Ask HN: What web hosting do you use for your personal sites/blogs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What web hosting do you use for your personal sites/blogs?

23 pointsnthnclrk31 comments

Just looking for a simple host, with really great performance. As the title implies, it's for a simple static site/blog (likely using Jekyll).

I'm sceptical of the much hyped Media Temple offering, and definitely don't want to hand over cash to GoDaddy.

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Disclaimer: It's my startup.

http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare

We track what people are saying about web hosting companies on Twitter to see who people are happiest with. It's not a perfect system but what we're trying to do is create an objective and transparent way to compare these companies which I felt this industry truly lacked. Maybe it will help you compare some of your options, we track Media Temple (http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/23/mediatemple/) and GoDaddy (http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/34/godaddy/) as well as many other big companies mentioned in the comments (Linode, Heroku, RackSpace, ASO, etc).

Cool site. I remember you from WebHostingTalk :)

If you are using Wordpress or another PHP based CMS then NearlyFreeSpeech.Net can't be beat.

That's true. And You'll love the good support.

For Wordpress hosting you also can't beat Wpengine.com as well. Those guys really know a thing or two about optimising and securing the hell out of Wordpress.

Seconded. NearlyFreeSpeech is dirt cheap for hosting PHP-based products.

And they'll stand up to censorious governments: http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2012/10/06/official-uk-gove...

No need to spend a whole load of cash if it's only personal.

Check out http://www.lowendbox.com/ for some dirt cheap VPS deals and guides on how to configure a limited resource server if you're new to it.

I currently use two providers I found from there, 3 containers in total. Having more that one allows me to simply switch if a host goes down.

(For a static site, it can be quite fun to see how much you can squeeze out of 64MB of ram.)

I used to be with Media Temple and I never really had an issues using them, it was their Grid Server offering and pretty decent for the price. After a while I yearned for more control and power, so I moved to a 512mb Linode VPS plan which including their excellent backup plan costs me $25 per month. I host around 12 sites (mostly Wordpress sites) and it can handle everything that has been thrown at it thus far.

Keep in kind a managed VPS plan from Linode means no Cpanel or fancy control panel so everything needs to be done via the command line. Perfect if you want to better understand Linux and learn command line commands. The backup service is a separate offering that's $5 per month and I highly recommend it as you'll most likely destroy a few VM instances before you get the hang of how to configure things like server requests and email.

From my experience Linode is definitely one of the best and cheap. It's perfect bridging hosting between shared hosting and expensive cloud based dedicated VM hosting like EC2. Rackspace is also pretty good, I have friends who swear by them but can't say anything about them really as I've never used them.

Do you have any tips for setting up a new VPS? I just got one recently. I know my way around Apache, but I've never run a mail server before, so I'm reluctant to move my domain until I know that I won't miss any emails in the process. (I'm using Ubuntu Server 12.04)

My knowledge of command line Linux was pretty limited to changing ownership of files, using wget and configuring Apache but like yourself my knowledge of setting up email and whatnot was flaky.

Fortunately, you're in luck. I learned everything about managing a VPS from Linode's own excellent documentation. This is the guide I used for setting up mail: http://library.linode.com/email/postfix/gateway-ubuntu-10.10... — bit out of date, but still relevant I am pretty sure and worked for me when I needed it.

Thanks, that will be very helpful.

Mine is on Heroku, but that's because i've written my own blogging software and that's not what you are asking for.

I'd go with a VPS, then it will be a learning experience as well (if that's what you want) and you can use it for other things and play around with new stuff. Prgmr, Linode, EC2 (A reserved micro instance is dirt cheap). If you just want to host a site, I've also had a great experience with Hostgator, although YMMV.

I use S3 directly (+ Route53) for my static sites, with EC2 micro instances for things that need a CPU. Previously I used Linode and was happy, but when I decided to cut administrative overhead, and go with just one vendor I went with amazon.

If it's static HTML, you can use Github Pages.

I'd second this. Github pages has special support for Jekyll.

This is actually a great idea. I hadn't looked into this as I have no need for code hosting/project management — but using Pages makes a lot of sense. And of course, Jekyll & Markdown support. Thanks!

Rackspace Cloud Servers[1] (formerly Slicehost) with a basic Ubuntu install and nginx. I also use it for a simple static site and blog (still running Blosxom!). Has been rock solid for years.

EDIT: I second the NearlyFreeSpeech.Net recommendation if shared hosting is OK (as opposed to a VPS with static IP, etc). NFS has been very dependable in my experience.

[1] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/

These days I'm mostly building one-page style sites (usually with AngularJS) paired with an API server (usually in node.js) so I tend to host these separately. I've got apps running on Heroku and I'm also keen to see if I can get better performance from AppFog so I might try that out soon. For static files I've been using Amazon S3 with either Cloudfront or Cloudflare.

AppFog. This is free till 2GM RAM limit. I am running my Django site www.mistrics.com on it.

I use a dirt cheap $15/month OVH dedicated server running Nginx, Unicorn and Postgres.

Software wise I use Rails deployed with Capistrano for most projects and Octopress for my blog as there's no need for blogs to be dynamic in my case.

I have a Jekyll blog that I host on S3 and CloudFront, with DNS hosted on Route 53. Anything more than that is overkill (and possibly a waste of money). Heck, even the CloudFront bit is not necessary.

All my static and newLisp based sites are hosted on a Raspberry Pi. The Pi has enough power to handle blogs or small traffic sites. I use no-ip.org to get a static address for the Pi at home.

Unless I'm missing something, no-ip gives you a DNS name mapped to your dynamic IP address, it doesn't give you a static address.

Awesome!, I want to do the same thing. but can no-ip.org work for a computer behind a subnet?

If you are using Jekyll, Github Pages is a no-brainer. Free, fast, and Jekyll works out of the box.

I'm using Heroku free plan.

I use ASO, their customer support has been great in my experience

Blogger. It's always up and does everything I need it to.

You can use Azure Websites. It's free and works awesome.

NearlyFreeSpeech. Costs me ~ $2 a month.

RamNode.

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