Hosting Advice Required

southwest · July 2020

hey all!

Long time lurker on all LET, HT and LES here.

I am wondering if i could get some of your expert knowledge in regards to the best solution for my design agency.

I currently have around 40 clients, which I have designed and provide a managed wordpress website for, nothing too fancy just static wordpress sites mostly for the trade industry and nothing to intensive.

I've had lots of VPS's and Dedicated servers previously so have the knowledge to host my own through running a gaming org and even now, but I've previously always stayed away from hosting my live production sites myself and kept to the standard reseller hosting providers out there, to put the onus on them if you like and not having to stress about it.

I'm currently with Brixly and although the customer support is great and performance is great, I am getting some unexpected downtime and outages which I believe is likely other shared users effecting my sites, now for my customers of course this isn't the best. I'm a sucker for speed and I expect my sites to load without delay.

I'm paying around £30 a month for a directadmin reseller and using, with backups, around 50GB.

My question is, what route would you go down to get the best for my clients? Ideally i'd want to keep to DA to make the switch easier but I also am also aware that maintaining a server myself will require a lot of extra time than I am putting in at the moment and the backup onus falls on me. I'd also prefer UK location.

Look for another reseller provider
Get a 4-8GB KVM (with free directadmin hopefully)
Is there a way to host the site somewhere else and if the current reseller is offline redirect the sites there?
Get something an AWS instance and fire up cyberpanel or webmin?
Get a dedicated server, maybe the likes of Cloudvider which offers DA.

As I'll only be hosting the sites I am managing is the likes of Cloudlinux etc a necessity as well or would even running Cyberpanel be an option?

Look forward to your input!

InceptionHosting · July 2020

I would suggest you do the following:

Get a VPS with a reputable provider, forget big fancy panels, you don't need them.

Install runcloud (basic write up: https://lowendspirit.com/the-nuts-and-bolts ) deploy as many WP sites as you want on an optimised config provided for you.

use the backup feature and you can literally restore your entire server to another one with any other host at any time effortlessly with 1 click, which apart from anything else is great for staging and testing.

Use cloudflare for DNS and in the event of any downtime you can be back up with a full backup restore and DNS repoint in about 3 minutes.

Then you are not provider/host bound and maintain full control and the management remains minimal.

Plug mxroute into that mix and that's the email side of things taken care of in its entirety.

southwest · July 2020

@AnthonySmith said:
I would suggest you do the following:

Get a VPS with a reputable provider, forget big fancy panels, you don't need them.

Install runcloud (basic write up: https://lowendspirit.com/the-nuts-and-bolts ) deploy as many WP sites as you want on an optimised config provided for you.

use the backup feature and you can literally restore your entire server to another one with any other host at any time effortlessly with 1 click, which apart from anything else is great for staging and testing.

Use cloudflare for DNS and in the event of any downtime you can be back up with a full backup restore and DNS repoint in about 3 minutes.

Then you are not provider/host bound and maintain full control and the management remains minimal.

Plug mxroute into that mix and that's the email side of things taken care of in its entirety.

Thanks Anthony for your advice.

I'm actually doing a number of these things already such as every sites DNS is piped through Cloudflare and all email is all handled by MXRoute, so literally just the webhosting that is required.

What sort of RAM level and CPU would you recommend for something of this size? Between the 4GB and 8GB?

I did venture with one of your services previously where I installed DA myself but the speed wasn't as quick as I'd of liked from the DA point of view, must of been just configurations etc that I needed to do further.

I'll take a look at RunCloud looks promising!

InceptionHosting · July 2020

Well this forum and the main site uses less than 1GB ram, so I would pick a provider that makes it easy to scale, start at 2GB and work your way up.

seriesn · July 2020

You should definitely focus on higher RAM for better and bigger caching purposes .

Litespeed with LS cache is probably a good option and doesn't need much customizations straight out of the box.

Depending on how heavy your themes and plugins are usually 2/4 shared core is more than plenty.

Bandwidth wise, look for Gbit/s speed, if your websites are heavy hitters..

Tagging @vyas for some additional wp hosting related advice

comi · July 2020

@southwest said: What sort of RAM level and CPU would you recommend for something of this size? Between the 4GB and 8GB?

it depends on the amount of viewers, so hard to tell
buy 16GB for a month, observe your load, buy what you need the next month - it's not that big of a loss.
also you get to reinstall so if you happen to mix up something the first time you have a great opportunity to iterate ;-)

@southwest said: I believe is likely other shared users effecting my sites

Nothing really solves this as in any case some things are shared, so I would like to emphasize @AnthonySmith's "reputable" part

vyas · July 2020

Thumbrule recommended IIRC someone had posted in Gridpane FB group:

1 GB RAM per 10 WP sites with @ 1 k visitors/ day

I would recommend the following additional steps:
(If not doing already)
Host all images except the WP feature image on a CDN. BunnyCDN is not too expensive, Blackblaze 10 GB plan +CloudFlare is also awesome and free of course.

That way, your backups will be faster, smaller database size, yada yada.

