Domain Name / Hosting

[David Schwartz]

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.

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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.)

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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



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