Hosting plan help for a newb, please

[Rob Banks]

Hello,

I'm a total newb who was just put in charge of a very small BB running vB 4.2, and will upgrade to 5.0 when available.

I'm on HostGator's "hatching" plan, the bottom of the barrel, cheapo shared plan. Surprisingly, it worked well for 8 years, but now hangs and times out sporadically. So I'm thinking it's time to upgrade the plan to HG's VPS. I know many have a low opinion of HG, but it has worked well for us until recently.

Here are the stats that I think are relevant.

Jul 2012
HTTP usage 4.46 Gig
IMAP usage 0.00 Meg
POP3 usage 0.00 Meg
SMTP usage 0.00 Meg
FTP usage 8.77 Meg

Total (all services) 4.47 Gig

Unique visitors 511
Number of visits 2,349
Pages 51,828
Hits 235,668
Bandwidth 4.17 GB

Any recommendations on what I need in a hosting plan are appreciated. The message board will not be growing much at all in terms of users or traffic.

I'm thinking HG's Level 2 VPS at 576MB RAM would be a good choice. Level 1 is 384, level 3 is 768.

TIA

[KevinL]

Stick with shared hosting but move to a quality host. No need to move to a vps.

Try checking out http://www.webhostingtalk.com also.

[alemcherry]

Your traffic is not much, so a good shared hosting would be ideal. Try Liquidweb, if you want an option. When you are on a shared server, you have nothing to worry about server management etc, so a reasonably priced ($20 / mo or so) shared hosting would be my first recommendation for you.

If you are going with Hostgator VPS, get at least Level 3. That is where the cPanel and server management is being offered. Anything less than that would mean that you are left with a server with no management or even a control panel to automate the job. Unless you are enjoy being a Linux administrator, it is not a very pleasant situation.

[Rob Banks]

Thank you. I will add Liquidweb to my list of prospective hosts. I asked on Webhostingtalk, and all the many responders there agreed that a shared plan on a quality host would be plenty for me.

[Mark.B]

Talk to Tim at Nimus Hosting.

https://www.vbulletin-hosting.co.uk

You can search this site for Nimbus and see the many positive comments about Tim's work.

[betterthanyours]

Hello Rob Banks

You don't need any expensive hosting nor do you need Tim @ Nimbus hosting. Don't go with Liquidweb. They do provide good support but their service can be poor and they are expensive.

There are other cheaper hosts out there that provide better service.

[Mark.B]

Hello Rob Banks

You don't need any expensive hosting nor do you need Tim @ Nimbus hosting. Don't go with Liquidweb. They do provide good support but their service can be poor and they are expensive.

There are other cheaper hosts out there that provide better service.

Rather pointless post.

You don't need Tim @ Nimbus Hosting

OK but, why not? Seeing as he's one of the most well respected hosts on here. You need to qualify your comments.

Don't go with Liquidweb. They do provide good support but their service can be poor

Their supoort is good but their service is poor? Eh? Which is it? You need to qualify your comments.

[betterthanyours]

I'm not here to argue with anybody. I am posting my experiences. For a forum of his size, hosting with Tim would be overkill and far too expensive. Not to mention a waste of unused resources and money. He could do with a 10$ plan a month with a good shared host such as eleven2.com. My post is not pointless. VPS are only required for busy forums which OP obviously does not have.

Liqudweb's Support is good. Service is poor ie their servers etc. You can read various people's comments about them. Liquidweb will always try to sell you an overpriced VPS. Even if you took a dump and needed something to wipe your ass, they'd suggest a VPS to "help". I can list a few just for your "information" though. First thing is PHP Memory Limit which is limited to 2mb. Second is they will not block bad spiders. I had a known hacking spider hn.kd.ny.adsl (google it) crawling my forum making 300+ concurrent connections making it unavailable. Hope that justifies it for you. Just take note of what everyone else is saying and recommending for OP's hosting needs. There's no need to completely milk him dry and sell him an unsuitable product.

@OP do not go for over the top power when you don't need it. eleven2.com hosting is good and cheap, very suitable for your needs. They also utilize memcached on their servers.

[Rob Banks]

OK, thank you everyone. Exploring on Web Hosting talk.