Cheap web hosting is cheap for a reason. | Hacker News Reader

Cheap web hosting is cheap for a reason.

y2kemo.com

7 pointsy2kemo9 comments

Time and time again I see these articles, and time and time again, people just don't listen.

If you are technically inclined enough to run a website, take a day (I promise that's how long it will take) to learn to configure a Linode instance (they have extensive scripts that will do most everything for you). I know you think your time is more valuable, but learning how to configure a simple LAMP Ubuntu server will pay dividends in the future.

You can host all of your sites on there for $20 a month, they're absolutely great to work with, and you won't be dealing with an oversold shared server.

And how can you take this article seriously when it's plastered with ads for Hostgator?

I'd much rather have these people stay with cheap shared hosting. There are too many poorly secured and poorly optimized VPSs "managed" by people who think they know how to run a server because they copied and pasted some Ubuntu tutorials. Sooner or later, they cause their Linodes to thrash, their sites gets exploited, or they botch up an upgrade and their sites are down anyway.

Some people will learn from these experiences and become better sysadmins. But most people who just want to run a WordPress blog with cutesy plugins are not interested in troubleshooting an unmanaged VPS. Someone who can't be bothered to enable error logs in php.ini to see what's causing all the 500 errors isn't the kind of person who will learn from a VPS malfunction. They'll just bash their host for being unmanaged, move to another host, wash, rinse, repeat.

HostGator is about as good as "cheap" shared hosts can get, not only because they're more competent than the majority of shared hosts, but also because they seem to be willing to deal with these kinds of customers. They understand that their typical customer is utterly uninterested in troubleshooting any issue whatsoever. (GoDaddy caters to the same clientele, but they're far less competent and a lot more shady.) If the same customer went with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they'd just end up writing another blog post ranting about how their host charges money for support tickets and expects the customer to participate in the troubleshooting process. How dare the host ask the customer to chmod a file!? NearlyFreeSpeech and Linode are too good for these folks.

How is the title of this link "Cheap web hosting is cheap for a reason." yet the author promotes HostGator which have plans starting from $3.96 a month?

I can't read the article because the author's cheap hosting can't handle the load. I see that it's hosted on HostGator now.

Haha, touche! I thought the same thing, I thought it was just my internet connection take a while to connect though

His promotion of a single other hoster plus the suggested five more "x sux" postings are indeed a bit odd.

I transferred my site to justhost about 8 months ago. I paid for the 4 year hosting plan. Personally I have never experienced any issues.

Although the only fault I have with them is the way they have awstats set up. You can't configure it to resolve IPs, 'Update Now' isn't available etc - as they overwrite the config file every day and there's no way around this.

Also, if people do want to purchase hosting from justhost you can use 50OFF as the coupon code.

I've been with them for a few years now and I've had so many problems with them. They are by far the worst 'cheap host' I've been with.

Webhosting is funny because everything is ok until it's not. It's easy to have isolated incidents which look really bad versus overall trends and knowing the difference.

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