I don’t know how helpful this is, but … the best time to buy hosting is Black Friday.
For points (1) and (3), this might help.
First, if I’m understanding (3) correctly, I think you want to be looking at a “Reseller” type of account. By itself, cPanel is for ONE account/domain. They have a thing called a “Reseller” panel, WHM (Web Hosting Manager), that lets you set up some number of independent cPanel accounts. Ignore the name, it’s just a way to manage multiple cPanel accounts if you need them. If you want to build and manage multiple sites for yourself and/or clients, this is the way to go.
If you want to actually BE a hosting “reseller”, then you’ll also need WHMCS or something like that to handle your billing. Some places include it with WHM, most offer it as an option. If you don’t need billing, save your money and don’t get it.
Sometimes some places offer big discounts, but the only thing consistent with most of them is they offer SOME discount BUT … it only applies to your FIRST INVOICE. Meaning that if you have a monthly plan, it only applies to the first month’s bill. But if you get a 3-year plan, it’s for the whole 3-year term.
On Black Friday, they’ll usually offer a plan upgrade for free PLUS the discount. So you’d get a 30-50 site reseller plan for the price of a 15-25 site plan. Or on a single account, they’d offer the next step up, like Silver instead of Bronze for the Bronze price.
I personally prefer cPanel and WHM, mostly b/c I’ve been using them for a very long time and am used to how they work.
However, there are tweaks that hosting providers can make that are often done to reduce their support overhead rather than help customers get our jobs done better. One case i point is NameCheap — I love them for domain registrations, but their hosting SUCKS! They have so many weird restrictions compared to other cPanel/WHM providers that it’s silly. When I’d ask, their canned reply was “for security reasons”. I’m sorry, but disabling the ability to click on the little cPanel icon in a row in WHM to open cPanel for that account does not strike me as security related. Doing so is quick and easy, but it restricts what you can do to a certain extent on the target account, because you’re not logged-in as the account holder — and I suspect your average user doesn’t understand that. As a result, it probably increaes their support tickets, so they disabled it. Several cPanel features are limited or blocked as well for the same excuse. I’ve never encountered this anywhere else.
I was at one place for a while, Eleven2, and they were pretty good, but on Sept 2nd of last year, they suddenly switched-out cPanel/WHM for a totally different control panel! It was totally unannounced, with no advance warning, no way to go back, and I had problems for over a month. I paid for one year of cPanel/WHM hosting, and they just took it away and replaced it with something else. No apologies, no discussion, no warnings. Just “poof” and here ya go.
Come Black Friday, I found a great deal on hosting from WebHostingWorld.net <
http://webhostingworld.net/> and paid for a year of SSD-based Reseller (cPanel/WHM) access with 50 sites for a 50% discount — it worked out to about $12/mo. Screaming deal.
Most cPanel/WHM hosts have raised their prices to reflect what cPanel has done. So a 15-user WHM account works out to $20/mo or so.
The nice thing about cPanel is that if you want to change hosts, the new ones can move your old account over in about 30 seconds — it’s built into the Admin side of the platform. The only shortcoming is that it messes up whatever Packages you have defined. Most of the support folks don’t even really know what this means, but you’ll find out the first time you try adding another account in WHM and the only Package options you have are the defaults that WHM offers — yours got lost in the move, but they still show up on the old accounts.
I was with HostGator for quite a while, but after they got bought by the “Borg” company buying up so many other hosting providers, their support went to crap. Many others as well. Stay away from the whole bunch of them.
As for (2), most will NOT give you SSH access. PERIOD. I did ask my current guys and they said they’d hook me up with a restricted shell on a per-account basis.
That said, you really only need it if you’re going to install some kind of script that requires you go do it from a command shell.
cPanel has a File Manager in it that lets you do pretty much anything you can do in a Windows Explorer or Mac Finder window, including editing .access files.
I also have a Windows VPN hosted at VirMach. They’re ok, and I got a great price — I think it was a New Year’s sale.
A lot of hosting places are totally automating their support, which is a PITA if you run into any real problems. They love to tout their Support, but they’re ALL cutting back. If you want REAL support, you’ll want to get a “Managed Hosting” account.
I can set you up with a managed Wordpress account and tons of premium plugins for $50/mo. I don’t have a sales page for it yet, tho. (It’s through WPMUDev.)
-David Schwartz
> On Apr 3, 2023, at 1:48 PM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> I am looking at cheap shared hosting providers.
>
> I found two so far... Bluehost and HostGator.
>
> I used Hostgator in the past and it was good and then really bad, and it has been a while. I eventually moved on. I have not used Bluehost and the reviews are mixed.
>
> I have three requirements:
>
> 1) must have a control panel.
> 2) must have ssh access. Not sure this is really necessary because, off the top of my head, all I need is to be able to edit the .htaccess file which I can do local and FTP up... or the control panel might have a built in editor. I probably need access to SSH so I can set file permissions.
> 3) must be highly discounted when buying in bulk.
>
> Any other cheap hosting providers you would recommend?
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> Thanks!!
>
> Keith
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