Website Hosting Companies-Which should I use?

Greetings everyone,

I am getting to the point in my journey where I am going to need to put my stuff on my own website instead of relying exclusively on CodePen. I will have to do this eventually but I have run into a roadblock that is pretty much forcing me in that direction. I am having serious difficulties getting the “show me the weather” project to work since CodePen uses secure http. Anyway, I am looking for advice on the best web hosting company for an upcoming web developer.

First I will need something that supports the tools we are using here on Free Code Camp. Second, I would also like the chance to use WordPress on the side. To me it is too popular and important to the current web to ignore. Third, in the long run I will want to add a blog for various reasons.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

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See the following.

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Just curious for the reason why the need to avoid EIG?

I see BlueHost is listed there as one of their owned company, (been a customer since 2007) and no complaints with their service/reliability.

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Lot of EIG web hosting services have bad customer service and tech support. Also, their infrastructure only supports limited programming languages. I’ve used several web hosts owned by EIG like iPower. However, they all might not be so bad. If you think one is maybe okay, give them a try.

iPower was fine at first, then my websites started to fun into issues. I have one OpenCart e-Commerce site, I kept getting “Too many connections” errors. Tech Support told me it was my site. I told them it ran over a year without issue. Once, I was on the phone with them, I told them I was the only person on the site and still received the “Too many connections” error.

So, I switched to DreamHost.com. They have been okay so far. If they don’t work out, I’ll switch to DigitalOcean or run my own VPS.

I’m running an e-commerce business and using OpenCart since 2013 with my site, at BlueHost.com (hosting since 2008), and also running several WordPress sites.

As I said, no issues for me. If there were reliability issues, I would have moved a long time ago. Otherwise, I’d be losing money.

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Why don’t you use GitHub Pages, Surge, or Heroku? They’re all free options and perfect for a developer (though out of the three only Heroku supports web servers, meaning you can’t use the other two for back end projects). Also, what do you mean by needing something that supports the tools on FCC? Do you mean Bootstrap and jQuery? Well since those are just libraries, any web hosting service would support them, you even could have written them yourself (technically speaking).

Lastly, I’m not sure why you’d need WordPress, or why you’d want to use it on your website. As far as I understand, it’s designed for non-developers to help them manage their own websites. But since you’re a developer you can change whatever you want whenever you want (with services like Heroku this is as easy as pushing code to a remote git branch, which is basically your website files).

If BlueHost is working for you, glad to hear. I have experience with other EIG owned web hosting services, and I was not very happy.

I think the OP wants to learn WP.

WP is popular and there’s money to be made creating, maintaining a WP site, or making custom themes WP sites for companies.

In the real world, customers want to be able to change content on their own… instead of contacting the developer/webmaster and asking them to do the change for them. As developer, this can get boring fast being asked to update a press release story, or change copy in a product page… but then again, it’s billable hours. So ka-ching!

  1. But some customers don’t want to pay the developer for every little change/new page they want to make.

  2. You as the developer, don’t want to be developing something from scratch a full CMS for a customer. WP is a ready-made solution.

You, as a developer can charge $$$ for making custom WP themes for customers. It may not be exciting work, not working in Angular or Node or whatever, but it can be very lucrative. The last WP site I setup and populated for a company, including creating a custom WP theme for them, I charged them $3500.

I use HostMetro. While it’s not the best in terms of uptime or reliability (I can’t really speak for their customer service as I haven’t needed to use that yet), one of the biggest advantages of HostMetro is that they have one of the lowest long-term costs. Because unlike so many other web hosts, which charge a low upfront fee and then slap you with their “regular rate” after a few years or so, HostMetro guarantees that their fee will never change—my starting fee was $4.45/mo (so $53.40 for 1 year) and I’m still paying exactly that amount 2 years later, whereas another host might have started charging me upwards of $10/mo after the first year. And when you add that up, HostMetro can end up saving a significant amount of money in comparison.

So not that I’m exactly “recommending” HostMetro, but I’m sticking with it for now because it is one of the cheapest hosts when you factor in the long-term costs, and if you’re especially tight on money, then it can be worth it. And HostMetro does support WordPress btw, as they use cPanel with all of the standard plugins.