Price point wise:
Gridpane $30/month

Or

We use Server Avatar for a low traffic site, operates in same principles - $ 30 per VPS per year I think. No need for DA or any other panel for either option as well

VPS providers we use are familiar or known names in this forum

p.s @seriesn probably tagged me because I bothered him enough last year when the above setup was being created

seriesn · July 2020

@vyas said:
Thumbrule recommended IIRC someone had posted in Gridpane FB group:

1 GB RAM per 10 WP sites with @ 1 k visitors/ day

I would recommend the following additional steps:
(If not doing already)
Host all images except the WP feature image on a CDN. BunnyCDN is not too expensive, Blackblaze 10 GB plan +CloudFlare is also awesome and free of course.

That way, your backups will be faster, smaller database size, yada yada.

Price point wise:
Gridpane $30/month

Or

We use Server Avatar for a low traffic site, operates in same principles - $ 30 per VPS per year I think. No need for DA or any other panel for either option as well

VPS providers we use are familiar or known names in this forum

p.s @seriesn probably tagged me because I bothered him enough last year when the above setup was being created

That and also probably cause you know a thing or two about Wordpress. I think.

vyas · July 2020

@seriesn

Maybe I had to work extra hard and try to sound knowledgeable just so that you aren't proven wrong

@southwest

I found the post I was alluding to earlier: this is from a FB post by Patrick, the cofounder of Gridpane. This is for primarily blog sites. For Woo etc.. reduce the number of sites by half. Points 5 and 6 form the post are more along the lines of practical advise, so not posting those :-) I can say that for 3 and 4 also, but leaving them as is.

" Good rules to live by in the context of self-managed WP/VPS land:
1.) Never less than 2GB of RAM.
2.) Approximately 10 sites per GB or RAM. (dependent on those sites not being crap and them not getting tons of traffic)
3.) Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
4.) IaaS costs scale in a pretty linear fashion. So if you're following rule #3 it's probably better to have two 4GB boxes than one 8GB box.
"

Mr_Tom · July 2020

I know you said you have experience with VPS/dedis but if you'd like something with some management let me know - can include DirectAdmin, and we work with a few web design agencies to provide their hosting - either via a control panel (DirectAdmin or cPanel) but we have a couple of clients who we manage the whole process including putting new sites live, etc.

We're UK based and can do phone support as required too (mainly UK working hours but sometimes needs must, etc).

southwest · July 2020

Thank you all for your responses, a great insight all round.

I've taken a look at RunCloud and fired up an instance on Hetzner to get the ball rolling and see what's what and if it works well. Only problem I can see is that RunCloud doesn't offer the Litespeed or even OpenLiteSpeed platform which isn't a killer yet but something to think about going forward.

My sites at the moment are genuinely built using the Elementor or Divi theme builders but are cached to oblivion, first initial impressions and use Optimole for all images which comes with a free CDN for the first few thousand requests.

As these are mostly static sites with very little user interaction, I think a smaller 4GB or so server could work quite well in this instance.

Going forward, although Hetzner is great, I would want to look at a UK location for a KVM VPS.

InceptionHosting · July 2020

@southwest said: I've taken a look at RunCloud and fired up an instance on Hetzner to get the ball rolling and see what's what and if it works well. Only problem I can see is that RunCloud doesn't offer the Litespeed or even OpenLiteSpeed platform which isn't a killer yet but something to think about going forward.

It is on the roadmap but the apache+nginx front end works wonders tbh.

Clouvider · July 2020

@southwest said: Get a dedicated server, maybe the likes of Cloudvider which offers DA.

We'd love to have you onboard!

Although I'd seriously consider the time server or VM management may take up if your not experienced or comfortable with it. Otherwise a service/solution such as @Mr_Tom's is more likely a better fit as he does all the legwork and you just focus on site design/development.

vyas · July 2020

@southwest said:
Thank you all for your responses, a great insight all round.

I've taken a look at RunCloud and fired up an instance on Hetzner to get the ball rolling and see what's what and if it works well.

Came across this in a WP FB group

serversuit.com/software

Cheers.

southwest · July 2020

Just thought I'd give you an update on my solution in the end.

Decided to hit the floor with a hetzner cloud server and runcloud for the new sites I am developing, the difference is literally night and day and although not the UK location I was hoping for, it now gives me options to fire up more servers for redundancy and spread the loads.... for now it is proving worth the extra setup hassle.

I've asked my current host to switch me from the DA to Plesk to see if that aids in the performance from that end, if not i've got myself a HostMedia account and going to host the legacy sites on there.

Interesting, I have purchased BunnyShell lifetime, it's similar to RunCloud so in the long run may be worth while.

seriesn · July 2020

@southwest said:
Just thought I'd give you an update on my solution in the end.

Decided to hit the floor with a hetzner cloud server and runcloud for the new sites I am developing, the difference is literally night and day and although not the UK location I was hoping for, it now gives me options to fire up more servers for redundancy and spread the loads.... for now it is proving worth the extra setup hassle.

I've asked my current host to switch me from the DA to Plesk to see if that aids in the performance from that end, if not i've got myself a HostMedia account and going to host the legacy sites on there.

Interesting, I have purchased BunnyShell lifetime, it's similar to RunCloud so in the long run may be worth while.

Congrats my man!

vimalware · July 2020

Welcome and thank you for flying Lowendspirit @southwest. ?

Come again.

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