Is it difficult for you to choose a hosting provider?
- Is choosing a hosting provider a challenge for you?
- What problems do you face when choosing a hosting provider?
I would love to hear any nightmarish stories while you tried to pick one for yourself.
If you asked me these questions a few years ago, my answers would definitely be:
But that was back when I thought shared hosting was a good choice simply because it was the cheaper option but that doesn't apply anymore. Ever since I discovered the world of services like AWS and DigitalOcean and learnt about the term "serverless", finding the right provider is super simple:
The entire hosting ecosystem has become pretty simple to navigate provided that you know what you're looking for. However, I do admit that when I was solely working with shared hosting providers, then no matter how good the host is, I would always run into issues the moment the website saw increased traffic or, in one specific case, a CodeIgniter application that exceeded CPU usage at times - but that's less to do with the provider and more with the fact that shared hosting just isn't cut out for intensive applications.
That's been my experience!
I have much to learn about web hosting and maybe that's the reason, it's such a nightmare for me. Thanks for sharing your detailed experience and insights. This can be a great reference for me :D
You're welcome and feel free to reach out if you need any more help! I can understand your confusion as anyone who has deployed a website before has been through that stage and I would be lying if I said that it wasn't very confusing before. However, the reality is that there have been a lot of advancements in the way things are done and so there are a few specific players that have just come out on top.
The trick is to first identify exactly what it is you need and in most cases, a simple VPS, once set up, is going to be way cheaper in the long run since you have full access to experiment and scale as needed. That being said, even "identifying exactly what it is you need" may be easier said than done for some people but that's alright, everyone learns!
Hope that helps and like I said, feel free to reach out if you need any more help :D.
Sure, It will be great. As soon as I have validated an idea worth working for, I will probably need some help figuring out the hosting. Even some nudge in the right direction will save me a lot of trouble as I have very little experience in this regard.
There are so much information and options out there that it was driving me bonkers.
Thanks for offering to help. I will reach out to you :D
I would say the most significant issue I faced when choosing a hosting provider was my attempts to over complicate it. I've spent twelve years working in large scale enterprise software. So my initial instincts for everything were to build infrastructure like I've come to expect in the enterprise space. The problem, of course, being that I don't have an enterprise budget! Fortunately, I realized what I was doing before ever spending (wasting) any money. Now with everything I do, I start with the question of "what is the minimum that I ACTUALLY need right now" and work from there. So for now, I'm using a couple of cheap VPS' from Linode. When the time comes to continue to scale because I've made traction, then I will scale my approach to infrastructure. Which is a much better approach than the hundreds of dollars a month I was trying to tie myself to for enterprise infrastructure with no users.
Yeah, old habits die hard 😅
My problem is over complicating due to comparison with the countless providers and also lack of experience hosting websites.
Your current minimal approach makes a lot of sense. Thanks for your suggestion 👍