For some things I quite like github pages with private repos for $7 aud monthly.

I recently signed up with A2 hosting: https://www.a2hosting.com (edit: url)

I want to host future node.js projects and other work at my own domain. Wordpress/drupal/joomla installers are available in cpanel. Just getting started so can’t speak for tech support unfortunately, but it’s nicer/more bang for buck than my previous host (siteground).

Absolutely not qualified to recommend webhosting, they all seem a bit pirate-like to me. But A2 could be worth comparing if you haven’t already.

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@GreatDeveloper66 For free testing purposes.

For FCC related tech, you can use Glitch.com and Heroku.com.

For WordPress learning, you can use XAMPP or WAMP on your personal computer. Or, you can use VirtualBox or VMPlayer to create you own Linux virtual machines.

This way you do all kinds of playing around and make mistakes without really hurting anything or costing money.

Personally, I use XAMPP and VirtualBox for testing.

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Oh, in that case it makes sense then. I would personally make my own site without WP, and then build some separate projects using WP.

How much PHP would you say is necessary for basic WP work (the kind you see on Upwork)? There seems to be unlimited work in this area but I’m not gonna lie, the idea of putting Node learning on hold to learn PHP does not sound very good

There is excellent documentation on Wordpress, on how to make themes. There are also lots of examples how to use the Wordpress php built in functions.

I would say being good at front end development and a keen eye for design and colors is more important when creating custom themes, rather than full knowledge of PHP. .

If you’ll be doing WP development, running your test server locally is very much preferred. I use MAMP since I’m on a mac. This avoids the FTP step and makes for faster feedback.

As for upwork and other related sites, I don’t use those kind of sites, because this and other sites like these seem to compete mostly on price, what developer can be the cheapest, and tends to attract clients that look for the cheapest too. Cheap clients are the worst kind— they tend to micromanage you, and think they own all of your time, I’ve only worked with a cheap client once-- never again, but that’s for another topic.

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I really love using Heroku for my projects and sites. You can try them out for free with their free tier, and they have a lot of good documentation on getting started. More advanced things like continuous integration are pretty easy to set up and since they use a git-like code push to their servers, it’s really easy to get used to if you already use Git for code management.

Guess there’s no harm in trying it out. Thanks for the advice!

And well, even though Upwork doesn’t seem like a great place to make a living from (for the reasons you described), I wouldn’t know where else to go to get my first clients, so I might take some low paying work with tough clients just to get started and put some professional experience on the portfolio. Perhaps I’ll also only do it once, who knows :smiley:

I’ve been using CINFU for several years. Their plans allow unlimited websites, even the really cheap ones. They also allow unlimited bandwidth.

You can opt for cheaper Direct Admin panel, which I have been using without any problems, or CPanel. I guess it depends on what you need, but considering that their plans start off at $0.65 per month, even trying them out is not going to be a huge cost.

Their customer support is ticket-based, but replies are usually quick. I’ve been happy with them.
You can find out more here, https://panel.cinfu.com/aff.php?aff=679.

If you are looking for hosting for projects. Host your own, it’s free and easy. I use VMWare and run Linux Mint, it is an easy way to transition from Windows and I use a Linux Apache MySQL PHP Stack from Bitnami then you can install these EASY TO DEPLOY MODULES that give you a fast easy way to run Wordpress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal CMSs and a large variety of other add on modules for your LAMP server Virtual Machine.

You run this on your local network and then migrate it to a hosting environment once you have cut your teeth and have your head wrapped around how it all works. This way it is a FREE solution till your ready for PRIME TIME

Aloha
Rob

Thanks for the recommendations. I will look into all of those. As for WordPress, at least 20% of current sites on the web use it. For that reasons alone it is important for a web developer to be familiar with it. On top of that, it could open up business opportunities in the future.

I use https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

It is a pay-as-go web host. It is a little more techie to get started, but the forums are great and there are good articles out there to get you started with wordpress on it.

I have multiple sites that get little traffic, like portfolio sites and I just throw down $20 every once in a while.