Loved all the responses here - great discussion. Hopefully I will add something Virtual or non-virtual. In my professional life I need non virtual. Yes, I use hundreds of gigs of ram, all the cores, but more importantly to get the performance I need I disable cstates, power throttling on the CPUs, I also pin processes to individual CPU's to take better advantage of L2 cache, I completely mess with how the kernel does networking, I require virtual hardware that normally conflicts with hypervisors, I am very concerned with how NUMA is handled, etc, etc, etc. But this is because I support a cloud infrastructure. Otherwise I care about word press and email and will never have enough traffic to warrant $12K of hardware hooked up to a 1GB pipe. So small virtual slices are fine. However I have also had issues with bad neighbors and over subscription. So a GD Dedicated server eliminates that problem, despite it having a thin virtual layer. That layer also provides a lot of advantages as mentioned above. So unless I need to do the very low level hardware stuff I do as a infrastructure provider it seems like a great option. Like Keith mentioned I mostly require wordpress, email, calendar, direct mysql databases, etc for my hosting needs. So for workspace like things (Email, calendar, etc) I use google apps for domains because I was lucky enough to be grandfathered in for free. Everything else is GoDaddy. However when you look at something like WordPress you have a number of options at GoDaddy. I can think of about 5 offerings that provide it. Some are a shared [CPannel | Plesk] server, elastic grid hosting, [Dedicated | Virtual Dedicated] servers, and of course managed wordpress. I chose managed word press because I want some one else to pay attention to security and to, quite frankly, make it easy for me. https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 4:01 PM, David Schwartz wrote: > After some outfit named RegisterFly or something like that got “acquired” > by GD, I began using NameCheap as my main registrar. They offer 1 year of > privacy for free, then it’s a few bucks a year after that. > > When NameSilo came along, they posted something here to get people to try > them out, and I liked what they offered. So I migrated my domains over > there. > > As for hosting, I had my own machine at a co-lo in town for several years. > After the HD died for the 3rd time, I decided it would be cheaper to just > get reseller hosting somewhere. So I got a reseller account at HostGator. > > I was getting fed up with the declining quality of support at HostGator, > and last fall I was doing something where it was recommended to get a VPS. > > So after many years with HG, I moved my reseller account over to a VPS. > Most of it was Wordpress sites. I typically set up one mailbox per domain > with a bunch of forwarders (to avoid a wildcard on the main mailbox). > > Unfortunately, I discovered that there’s a downside to having a VPS: > shared server hosts implement lots of anti-hacker stuff that keeps out a > LARGE amount of riffraff. > > Over six months, every one of my WP sites got hacked. The hackers are > merciless in their onslaught. At one point my VPS locked up because it was > “out of disk space”. WTF? When I transferred everything over, there was > only 12 GB of disk used. After a month, it maxed-out at 25GB. This was just > a handful of WP sites with very little activity! It seems spammers got into > my email on several sites and started pumping out spam emails. And for > whatever reason, they didn’t get sent, or deleted. So the VPS basically > developed a bad case of constipation due to overload of outbound email > queues! About half a million of them, according to my admin. Sheesh. > > In January, my VPS host shut down my email entirely because he said it was > exceeding email bounce rates and was putting the IP and some other stuff at > risk of getting blacklisted. > > That was it. I’d had enough. > > So I looked around and decided to move everything to a reseller account at > NameCheap. They’ve been in the hosting game for a while, and they offer > standard cPanel hosting among other options. I put in a ticket and they > moved everything over from the VPS to their server in a few hours. > Everything seems to have worked very smoothly. > > ——————————— > > Overall, I mainly to use my hosting for two things: WordPress and email. > > So much is shifting over to hosted platforms that I’m finding less and > less need for my own hosting. > > I’ve got a few domains that I use for my main email, but over a dozen that > have email configured. I think they’re all just one mailbox plus a bunch of > forwarders. > > For many years, I’ve used a 3rd-party SMTP host for all outgoing emails, > which I started doing when I had my box on co-lo in order to stop the > hackers from using my machine to send out spam. (I disabled the outgoing > email.) > > I used DNSMadeEasy’s SMTP service for years. It started out at $8/yr or > so, and is now $29 or so. It’s limited to 500 outgoing emails per day. > > But I recently found SendGrid, which is free for up to 12,000 emails per > month. So I switched over to that. > > I’d like to be able to ditch the hosting entirely, but as others have > pointed out, getting just standalone email support can cost more than full > hosting! > > (I have a small WHM reseller account on NameCheap that costs me $16.95/mo > for 25 cPanel accounts.) > > ———————————— > > Just today, NameCheap announced that they’re going into beta with a > Managed WordPress hosting that’s free for now. > > You can get into their beta by visiting: EasyWP.com > > They’re looking for feedback from people, and said they’ll offer a > lifetime subscription when it launches to people who participate in their > beta program. > > I dunno what that means in $$ terms, but hopefully it’ll be cheaper than > the other managed WP hosting solutions that are out there. > > BTW, NameCheap has 88-cent domains for a dozen popular TLDs right now, and > nice discounts on some others. > > -David “The Tool Wiz” Schwartz > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >