de 3s e cada vez o Google dá mais peso a este fator.
Frustrating! So I had to look outside.
Just to get you started, today I use the hosted VPS from Vultr, more specifically a High Frequency Compute that I tested in parallel with 4 other big ones that were Digital Ocean, Closte (Uses Google servers) and Linode.
For a better understanding I will make a brief explanation of the different types of website hosting here and what criteria I use before choosing a solution. If you already know about the different types of hosting, you can skip this part and continue your reading here:
Among the main criteria I use to select a server to host my websites and client sites are:
As for the type of accommodation, the best known are:
I can say that in this type of hosting you will have access to greater hardware resources, and often better performance, for the lowest price. All this and even with the possibility of practically unlimited expansion, being able to host sites with numerous simultaneous accesses without it going down.
This type of hosting is not suitable for those with little technical knowledge. You need to know how to install and configure web services, Linux terminal, ssh, know how to read system logs to find out about errors and bad behavior, besides many other things that require some expertise.
The truth is that this type of accommodation is fascinating from the standpoint of possibilities but as I said, it's not for everyone.
You need to have good technical knowledge or hire someone to take care of it for you.
There are some ways to make the management of servers much easier using tools such as Plesk, SpinupWP, BunnyShell among others.
I started using them myself and highly recommend them. I will make a post dedicated to these tools if I have enough interest from people.
Essentially what they do is use Cloud Hosting like Digital Ocean, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, StackPath and VULTR as hosting and provide a control panel that makes administration much simpler.
Want to install WordPress, E-commerce, PHP or other web service? Take a few mouse clicks and you're done. Your website will be up and running in a few seconds.
Want to implement caching? In a few mouse clicks and you're done.
Want to implement CDN (Content Delivery Network)? A few clicks and you're done.
Support? No doubt! The good ones still. If need be, they will investigate your website files to see if they can find what might be the cause of the error.
Automatic scaling of server/hardware resources? Can count.
All of this you pay a fixed amount more than the VPS option. You basically pay for the hardware features you choose from the cloud hosting you choose plus support.
This one I used for a long time and I confess I was very satisfied. I just didn't keep using it because I have enough technical knowledge to use a VPS with tools that help management, which considerably reduces hosting costs.
Some good examples are Kinsta, Cloudways, WP Engine etc.
What is very interesting about this is that they have an auto-scaling system, that, if your traffic increases suddenly, the server will free up more bandwidth and computational resources to adapt to this change and as soon as the demand decreases, the server it reduces its resources and adapts to the new reality.
This is great for many info-producers, as they usually have a large flow of traffic on launches and in the first days of the course opening and then the traffic drops sharply, not having to pay for a super expensive server continuously.
In addition, it has other differentials that allow the construction of an automated WaaS (Website As A Service) with auto-generation of SSL certificates, Auto insertion of domains, among others.
Currently, I do not know any other type of hosting and I believe that I have spoken in general about all the options available on the market.
Now that you have a general idea of the different types of hosting, you have more security to be able to choose the one that best meets your business needs.
To make it easier, answer these questions:
If you answered no to both questions, go for shared hosting or managed cloud hosting.
If you answered yes to both questions, go VPS.
If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, you can use Plesk, SpinupWP and similar.
The choice of hosting doesn't have to be something that takes you a lot of time as you will most likely end up switching over time, either because better alternatives have emerged or because of the need for an upgrade.
The important thing is to keep in mind what each of the options can offer you so that later you don't waste time and even money for a poorly made choice.
If you found value, don't forget to share.
I hope it was helpfull.
